My belated condolences. I always enjoyed reading his posts and will miss his insight and wide ranging views. May hew…
Another Brexit aftershock
Last week the UK held local elections for most of its counties as well as a few mayoral ones. If you’re not particularly up on the UK political scene, there are two main parties, the Conservative and Labour parties broadly representing respectively the right and the left of politics. The conservatives are currently the government These local elections are somewhat like the US mid-terms in that they’re looked at as an indicator of how each party is viewed by the electorate. The constitutional difference is the mid-terms change the composition of Congress whereas the UK local elections have no effect on the makeup of Parliament.
Broadly speaking, is was disastrous for Labour, especially in the further deterioration it showed in what is called the “Red Wall”. This is seen as traditional Labour heartland and the breakthrough beacheads the Conservatives made into it in the 2019 general election were expanded, most particularly in taking a by-election seat that had been Labour since its creation in the 1970s. In the build up to it, the usual chronically left-wing MSM cranked up the propaganda machine, confidently polling and predicting a big Labour win. Some acquaintances of mine swallowed, as they’re chronically prone to doing, all the fake news stories, opinion pieces and polls pushed out by the likes of the BBC and the Guardian.
It didn’t go down well when I opined that the Conservatives were actually going to increase their grip on power. In the aftermath of their freezing cold reality shower in the polling booth, the frantic search for the reasons or culprits that caused the disaster began. Those reasons are very much what you’d expect from excitable political activists rather than any cool Realpolitik thinking.
Labour’s policies were wrong (not quite accurate, there were no tangible policies). The party should not have replaced Jeremy Corbyn because the people still wanted his brand of extremist left-wing policies (see the electoral disaster of 2019). Nobody liked the new leader Keir Starmer (the wokes and all the media did but when he took a knee in a blaze of fake news publicity, the rest of the country thought what a dick, especially after seeing what artificially stoked political race wars have done for America). The left-wing of the party wanted Starmer to crash, so only gave tepid support (kinda true). A party still openly having vicious internal fights between its left and right wings wasn’t seen as trustworthy by the voter (very true).
There’s still a lot of reasons and analyses for the disaster being churned out but the connection back to the Brexit vote of 2016 is in the DNA of the results. Labour still wouldn’t unambiguously commit to actioning the people’s will whereas Boris Johnson (AKA BoJo) did finally get the country out of the EU. In all the strong Brexit areas, Labour took various degrees of batterings. They held it together in the big metropolitan areas, which wasn’t as good a thing as you might think. Perception is all in politics, and they’re increasingly seen by ordinary people as the party of the metropolitan elite, with no interest in the shires. News flash – you’ve absolutely no chance of winning a general election without the support of the despised provincial simpletons.
There’s still an immense amount of Brexit foot dragging going on in the London swamp and the French are still making Brexit as difficult as possible. They threatened to cut off the electricity supply to Jersey, a British crown dependency island about 20Kms off the French coast, over fishing rights. BoJo immediately told them in his charming way to Foxtrot Oscar and dispatched two British warships to the island. Quintessentially him and it reflected the public mood. As an example, a 90yo woman who was blind was taken to her local polling station to vote by her son. After she’d made her cross and folded her ballot paper, she said loudly “which box do I put this in to declare war on France” to a big cheer from the crowd gathered in the hall.
It always comes as a shock to people who’re interested in politics at how little attention the general public pays to it. An election comes along, the people give it a couple of weeks half-listening to various politicos, do their vote and then get back to their life ignoring politics. To my mind, the real reason for the result is a fundamental change in that common man’s attitude in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum.
They still don’t follow politics on any regular basis. What the five year delay of establishment politicians of both the right and left stubbornly trying to wiggle out of actioning their will did was not only lower the habitual respect for Parliament to historic depths, but the traditional British attitude towards politicians of take whatever they say with a pinch of salt, became one of actively despising them. Instead of listening to the usual barrage of pre-election promises and taking a realistic view of which ones might be delivered, they’re much more cynical.
Behind all the glitz and fanfare, they spotted Labour’s promises to make life better for any minority except them who were the majority expected to finance such fine words aimed solely at the woke folk of the big cities. And they spotted Starmer for what he was too – a rich, metropolitan elite lawyer spouting on about minorities with an occasional nod towards the working class while being totally content-free every time he opened his mouth. They’d had five years of that sort of BS treatment and now recognised it on reflex. In a way and in a much more cynical way, they’ve become more politicised.
BoJo on the other hand, finally delivered Brexit, has many faults and committed many gaffs, but he’s likeable and does old-fashioned things like sending gunboats to wave two defiant fingers at the Froggies and enrages the fake news collective by expressing his opinion that a woman wearing a full burga looked like a black post box.
They’ve lost all trust in the political media, they’ve learnt to look harder at bland political statements, they’re fed up of being non-people and being ignored, they’re tired of ordinary family life being rubbished at ever turn, they’re sick to death at their Christian faith always being presented in the mass media as something to be sniggered at and they feel identity politics excludes them, the natives, from any say in how their own country is run. Nowadays, they’re only interested in politicians who can actually deliver for them, the majority.
It’s as simple as that.
©Pointman
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cross posted at https://freedomaustralia.freeforums.net/thread/1083/uk-elections-after-brexit
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Well said, that man.
As in US of A, every few years the deplorables get to decide whether to have socialist right wing pollies or left of centre left wing pollies.
As in Animal Farm, those outside looked at one and then looked at the other, and could not tell the difference.
They have all attended the same schools, thanks to Deddy’s end or Mater’s well paid government sinecure, all studied PPE at “uni”, all had gap year doing good somewhere, or picking up some more “degrees” in USA, see Deddy’s sinecure above, then being some pollie’s bag-carrier before becoming a candidate for some constituency out in the styx. Then it is onwards and upwards with directorships, consultancies, paid for speeches, multiple taxpayer funded, tax free, housing, expenses, jobs for all the family. What larks.
But we do recognise an Onanist when we hear him speak. Starmer, Max Headroom with up to date CGI.
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Andf speaking of Onanists wotabout Boros?
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BoJo is not much better than Corbyn. He’s partner who rules the roost is to the left of AOC and so are most of the so-called Conservative Party’s policies. Other than Brexix what does he actually stand for?
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Re: Brexit
When the UK voted to leave the EU, the top dogs at the EU did everything possible to prevent this from happening.
Why?
The UK just wanted out; they had no goals / desire to have any other nations leave.
So why did the EU bureaucrats do everything they could to prevent the UK from leaving?
Any thoughts??
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John – AFAIK it’s because the UK put more money into the communal coffer than anyone except Germany, so with the UK out a lot of the budgets would be squeezed. Thus the ruling that for projects agreed when the UK was still in, the UK would continue to fund after it had left until the next EU budget cycle, and that the pensions for eurocrats would also have contributions from the UK long after the UK has left.
Added to that, they figured that if it was seen to be easy to leave then others might be encouraged to leave as well, especially if it was seen that the UK flourished outside the club. The various hidden fines will probably ensure that the UK doesn’t start obviously doing better for 5-10 years when they’ve mainly stopped paying in, by which time the rules may well be changed to make it much harder for others to leave, so I figure they’ve achieved their aims.
Funny thing… Keir Starmer seems to try very hard to do what he perceives as the right thing, and we all know that Boris Johnson can’t be trusted to tell the truth about anything and his only real skill is in bafflegab, yet Boris was still preferable to the other choices as being the least-worst and also he did actually get the job done in the end. Most likely if the UK negotiators had been more-skilled then the penalties for leaving the EU would have been lower, and the unavoidable dip in income after leaving would have been less, but on the longer-term we’ll forget that. Then again, Boris and half-cocked seem to go together, so I wasn’t expecting anything near optimum.
It will be interesting to watch the progress of Scotland trying to leave the UK and joining the EU. Some interesting border-problems there, exceeding the problems with Northern Ireland but hopefully without the bombs. Like Catalonia trying to leave Spain (and remain in the EU), the strategy is to make it illegal to have a referendum, and to say it’s illegal to leave without a referendum. Similarly to the UK and EU, Catalonia is a net payer into Spain’s budget, and Spain will be poorer without that tax-revenue. Though there are some people calling for Welsh independence, most people realise that they are a net receiver of money from the UK and so they’d be quite a bit poorer out of the union. It seems to me that a lot of the political stuff boils down to money.
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The “Top Dogs” in the EU, did nothing to stop the UK from leaving. We’d decided to leave, they just said “Sorry to see you go, here’s your options”.
The rest is because the “official” leave campaign, didn’t have a plan beyond getting the electorate to back leaving.
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