Dropping the hammer on the lot of them.

Posted by Pointman on April 21, 2017 · 18 Comments 

The British Prime Minister Theresa May has just decided to call an early general election at the start of June. She stated her main reason for doing so rather than serving out the next three years of her premiership, was the unreasonable resistance she was encountering with the political establishment in London in her attempt to carry out the will of the people to exit the EU.

Various parties in Parliament have been making threats to “close down government” unless she back pedals, while the unelected upper house of the Lords have been doing nothing but dragging out or plain obstructing any legislation to enable Brexit.

For overseas readers not overly familiar with the details of the British political parties who will be competing for votes in the election, I think it worthwhile to thumbnail sketch the main contenders and the varying state they’re in.

The current administration in power at Westminster is the Conservative party, more familiarly know as the Tory party. Nominally they represent the Right wing of the political spectrum, but after a decade of centrist politics that made them almost indistinguishable from any other party fighting for the political centre ground, they’re starting to emerge out of it and move back in a rightward direction.

That readjustment home to more traditional policies may win back significant numbers of what was their bedrock voters who’d grown disgruntled with both the leadership style and the party’s direction, and who’d started drifting into the United Kingdom Independence Party or UKIP camp. It was that drift which obliged David Cameron, its previous leader, to offer the Brexit referendum at the last election.

When the country voted for Brexit, Cameron, who didn’t want it, resigned the party leadership which Theresa May eventually took over. She promptly culled the administration of all Cameron’s toffs who’d become totally out of touch with the party’s bedrock voters or swivel-eyed loons as they condescendingly called them, and that as May’s first step went down rather well with the aforesaid loons.

The next party behind the Tories is the Labour party. As yin is to yang, they traditionally represented the Left wing of the spectrum. Again, they also went through a decade or so of centrist politics which moved them away from their more socialist roots, but that did win them three straight elections under the leadership of Tony Blair. The party’s hard left-wingers could never forgive him for that – go figure. With his stepping down from the leadership, the university-bred champagne socialist element within the party promptly moved it leftwards and into successively worse electoral disasters.

The bizarre response from the controlling elements of the party has been to keep moving it in that direction and since it’s also been hijacked by the extreme left who’ve installed an unelectable Marxist as its leader with his equally unelectable stooges called Moe, Larry and Curly doing the day-to-day business of running the party into the ground, their chances of winning could most optimistically be described as dire. Basically, there’s no serious mainstream political party in Britain representing the moderate left of centre electorate. Supporters of the Democrat party in America take careful note.

The only other parties of any significance would be the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems) and UKIP.

The SNP made massive electoral gains at the last national election, reducing what used to be a Labour stronghold of Scotland to a one seat hanging on by their fingertips forgotten land north of Hadrian’s wall and best left to the woad-daubed Picts. It’s a party in many ways reminiscent of UKIP. It can’t seem to focus on anything other than independence which poll after poll says that the average Scot doesn’t want because they’ve the common sense to know the only thing keeping Scotland afloat is the money flowing into it from the Chancellor’s coffers in London.

In the wake of the Brexit leave vote, its leader Nicola Sturgeon, possibly the most arrogant and yet inept politician in the current British landscape, has been camped in the waiting rooms outside various offices of EU potentates who’ve all to a man managed to avoid seeing her. Some people are simply too thick to realise they’re getting the brush off treatment.

She somehow expects them to accept Scotland as not leaving the EU while the rest of Britain is going to. They’ve already got enough problems without voluntarily accepting the financial bloodletting of keeping afloat yet another state that could very quickly come to look like Albania unless somebody keeps on subsidising it.

The Lib Dems were in coalition with the Tories in the previous administration and managed to deliver nothing of any consequence, most especially proportional representation. They reneged on pretty much all of their election promises and were eviscerated of parliamentary seats in the last election. Basically, the slick Tory politicians they were in alliance with led the innocents abroad up the garden path by the nose and then positioned them precisely to kick them in the arse over the election cliff they hadn’t the wit to see looming in front of them.

UKIP is the enfant terrible of the bunch who campaigned for nearly two decades under the leadership of Nigel Farage to get out of the EU and eventually forced the referendum that led to Brexit. After a victorious Brexit vote, Farage stepped down from the leadership for a well deserved rest but the party has since been all over the place without him, but now seems to be stabilising.

Like all single purpose movements, it found itself without a raison d’être once that purpose had been achieved. They’ve got themselves a new leader who appears to be getting them back on track, but that looks to be uphill work of more than a few year’s duration.

The fake news machine was immediately cranked up in the wake of the announcement with as usual the BBC to the fore, but after all their abject failures in either reporting on or calling the correct results for the election of 2015, the Brexit vote or even the election of president Trump, they’re not doing too well on the prophesy front even if people actually believed them nowadays.

Since they’re overwhelmingly churning out a product for the metropolitan elite, it’ll be ignored as it has been for the last two years by the majority of people who don’t fall into that particular demographic. They’re neither elite or metropolitan. It’s already pathetically obvious to most people that all they see in this election is their much longed for second chance to somehow reverse the Brexit referendum, which is a fixation that’ll play to May’s advantage.

In a country which all bullshit aside is rightly known for its sense of fair play, the reaction of the establishment to the electorate voting for exit has not gone down well with the average person. You take a vote, people turn up at a voting station and do their civic duty and then whether it’s a win or loss for your side, you abide by a democratically arrived at result. What you don’t do, is try to subvert in devious ways and at every turn a decision which has been fairly arrived at.

Also, all the horrifying catastrophes that were predicted to happen by the great and good and authoritative experts should people vote for Brexit have failed to materialise. The stock market is on record highs, companies who hinted they might leave are increasing inward investment, the four percent of domestic companies that export anything to the EU have not collapsed, the Germans are crazy at Merkel and Junker to stop arsing around and do a quick trade deal with Britain or they’re going to lose one third of their export market and president Trump has said Britain is at the head of the queue when it comes to any bilateral trade agreement.

If that’s Brexit Armageddon, bring it on baby. As an afterthought, the Thames has seemingly not run red with blood and the death of every first born child has not yet occurred.

A year down the line, if Brexit was rerun, it’d be a massive yes vote for the reasons I’ve outlined. In a sense though, that’s exactly what’s happening and exactly what’s informing May’s decision to call a snap election, because there’s a real groundswell of resentment at the establishment’s sly manoeuvres to reverse the referendum result. She’s using that resentment to gut the political establishment.

Even before the election was announced, the Tories had a twenty-one point lead over their nearest opponent Labour, so barring some catastrophic event, May and her Tory party are going to walk it with an increased majority in parliament.

Given that obvious fact which the lying media choose to gloss over, let’s go over what I think may be her motivations. The most superficial one which is much touted by liberal media is that it legitimises her leadership of the country. Because she took over from Cameron who’d resigned a year after winning the last general election, nobody had actually voted for her to be prime minister. You’d have to be a low-level political termite to lend any weight to that idea, though in passing her decision does put to the sword the odd misogynist and disloyal remainer within her own party.

She mentioned in her election announcement the split between what the country wanted and what their elected representatives were trying to obstruct. Members of Parliament (MPs) of both Tory or Labour persuasion were voting in ways that were directly opposite to the expressed wishes of their own constituencies in the Brexit referendum. They were elected to reflect the opinions of their local people and with some exceptions, that’s why their ass is comfortably ensconced in Westminster. If they want to keep that certain cachet of being an MP, they better get behind their constituent’s wishes.

As I said, her party enjoys a twenty-one point lead over their nearest rival Labour, so where this event gets interesting is how the people who aren’t Tory voters are going to vote. The biggie is what Labour voters are going to do with their vote because they can no longer bring themselves to vote for a party which not only has no hope of winning but increasingly looks like nothing more than a student union pressure group throwback to the seventies.

Labour has been all over the place on Brexit; they’ll neither support it nor condemn it, though most people know in their heart it’s the latter which applies, but the party dare not say it outright. Simply put, their lily-white political theories are in total conflict with the everyday wishes of their grubby blue-collar voters.

The great unwashed wants out of the EU because it’s killing their jobs and they feel their culture is being swamped. The Labour party keeps farting around and bending over backwards to accommodate vanishingly small minorities while ignoring the basic Lumpenproletariat of their white, working-class supporters who they’re supposed to be representing. Which way will that not inconsequential portion of their dissatisfied supporters vote?

The answer to that question is the one true key in this election.

Historically, that hardcore Labour demographic would never vote Tory if only from visceral reasons, but this election is not about voting for a party predicated on a half-remembered class warfare; it’s about ramming Brexit past a smug and obstructive Westminster parliament which thinks they know better than the ignorant schmucks who elected them.

Whatever happens, they’ll not vote as usual for Labour because of its resistance to Brexit, so the choices become tactical. If they switch to UKIP, which a lot of them did at the last election, Brexit may not be assured, if only because UKIP picked up sixteen percent of the vote in the 2015 election and yet still ended up with only a single seat in parliament.

It’s a better guaranteed result to bite down hard on your pride and vote Tory just this one time in your life to get out of the bloody EU. A portion will go the Lib Dem route, if only because that’s Tory lite. The only other option is abstention, which would be a complete disaster for the Labour party. Already, twenty and counting standing Labour MPs have announced their intention not to stand for reelection because they’ve got a shrewd idea of what’s going to happen – a blood letting of biblical proportions with Labour on course to lose an estimated one third of their seats, and that relatively optimistic estimate is being offered by their own media pundits.

The other school of opinion outside the north London media consensus is the coming election could be a near death experience if not the real thing for the Labour party. The result of such an outcome depends on where their former voters have decided to place their protest vote. If they went the Lib Dem route, they can be pulled back, because they’re still prevaricating around the bush. If they went UKIP and their votes put a significant number of UKIP MPs into parliament, getting them back into the fold is going to be a lot more problematic.

If, as some people think, the result will be an unmitigated disaster for a Labour party whose own internal rules now make it impossible to wrest back control of it from the extremists, the only option left is schism. What is the traditional Labour element will have to split off and establish a new party more closely modelled on reality and representing the moderate left of centre demographic of the electorate who cannot bring themselves to support what the Labour party has become. Should this happen, it’ll take at least two more general elections for such a new party to stabilise, establish its own powerbase amongst the electorate and have a serious shot at winning power.

The SNP will be effectively irrelevant in the larger scheme of things since the massive potential influence the sheer number of seats they managed to win in the last election has been pissed up against the fully-tiled wall of the political urinal by an independence fixated Nicola Sturgeon. Absolutely nothing of any consequence was done by them for Scotland in the last two years. Nothing.

They’ll probably lose seats because of the subtext of this general election née referendum, and it’ll be a step towards yet another Culloden in the well established tradition of Scotland being led into disaster by bloody idiots. Having failed to go forward for the last two years, the loss of political momentum tends to dictate the only direction left for them to go is backwards.

Getting beyond the die-hard Tory or Labour voters, this election won’t be about the floating voter who usually decides the outcome, but rather the loosely affiliated ones who never thought twice about which way their political loyalties should be. For most of them, business as usual isn’t an option this time around, so it comes down to who they’re going to switch their temporary allegiance to, since I think they’ll see it as a one-off non-binding choice because all bullshit aside, people see it more as a rerun of the Brexit vote rather than a party political thing.

They’ll use it to give an out of touch Westminster a slap to remind them who actually holds the power once every five years. I said in a previous piece that I suspected Theresa May was quite ruthless in the way that only a strong woman has to be in the majority company of men who’re so busy pissing smug testosterone at each other that they totally ignore her.

She stoops to conquer behind a quiet shield of competence and ignores the sniggers that dismiss her as a product of nothing more than gender tokenism. The more arrogant a man is, the more blinded and stupid his perception becomes, especially when it comes to dealing with a woman who actually knows what she’s doing.

They all got it wrong. I seem to recall we’ve been here before with the last female Prime Minister of Britain. A Tory win with a substantially increased majority is as certain as anything can be in politics, but it’ll also straighten out dissenters within her own party while at the same time doing major if not terminal damage to all of the other parties. It’s putting the hammer to every other party while establishing a Tory hegemony over politics in Britain that’ll probably last for the next fifteen years.

Make no mistake, this is an exercise in politics at its most ruthless, and there will be heavy casualties.

©Pointman

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