Gad Saad - Posts - "I’m already seeing people proclaiming that the huge victory of @BorisJohnson’s party will usher the end of the world. Is there no end to the faux-hysteria? In a democracy, your camp sometimes loses and it’s not because of bruh racism, nativism, & low-info voters. Accept defeat.Many of the hysterics and Collective Munchausen clowns are supposed sophisticated thinkers. I was not pleased with @JustinTrudeau’s victory (twice) but I accept it and move on. Be decent. Accept democratic outcomes."
Mike on Twitter - "After producing the largest majority in parliament in 30 years, a BBC commentator just called Johnson “such a divisive and controversial figure.” Those words have been robbed of their meaning. They now mean “he’s not acceptable to us, the chattering classes, represented by MSM.""
How Jeremy Corbyn's predicted defeat would be worst since the 1935 election - "The scale of Labour’s defeat predicted by the shock exit poll would leave the party with the fewest number of seats since the 1935 election.It would also be the first time since the inter-war years that Labour has won fewer than 200 seats."
Former Labour member reveals it took just five minutes for delegates to decide Jews were 'subhuman' and should be forced to eat bacon - "two total strangers took just five minutes to decide that Jews are “subhuman” and should be “forced to eat bacon” when they met at party conference. Colin Appleby... who is Jewish and resigned his membership and position as LGBT Officer in the Cities of London and Westminster Labour Party in in October 2018, said he was “shocked” to hear that two strangers could express anti-Semitism so openly... Later that day, Mr Appleby said delegates hissed at him and called him “disgusting” for voting against a Palestine solidarity motion. While flags are banned on the conference floor, hundreds of delegates waved Palestinian flags with apparent impunity... He told the Commission of 22 comments he had been subjected to at party meetings, including that he was a "child killer", "Zio scum" and "good with money"."
Marlon Solomon on Twitter - "Who'd have guessed that Mendoza - one of the people most responsible for toxifying the British left with racially charged conspiracy theories about Jews - would blame a Jew before anyone else. Whoever takes control of Labour, from whatever faction, please fuck these people off."
Jeremy Corbyn will stand down 'early next year' but declines to take blame for election disaster - "“I have pride in our manifesto that we put forward….this election was taken over ultimately by Brexit.”On his future, he said: “The National Executive [Committee] will have to meet, of course, in the very near future and it is up to them. It will be in the early part of next year.”The comment suggests Mr Corbyn plans to stay on until a successor is in place, rather than facilitate the appointment of an interim leader... Some drew a sharp contrast with Ed Miliband, who resigned immediately after losing in 2015, saying: “I take absolute and total responsibility for our defeat."
Classy.
Alex Clark on Twitter - "Perhaps telling everyone who disagreed with you to fuck off and vote Tory wasn’t such a great plan, you condescending bunch of pricks."
"& the people saying "if you're a Tory just delete me". Like ok great let's pretend nobody's voting Tory and we'll just win! Ahahaha oh wow."
"yes, well when you block anyone on social media who disagrees with you, national election results are going to come as a shock."
Francis Foster on Twitter - "That silence you can hear, is Labour Party activists realising that those people they were screaming “gammon” at, were in fact traditional Labour voters. #LabourParty #GeneralElection2019 #GeneralElection #Labour"
Christmasoteric on Twitter - "Blyth Valley will be the first UK constituency to report its vote. It's voted Labour by overwhelming numbers literally since the day it was created in 1950. If the Tories win, it's an earthquake. If they come even close, it's still a sign of a massive night for the Conservatives.
(the closest it ever came to flipping from Labour was a 2% victory during the Thatcher blowout in 1987, the most overwhelming Conservative nationwide victory in the post-war era...if it's anywhere close to that, oof.)
the Tories have won Blyth Valley, the first constituency to declare in tonight's elections...which has NEVER voted anything but Labour as long as it existed. And this wasn't even on the UK exit poll's "Tory pickup" list...
In 2017 -- TWO YEARS AGO -- Labour won Blyth Valley over the Conseratives by nearly 20%."
Jo Swinson LOSES her own seat after Lib Dems' anti-Brexit campaign flops - "The Liberal Democrats turned on their leader Jo Swinson today after she was ousted from her own seat in Scotland following a disastrous General Election campaign.The party's former deputy leader Simon Hughes launched a scathing attack on her as he said 'every strategic decision' taken since she took over had been wrong... 'Every strategic decision. They decided to go for revoking Article 50, having ignored the referendum. They decided that they could argue that that was because we might be a majority government. Incredible, incredible - nobody believed it.'Jo led the campaign on the basis that she could be the prime minister - incredible. Nobody believed it. She was almost unknown.'... the Lib Dem push for power - built on a headline pledge to cancel Brexit - flopped as Ms Swinson's plan to unite every Remain voter behind one party failed. Instead, the Lib Dems have been left treading water, with a forecast suggesting the party will finish the election with just 11 MPs. Such a tally would be one seat lower than its 2017 haul and significantly worse than the 21 MPs the Lib Dems had when the election was called after a series of high profile defections... The former coalition government minister had initially positioned herself as a potential candidate for prime minister but was forced to backtrack when polls put the party on just 12 per cent. Ms Swinson has also struggled to win over voters on a personal level, with opinion polls suggesting members of the public liked her less the more they saw her. A recent poll by Ipsos Mori found that the leader had a net favourability rating of minus 31 - making her less popular than Mr Corbyn. At the start of the campaign, Ms Swinson had a rating of minus 20, indicating that she became less popular as the campaign went on."
So much for Remoaners claiming the majority of the UK was against Brexit
Francis Foster on Twitter - "Turns out demonising working class people and calling them racist doesn’t get you elected.... Who would’ve thought it? #GE2019 #GeneralElection #LabourParty"
Jeremy Corbyn’s success is a model for American progressives - The Washington Post
From 2017. This aged well.
American Leftists Saw Corbyn’s Inevitable Victory As a Model - "That theory holds that Corbyn’s populist left-wing platform is both necessary and sufficient in order to defeat the rising nationalist right... Proceeding from the erroneous Marxist view that capitalism is growing more oppressive, and a working-class backlash is therefore inevitable, they glommed onto bits of data and ignored and large and growing array of evidence to the contrary. In the U.K., this delusion created a bitter argument between the left and center-left... As early as 2016, a writer for the progressive New Statesman was lamenting “The sheer intensity of [Corbyn’s support], combined with some of his supporters’ glassy-eyed denial of reality and desire to ‘purge’ the party unfaithful,” and compared it to “a cult or a religious movement.” Corbyn’s victory became a matter of faith, and its adherents continued to tout wisps of evidence for it even in the face of dismal polling... Whether a more moderate Labour leader would have defeated Johnson – who is highly unpopular, yet still far less unpopular than Corbyn – is unknowable. What is certain is that his delirious backers assumed his success, and built around it a self-serving theory from which they refused to deviate in the face of mounting indications of doom."
The leftist echo chamber
Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter - "Boris Johnson's victory is Britain's rejection of leftist politics. It's a rejection of anti-Semitism. It's a rejection of gender wokeness and cringe pronouns. It's a rejection of open borders immigration. It's a rejection of socialism. It's about putting Britain first."
U.K. election: How could Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party lose so badly? - "Leigh, the constituency in Northwest England where I grew up, was one of the bricks that shattered Labour’s fabled “red wall.” What had previously been a safe Labour seat elected a Conservative for the first time in its 134-year history. According to the local paper, in his victory speech, newly elected Member of Parliament James Grundy declared that “his ‘Get Brexit Done’ message was key to the campaign.” I’m sure he’s right. After all, 63.29 percent of Leigh voters supported the Leave side in the EU referendum in 2016, and there’s undoubtedly a deep sense of resentment that local sentiment has been ignored. Labour MP Lisa Nandy, who held her seat in neighboring Wigan, said in an interview with the BBC that working-class Labour supporters who voted to leave had been insulted by middle-class Southerners, who dismissed them as “stupid” and “racist.” When visiting the area, it’s impossible not to encounter expressions of exasperation that Brexit still hasn’t happened. People, including some who voted to remain in the European Union, are so sick of the tune that’s been playing for the past 3½ years that they’re ready for the music to stop... [Corbyn] was a huge liability. Although Labour maintained its strength in London, gaining one seat there, it was in spite of rather than because of Corbyn. He was unable to resolve internal party crises, including repeated allegations of anti-Semitism. During a high-profile TV interview during the campaign, Corbyn refused four times to apologize to the Jewish community on the day that Britain’s chief rabbi declared that “a new poison—sanctioned from the very top—had taken root” in the party. (A week later, he did apologize.) Corbyn’s attempt to take a middle-of-the-road stance on Brexit, when he wasn’t avoiding the country’s dominant political issue entirely, alienated both the working-class Leave supporters in the North and Midlands and liberal Southerners who voted Remain. The party was also unable to win over new supporters. Its manifesto, which promises to provide free broadband service, to institute a four-day workweek, and abolish college tuition fees—reliably described as “radical” in the Tory-dominated press—failed to “cut through”... Tony Blair is the only Labour leader since 1974 to have led his party to election victory—and there isn’t another Third Way compromiser in sight."
I like how Labour's really controversial proposals got ignored by Slate, since they wouldn't be able that only the "Tory-dominated press" would say they were radical
Titania McGrath on Twitter - "Following tonight’s devastating election results, it’s time for the left to reflect. We have clearly failed to win over the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens. The obvious conclusion is... we didn’t call them racist often enough."
Britain's Labour Party Got Woke—And Now It's Broke - "“Most people I know who used to be staunch Labour are now saying no way Jeremy Corbyn,” said Steve Hurt, an engineer. “It’s not our party any more. Same label, different bottle.”According to the activist I was with, that had been the reaction wherever he went. He had knocked on 100 doors in a council estate earlier that day and all but three people he’d spoken to told him they intended to vote Conservative—and this in a city where 26 per cent of the population are among the most deprived in England. I asked why, if these electors hated Corbyn so much, they didn’t simply abstain? Why were they planning to brave the elements on a cold day in December to vote for a party led by an old Etonian toff?“Because they hate Corbyn that much,” he said. “The biggest message they can send to him is to elect a Tory government.” It’s the same story across England—working class electors deserting Labour en masse... a Deltapoll survey for the Mail on Sunday last month showed the Conservatives outpolling Labour by 49 per cent to 23 per cent in the C2DE social grades—the bottom half of the National Readership Survey classification system that ranks people according to occupation. That is to say, people in the bottom half of the NRS distribution—skilled manual workers, semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers, state pensioners and people on benefits—were intending to vote Conservative rather than Labour by a ratio of more than 2:1... the higher the concentration of graduates in an area, the more likely it was to skew Left... the desertion of Labour by its working class supporters—and its increasing popularity with more affluent, better educated voters—is a long-term trend, not an aberration [related to Brexit]. The disappearance of Labour’s traditional base isn’t just the story of this election, but one of the main themes of Britain’s post-war political history... Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters have talked a good deal about winning back these working class voters, but his policy positions haven’t been designed to appeal to them. I’m not just talking about his ambivalence on Brexit—there’s a widespread feeling among voters who value flag, faith and family that Corbyn isn’t one of them. Before he became Labour leader in 2015, he was an energetic protestor against nearly every armed conflict Britain has been involved in since Suez, including the Falklands War. He’s also called for the abandonment of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, the withdrawal of the UK from NATO and the dismantling of our security services—not to mention declining to sing the National Anthem at a Battle of Britain service in 2015. From the point of view of many working class voters, for whom love of country is still a deeply felt emotion, Corbyn seems to side with the country’s enemies more often than he does with Britain. Corbyn’s victory in the Labour leadership election was followed by a surge in party membership— from 193,754 at the end of 2014 to 388,103 by the end of 2015. But the activists he appeals to are predominantly middle class... A careful analysis of the policies set out in Labour’s latest manifesto reveals that the main beneficiaries of the party’s proposed increase in public expenditure—which the Conservatives costed at an eye-watering £1.2 trillion—would be its middle class supporters. For instance, the party pledged to cut rail fares by 33 per cent and pay for it by slashing the money spent on roads. But only 11 per cent of Britain’s commuters travel by train compared to 68 per cent who drive—and the former tend to be more affluent than the latter. Corbyn also promised to abolish university tuition fees at a cost of £7.2 billion per annum, a deeply regressive policy which, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, would benefit middle- and high-earning graduates with “very little” upside for those on low incomes... these “topsy turvey” politics are hardly unique to Britain. Left-of-center parties in most parts of the Anglosphere, as well as other Western democracies, have seen the equivalent of their own ‘Red Walls’ collapsing... left-wing parties in the US, Britain and France used to rely on ‘nativist’ voters to win elections—low education, low income—but since the 1970s have begun to attract more and more ‘globalist’ voters—high education, high income (with the exception of the top 10 per cent of income earners). The nativists, meanwhile, have drifted to the Right, forming a coalition with the business elite. He crunches the data to show that in the US, from the 1940s to the 1960s, the more educated people were, the more likely they were to vote Republican. Now, the opposite is true, with 70% of voters with masters degrees voting for Hilary in 2016. “The trend is virtually identical in all three countries”... left-wing parties now have little to offer indigenous, working class people outside the big cities—and their activists often add insult to injury by describing these left-behind voters as “privileged” because they’re white or cis-gendered or whatever. So long as parties like Labour pander to their middle-class, identitarian activists and ignore the interests of the genuinely disadvantaged, they’ll continue to rack up loss after loss. Get woke, go broke. Will the Democrats learn from Labour’s mistake and make Jo Biden the candidate—or even Pete Buttigieg? I wouldn’t bet on it. The zealots of the post-modern Left have a limitless capacity to ignore reality even when it’s staring them in the face. As I said to a friend last night after the election results starting rolling in, fighting political opponents like Jeremy Corbyn is a bit like competing in a round-the-world yacht race against a team that thinks the earth is flat. It can be kind of fun, even exhilarating. But until they acquire a compass and learn how to read a map, it’s not really a fair fight."
One leftist response is to blame Tory voters for being stupid. Yet these 'stupid' voters reliably voted Labour for so long. Maybe what really made them stupid was continuing to vote Labour for so long.
One leftist response is to say only uneducated people vote Tory. Elitism and contempt for the working class is good when it comes from the left
JOHN GRAY: Why the working class is deserting Labour - "Growing numbers are coming to prefer a party that in the past they viewed as the voice of wealth and privilege to a Labour Party that has become the mouthpiece of a fashionably Leftish section of the middle classes.These voters are repelled by the party Labour has become – a ragbag of sectarian ideologues fighting among themselves, with no concern for the values that move the masses Labour once led... In 1945, when the great reforming Labour government of Clement Attlee came to power, around a third of Labour MPs came from working-class backgrounds. Today only around four per cent do... many Labour MPs came from the communities they were in Parliament to represent.They knew from first-hand experience how working people lived, and had an instinctive understanding of their values.They were unapologetic patriots, who loved their country even while they condemned injustice in it. They supported our Armed Forces, and did not make excuses for Britain's enemies... [Corbyn] grew up in a Georgian country manor house and attended an independent prep school and then a centuries-old grammar school.Corbyn's scruffy anorak and cap shows him trying to shed his rather posh origins and assimilate to what he imagines to be proletarian costume as it may have appeared to him in the 1970s.Apart from Corbyn, who seems genuinely to believe the image he has fashioned of himself, no one is taken in. The millions of working-class Labour voters who mistrust and despise him are not fooled. Middle-class Leftists, on the other hand, recognise him as one of their own – a man for whom patriotism is vulgar, and who thinks of terrorists as his friends. Here, a second factor comes into play. The massive expansion of higher education in Britain over the past decades has created a sizable population of graduates with ultra-progressive attitudes, heavy loads of debt and decidedly uncertain career prospects. Labour's unexpectedly strong performance in the General Election of 2017 was partly a result of its manifesto promise to abolish student tuition fees, which would have cost public finances as much as £12 billion.At the same time, Labour refused to unfreeze welfare benefits, a policy it considered to be unaffordable. Plainly, Labour was targeting the middle-class youth vote at the expense of those who really needed help... For these graduates, the values that continue to shape working-class life are relics of the past. Nation states are anachronisms, and immigration controls implicitly racist. The future can only be a borderless world in which people move freely and live and work wherever they want.Of course this is fantasy. With enormous disparities in economic development, living standards and welfare provision in different countries, people would move rapidly from poor to rich societies in large numbers.There would be a massive backlash from voters, moderate parties would be overwhelmed and the beneficiaries would be the dangerous forces of the far Right. Yet a version of this fantasy was proposed last week by Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, when – in direct violation of Labour policy at the last Election – she committed her party to maintaining and extending freedom of movement. A world without borders is an idea that appeals to middle-class graduates who think of themselves as global citizens rather than as belonging in any particular country... Labour's sneering Leftists, who regard working people as fit only for Soviet-style re-education in politically correct attitudes, are deeply resented.Could it be that Johnson is popular among working-class voters because he encourages them to be patriotic about our country – and to feel positive about themselves?Most important of all, Johnson's Conservatives realise how important it is to move on from the ghastly Groundhog Day of an unfinished Brexit."
‘Austerity was not the way forward’: An interview with Boris Johnson | The Spectator - "Only once in the post-war era has a British political party won a fourth term in office, but that is what the Conservative party are attempting to do in this election. It’s a tall order, but Boris Johnson has a plan: to make it clear that his is a new government — offering change, not simply more of the same... When he was running for the party leadership, he told us that his ‘true selling point’ was his ability to win elections"
Doesn't stop leftists from claiming the Tories will push austerity till everyone dies
President Trump & Brexit -- Votes Demonstrate Deepening Political Divides - "Two months after the Brexit vote, a 40-year-old Polish man was murdered in Essex. The press and pro–European Union politicians pounced on it. The Guardian claimed that the killing “exposes the reality of post-referendum racism.” Even the conservative Telegraph asserted that the killing raised fears that “migrants are being targeted in post-Brexit hate-crimes.” The head of the EU Commission blamed the murder on “galloping populism.”By the time that the man’s 16-year-old killer was convicted of his murder one year later, the story had fallen out of the news. Before the trial it had become clear that the killing was the result of nothing more than a pointless, late-night street row, awful, terrible, and with lessons of its own to impart. But the victim’s race had nothing to do with it. Neither did the British public’s decision to vote Leave.Still, the narrative continued... The narrative of “racist vote leads to upsurge in racism” was too useful to be dispensed with. Precisely the same claim was pumped into the American system after the election of Donald Trump. A collection of offhand, occasionally off-color quotations were characterized as flagrant “dog whistles.” One joke about Mexicans — unwise though it was for a candidate — was declared to be a racist assault on all Mexicans. And once that link was made, it was the smallest of steps to pronounce the vote for Trump “racist” and some sort of green light for real racists. Politicians and pundits tied a spate of bomb threats made against Jewish community centers in the U.S. and abroad in January 2017 to the inauguration of President Trump. A congressman blamed Trump supporters for the threats, and commentators issued dark warnings that these forces would come for everyone next. Two months later arrests were made of two men — one a journalist formerly with the far-left website The Intercept, the other an Israeli-American man with mental-health problems. Few people were detained by such details... The Guardian (again) claimed that “homophobic attacks in UK rose 147% in three months after Brexit vote.” Why? It made no sense whatsoever. Why would the British people vote to leave the European Union and celebrate by attacking gays? Unless the European Union could be said to be the only restraining force on an otherwise unalloyedly bigoted populace (a theme that was convenient for certain campaigners to claim). In fact the data on which the Guardian and others based their reports did not concern criminal convictions or even hate-crime reports but came from a single online survey carried out by an LGBT charity and voluntarily replied to by a few hundred people who may or may not have been gay... the “rise in hate” narrative has not been the only one to span the Atlantic since 2016. Another — it only grows with time — is that the results of the Brexit and Trump elections were illegitimate because they were “stolen” or “influenced” from abroad. This idea, which has had multiple manifestations, motivates a deep and ongoing effort to claim that the two results are in this way not merely illegitimate but linked... Researchers at Oxford University last year looked into the claims of Russian interference in the Brexit vote. They found a grand total of 105 Russian-linked Twitter accounts that had been tweeting ahead of the vote. Twitter itself said that only one Russian-linked account had spent any money ahead of the vote (buying just six advertisements), and a number of the Russian-linked accounts turned out to be tweeting in favor of Remain. To believe that the Brexit vote was swayed by a small number of Russian bots rather than decades of British disillusionment with the EU’s mission creep is a delusion of the highest order.And yet it goes on. After the Twitter-bots claims fizzled, we had the saga of Cambridge Analytica, this even though the official Leave campaign at no stage hired the firm to do any work for it. For the past 18 months the claim that one data company (again, in the words of the Guardian) “hijacked” British democracy and then hacked the American election has been pumped remorselessly into our bodies politic.Yet the Cambridge Analytica story was never about one firm. It was about an attempt to draw the dots that could be connected to prove that Russia had swayed the vote. And if it could be proved that Russia directed, hacked, or otherwise stole either of the 2016 votes, then obviously they not only would be illegitimate but ought rightly to be rerun.A suggestion that the facts may not be on the side of the people making these claims can be partially demonstrated by the retreat of the claims themselves. Both in America and in Britain, the claims started with allegations of vote-rigging, including actual hacking of the vote. Then they moved on to social-media influencing. Now the search is for evidence that anyone connected with either the Trump or the Brexit campaign was in some way influenced or compromised by Russian money... it is now clear that the Brexit vote and the Trump election are hugely important milestones in both democracies, not because of what has or has not been achieved but because both constitute the first democratic mandate in either country that an elite in each country has refused to accept... The second observation is what an unbelievably unwise and wasted opportunity this already looks to have been. If you were an anti-Trump strategist or a pro-EU campaigner, you might have taken all sorts of things from the results of 2016... Even now almost none of this reflection seems to have occurred, on either side of the Atlantic. And if there is one reason, it is that, even after all this time, instead of accepting the votes and trying to learn from them, elites have expended almost all their available energies trying to pretend that the voters in 2016 were bad or duped. The past two years could have been spent trying to learn something or build something. Instead, the best minds of Left and Right have spent their time making claims of “racism,” “Russia,” and “Cambridge Analytica.” The final observation I would make is that all of this has gone to create a phenomenon that I have come to think of as snowplow politics... any time that anybody attempts to inhabit what would be the middle of the road, this great snowplow is driven straight at them. For the time being, the snowplow continues to operate on the gasoline provided by allegations such as those listed above. If you praise a particular policy of Donald Trump’s, you are not praising that policy but legitimizing racism, or misogyny, or Russian influence, or a hundred other things. If you are among the many people who voted Remain but decided to spend the period since 2016 accepting the vote and seeing the advantages that could come from it, you were not being pragmatic. You were encouraging hate crime, homophobia, and the hacking of your elections by foreign powers. Instead of just inhabiting what should be the normal terrain of political acceptance, you have become an accessory to a crime... People often talk about the increasing divide in our politics. But they do not recognize the cause. The cause is that even after all this time the process of acceptance, healing, and mending has not even started. Instead our societies are stuck, and seem intent on staying stuck, in this period of denial and rage... a precedent has been set that will not end in this electoral cycle or any other in the coming years: a situation in which accepting the results of a vote becomes a matter of choice and the idea that the public’s decision is final moves from being a convention to a quirk."
Jeremy Corbyn could do more damage to UK in 'few short weeks' as caretaker PM than Cambridge 5 spy ring did over decades, critics warn - "JEREMY Corbyn could do more damage to the UK in a “few short weeks” as a caretaker PM than the Cambridge spy ring did over decades, critics have warned. One former Labour MP claimed moving Mr Corbyn into No10 could be disastrous because he has “sided with Britain’s enemies his whole life”.... Jeremy Corbyn could do more damage to UK in 'few short weeks' as caretaker PM than Cambridge 5 spy ring did over decades, critics warn - "JEREMY Corbyn could do more damage to the UK in a “few short weeks” as a caretaker PM than the Cambridge spy ring did over decades, critics have warned. One former Labour MP claimed moving Mr Corbyn into No10 could be disastrous because he has “sided with Britain’s enemies his whole life”... he was slammed in June as "pathetic" by then Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt after calling on the government to provide “credible evidence” that Tehran was behind attacks on British oil tankers. Mr Corbyn had claimed: "Britain should act to ease tensions in the Gulf. Without credible evidence about the attacks, the Government’s rhetoric will only increase the threat of war.” At the time of the poisoning of ex-KGB spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, the Islington North MP was accused of “weaselly” words for still refusing to lay direct blame on the Russian state. He doubted British intelligence that the Skripals were targeted by the Kremlin - with his spokesman suggesting that because of past faulty documents over the Iraq War, sources could not be trusted. A former military chief has warned Mr Corbyn in Downing Street could lead to Britain's nuclear deterrent being compromised... he planned to ask the “wider community” before deploying our nuclear arsenal in the wake of an attack. Lord West of Spithead, a Labour peer and former First Sea Lord, said this could have serious consequences for Britain’s security and accused Mr Corbyn of not knowing what “deterrent” means. He said:"It is an extraordinary position to have that you will keep building the deterrent, but say 'of course if all the British people are annihilated I would not dream of responding at all.'""
Jeremy Corbyn refuses SIX times to say whether he would authorise troops to kill terror chiefs - "The Labour leader last night refused six times to say whether he would order special forces to kill a terror chief.Jeremy Corbyn was asked repeatedly if he would sanction an operation if British intelligence identified the new leader of Islamic State.He said if it was possible they should be captured, but if not then he would have to 'take the appropriate decisions at that time'.Mr Corbyn was then challenged about what he would order British troops to do if the terrorist was wearing a suicide vest – but again could not say that he would sanction lethal force... Mr Neil pushed him: 'How do you arrest somebody in hostile territory, surrounded by armed killers wearing a suicide vest?''I said if it is possible. But let's look at it in a serious way also'... Mr Neil also hammered the Labour leader over his record on national security issues. He said: 'I mean people look at you and your record and what you've stood for and they think, why does he always give Britain's enemies the benefit of the doubt? Galtieri in the Falklands, to Mr Putin when the Kremlin was trying to kill people in Salisbury. 'You rarely have a good word to say for our allies. You've no time for Nato, the alliance that's kept us safe. Why would you – why should people trust you to defend our national interest?'"
Trump has bad things to say about NATO, so he's dangerous. Corbyn has bad things to say about NATO, but he's good
Are the West's Secrets Safe in the Hands of Britain's Politicians? - "Seamus Milne, the Labour leader’s director of strategy and his closest adviser, has been an outspoken critic of Western policies throughout a long career as a columnist at the Guardian newspaper. He has argued Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea was “clearly defensive” and the consequence of a NATO manipulated breakup of the Soviet Union... One former top level CIA official told VOA: “If we have doubts or fears, we will avoid uploading especially sensitive data — some officers will just take it upon themselves to do it, whether there is an order from on high or not.”"
Broken Record: Left Continues to Smear Voters as Racist Bigots After Election Loss - "Prominent leftist political figures in the UK reacted to the Labour Party’s massive election loss by once again smearing voters as racist bigots, which is one of the reasons why they lost the election in the first place... instead of using the defeat to take a moment of reflection and re-assess their messaging, many leftists angrily lashed out and insulted the very people who they should be trying to reach... Once again the left is smearing the very people they claim to represent as racist, uneducated, thick bigots."
Andrew Doyle on Twitter - "If you smear the working class & elderly as racist & stupid, you’re a bigot. If you see fascism everywhere in one of the most tolerant countries, you’re a fantasist. If you have contempt for democracy, you’re an elitist. Above all, you’re the reason the left continues to lose."
David Baddiel on Twitter - "This is unbelievably patronising. The No. 1 thing the Crank Left need to understand is that them losing does not mean the people, the very people they claim to champion, are stupid, or brainwashed, or perverse. *They* need to change, not the people."
Apparently democracy means the elites dictate to the people what they should believe and what they should do
Antifa protests in London following Conservative landslide win - "“Tory scum off our streets, Nazi scum off our streets!” shouted left-wing protesters in central London... The British capital descended into chaos as the Met Police struggled to contain protesters connected to antifa, socialist and communist groups. They had shut down the streets in and around Westminster. They demanded a “revolution” and the ousting of the Conservatives. Protesters disobeyed police orders and shoved officers who attempted to block them from certain routes... The on-going chaotic protest echoes left-wing demonstrations-turned-riots in the U.S. after Donald Trump’s electoral win in November 2016."
Since antifa don't believe in democracy, it's no surprise they can't accept election results they dislike
Sadly, US culture gets exported worldwide
Andy Ngo on Twitter - "Antifa are rioting in London in response to the election results giving Conservatives a huge electoral win. It’s like what I saw in Portland in November 2016."
WATCH: Chaos Erupts in London as Leftists Clash with Cops After Election - "Socialists, Antifa, and anti-Brexiteers took to the streets to show their disapproval of the British people’s democratic will while chanting “this is what democracy looks like”... “Fuck Boris, fuck racism, fuck homophobia, fuck all you pigs.” “[Boris Johnson] is a pig and I’m so ashamed that he’s the prime minister of my country, it’s disgusting and I wish him the worst, I wish him a horrible death”... Holding placards with Socialist Worker slogans like ‘Defy Tory Rule’ and ‘Open the Borders, No Deportations’ and banners reading ‘Queer Resistance’, hundreds of protestors outside Number 10 Downing Street broke through barricades, blocking traffic and violently clashing with police. At least two protestors were arrested during last night’s protest, one for assaulting a police officer and another for brawling... At one point, someone can be heard possibly goading the protesters, yelling “You’re not in sociology class anymore” as they jostle with police... Speaking in May, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage warned against the increasing violence of the left after getting “milkshaked” on the campaign trail. “For a civilised democracy to work you need the losers’ consent,” he said. “Politicians not accepting the referendum result have led to this.” “Physical assault is now considered acceptable — they have a view, they are right… they feel entitled to behave like this. Something has gone very badly wrong”"
Apparently democracy is mob rule
Jeremy Corbyn: where is Jeremy Corbyn? Labour leader goes into HIDING as party in chaos - "It is understood Mr Corbyn is yet to apologies to staff in Labour HQ for his failure to win the general election.One insider was reported to have said: “Three days later and Labour staff still haven’t heard a peep from Jeremy.“Disgusting contempt for the people who did all the work.”... Mr Corbyn has put much of the blame for his election failure on the mainstream media for its criticism of Labour under his leadership and says the party must do more “to meet this billionaire-owned and influenced hostility head-on”."
Amused that the people alleging media bias led to the Tory victory are the same ones who allege American Liberal media bias is imaginary, and who say it's dangerous and fascist to criticise the media (when it's their political enemies doing it). At least no one is making noise about a second referendum anymore. Though the excuses, hatred and recrimination are going to get tiresome too.
Top MP accuses BBC of 'consciously playing a part' in Labour's election defeat - "Andy McDonald descended into a furious clash with presenter Justin Webb as he appeared to allege a deliberate attempt to hurt Labour on the part of the state broadcaster."
I saw for myself just how hostile many voters were to Jeremy Corbyn - "A man answered the door and told Coyle bluntly not to bother leaving a leaflet because he regarded his leader as a terrorist sympathiser and wanted nothing to do with him, or anyone associated with Labour.On another occasion, Coyle was confronted by a father on the school run who turned the air blue in front of his own child, using a four-letter word to sum up his view of Jeremy Corbyn. “There were people who said they knew Boris Johnson was a liar and a cheat but they still preferred him over our leader,” Coyle said.He and his team talked to 10,000 people during the campaign and kept a record of what each of them said. The two reasons most often given by those who decided against Labour were its policy on Brexit and dislike of the leader. “Dislike of Corbyn came top”... Up and down the country, Labour candidates were all too aware what their biggest problem was. But they had to keep quiet about it while campaigning. One Labour MP told me on Friday morning, after details of Labour’s catastrophic defeat were known: “We all knew what was coming, just not quite how bad it would be. We didn’t want to allow the Corbynistas and Momentum to blame us and point the finger at us afterwards, so there had to be an unspoken agreement to deny it.”Many Labour MPs had been observing this same vow of silence about Corbyn for more than three years, since they mounted a failed coup to oust him in 2016. They thought there was nothing for it but to allow him to fail on his own.When shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth was caught on tape, in the last few days of campaigning, telling a Conservative friend that it was looking “dire for Labour” because of a “combination of Corbyn and Brexit”, he was only saying what fellow candidates had known all along.The Observer’s pollsters Opinium have revealed their own analysis of the reasons people rejected Labour: 43% cited the leadership, 17% its policy on Brexit, and 12% its economic policies. Among Labour defectors – those who voted Labour in 2017 but didn’t this time – 37% mentioned the leadership, 21% Brexit and 6% its economic policies. Despite the overwhelming evidence, team Corbyn denies completely that it was the leader who repelled voters. Corbyn, when acknowledging Labour’s defeat in the early hours of Friday, refused to accept any personal responsibility for his second general election loss... He, shadow chancellor John McDonnell and party chairman Ian Lavery all insisted Brexit had drowned out Labour’s popular policy agenda, and that the leader had not been the problem. This has infuriated MPs and defeated candidates, who see it as evidence of the Corbynistas’ determination to hold on to the levers of power in order to install a successor in exactly the same mould as Corbyn who will deliver more of the same."
Of course, leftists just keep on telling themselves it was only about Brexit. So they're probably going to lose again next time
Lily Allen deletes Twitter account after saying Brits voted for ‘kids to die with no healthcare’ in election meltdown - "SINGER Lilly Allen has deleted her Twitter account after claiming Brits voted for "kids to die with no healthcare and less brown people"... Earlier, even as the exit poll predicted a crushing loss for the party, she tweeted: "Still holding out for a Labour majority"... Allen also echoed comments made later by Corbyn, claiming right-wing media were responsible for Labour's loss. "Unchecked targeted bespoke propaganda. We need to start taking this seriously"... Allen - whose estimated worth is £15million - previously grabbed headlines after posting a video of herself apparently overcome at the content of Labour's manifesto. Her eyes streaming with tears, she was filmed saying: "Guys I've just watched the Labour manifesto. I think it's the best manifesto I've ever seen.""
Benny on Twitter - "Want to know why the Labour Party was savagely, historically humiliated in the UK election?
They spent the last three years:
- Fighting the will of the people
- trying to undo a national election
- embracing radical anti Semitism
- sabotaging government
Good luck in 2020 Dems"
Labour ‘pretty sure’ they lost because they didn’t call enough people racist
Why working-class people vote conservative - "Why on Earth would a working-class person ever vote for a conservative candidate? This question has obsessed the American left since Ronald Reagan first captured the votes of so many union members, farmers, urban Catholics and other relatively powerless people – the so-called "Reagan Democrats". Isn't the Republican party the party of big business? Don't the Democrats stand up for the little guy, and try to redistribute the wealth downwards?Many commentators on the left have embraced some version of the duping hypothesis: the Republican party dupes people into voting against their economic interests by triggering outrage on cultural issues... One of the most robust findings in social psychology is that people find ways to believe whatever they want to believe. And the left really want to believe the duping hypothesis. It absolves them from blame and protects them from the need to look in the mirror or figure out what they stand for in the 21st century. Here's a more painful but ultimately constructive diagnosis, from the point of view of moral psychology: politics at the national level is more like religion than it is like shopping. It's more about a moral vision that unifies a nation and calls it to greatness than it is about self-interest or specific policies. In most countries, the right tends to see that more clearly than the left... The Democrats, in contrast, have tried to win voters' hearts by promising to protect or expand programmes for elderly people, young people, students, poor people and the middle class. Vote for us and we'll use government to take care of everyone! But most Americans don't want to live in a nation based primarily on caring. That's what families are for. One reason the left has such difficulty forging a lasting connection with voters is that the right has a built-in advantage – conservatives have a broader moral palate than the liberals (as we call leftists in the US). Think about it this way: our tongues have taste buds that are responsive to five classes of chemicals, which we perceive as sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savoury. Sweetness is generally the most appealing of the five tastes, but when it comes to a serious meal, most people want more than that... are voters really voting against their self-interest when they vote for candidates who share their values? Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism. As marriage rates plummet, and globalisation and rising diversity erodes the sense of common heritage within each nation, a lot of voters in many western nations find themselves hungering for conservative moral cuisine. Despite being in the wake of a financial crisis that – if the duping theorists were correct – should have buried the cultural issues and pulled most voters to the left, we are finding in America and many European nations a stronger shift to the right. When people fear the collapse of their society, they want order and national greatness, not a more nurturing government. Even on the two moral taste buds that both sides claim – fairness and liberty – the right can often outcook the left. The left typically thinks of equality as being central to fairness, and leftists are extremely sensitive about gross inequalities of outcome – particularly when they correspond along racial or ethnic lines. But the broader meaning of fairness is really proportionality – are people getting rewarded in proportion to the work they put into a common project? Equality of outcomes is only seen as fair by most people in the special case in which everyone has made equal contributions. The conservative media (such as the Daily Mail, or Fox News in the US) is much more sensitive to the presence of slackers and benefit cheats. They are very effective at stirring up outrage at the government for condoning cheating."
Prescient, from 2012
Ironically, in other contexts the left would approve of foregoing self-interest for moral ideals. Related: liberals don't pour scorn on rich liberals for being stupid and voting against their self-interests by voting for candidates who'll raise taxes
The polling that shows Corbyn is to blame for Labour’s decline | Coffee House - "Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition did not win a majority and could never win a majority because millions could not vote for the incompetent and indecent Jeremy Corbyn. It’s that simple.I am not just repeating anecdotal evidence from Labour MPs and canvassers. A vast poll of 12,000 voters, released tonight, showed Jeremy Corbyn was by far the single biggest reason voters gave for deserting Labour. Of those who voted Labour in 2017 but were less than 50 per cent less likely to vote Labour now, Deltapoll found the overwhelming reason people gave was they ‘don’t like Jeremy Corbyn’ with 46 per cent agreeing with that blunt statement... The Conservatives could be in power for most of the 2020s because a bunch of student politicians and narcissist performance artists destroyed a once viable party... I have friends and colleagues I once considered good people, and politicians and celebrities I once admired, who I can never look at the same way again after they endorsed Labour. Not reluctantly, not as a grim but necessary compromise, but joyously with the absurd conviction that the collection of creepy and half-witted conspiracy theorists they sold their souls to could end poverty and restore the shattered public realm. To support Labour with a smile on your face was to say anti-Jewish racism doesn’t matter... Inevitably, given European history, this generation of British Jews are thinking that this is what it is like when they come for you. Respectable people, your friends, your neighbours, look away. They don’t listen or want to listen. When they come for you, you find you are dispensable. ‘The ease with which you turned on us, may it be a stain on you for the rest of your miserable lives,’ cried the Labour activist, Dan Fox to Labour members... I am pleased to report that the despairing idea that Jews are on their own is not true. The Jewish Leadership Council commissioned the poll and, naturally, asked about Labour racism. Among 2017 Labour voters who were uncertain about voting Labour in 2019, anti-Semitism was almost as big a reason as Brexit for people turning away from the party. 16 per cent gave anti-Semitism as a reason while 19 per cent named Brexit. Over a quarter of the entire voting population – 28 per cent – said they would have been more likely to vote Labour if Corbyn had handled accusations of anti-Semitism better... The rest of us can find a little cheer at this miserable time. It turns out that, despite everything, the British aren’t such a bad lot after all."
If you tell yourself that this was a fluke because of Brexit, you can continue to refuse to face reality
Maybe many Labour supporters will tell themselves that voters don't like a "good and decent man"
"Corbyn" is probably also code for "the far left policies Labour wanted to implement"
How Culture Killed the Labour Party - The Atlantic - "On paper, the conditions were ripe for a Labour victory. The Conservative Party has been in power for nine years. Johnson is controversial; according to most polls, his popularity ratings are significantly underwater. Although he promised to lead the country out of the European Union by October 31, alienating the half of the country that would like to remain in the EU, he failed to do so, disappointing the half of the country that wants to leave... Rother Valley, a mining community in South Yorkshire, had been in the party’s hands since 1918; in 1966, the Labour candidate won it with a staggering 77 percent of the vote. Sedgefield, a proletarian town in England’s northeast, had been held by Labour since 1935; in 1997, Tony Blair won this constituency with 71 percent of the vote. Both are now in the hands of the Tories, who had long been known, simply, as the “nasty party” in those parts of the country. Labour has been reduced to such a pitiful state for two main reasons. A structural transformation is making it difficult to sustain the electoral coalition that has propelled left-of-center movements to victory in the past. And the response to this structural shift that Corbyn pursued has proved to be toxic. Back when Labour was capable of commanding convincing electoral majorities, it held together a broad class coalition. It was the natural party of working people, with overwhelming support among the less affluent and less well educated. At the same time, it enjoyed strong support among large sections of the middle class, attracting many university students, schoolteachers, and civil servants.Although these two sides of the bourgeois-proletarian coalition have always differed in their cultural attitudes, they had significant economic commonalities. Both had an interest in high wages and strong unions. And both relied on the welfare state for the schooling of their children, for access to good doctors, and for the knowledge that they would be able to retire in dignity. So long as the main focus of electoral politics was on economic questions, the leaders of the Labour Party could therefore hold this broad coalition together. Many Labour policies, such as generous spending on the welfare state, appealed to both.But in the past decades, partisan alignment has shifted away from matters of economic policy toward what one might call questions of culture, such as immigration and, of course, Brexit... Labour is now being pulled in two opposite directions. Many of its middle-class voters feel that the party is not sufficiently liberal on cultural issues; as a result, they are tempted to opt for more consistently progressive alternatives such as the Green Party. Meanwhile, many of its erstwhile working-class voters feel that the party’s leaders have come to look down on their cultural views; as a result, they are tempted to vote for the Tories, or even for more extreme alternatives such as the Brexit Party. The rise of culture as the main cleavage of Western politics helps explain the slow death of social-democratic parties in many countries across the West. In Germany and France, and from Italy to Sweden, left-of-center parties have failed to find a political message that can reassemble the old bourgeois-proletarian coalition. Corbyn claimed to have found the recipe for reversing the left’s decline: Move far to the left. His economic program was often touted as the most radical in generations. And as his boosters pointed out, some of its individual components polled very well. But judging from yesterday’s results, working-class voters, in particular, were not persuaded by his rhetoric about the evils of capitalism and the attractions of socialism. In a poll of British voters, the second-biggest reason people worried about a potential Labour government was that it would “spend too much and get Britain into more debt.”The biggest reason? “Jeremy Corbyn being Prime Minister.”... Corbyn has consistently portrayed Britain as a country defined by deep injustice and iniquity, while expressing his sympathy for violent and extremist movements from the Irish Republican Army to the Iranian regime. While he has always found the time to stand in solidarity with dictators such as Hugo Chávez, he has been unable or unwilling to purge his party of anti-Semites, or to convince voters that he would take energetic action to punish criminals and terrorists. After the recent terror attack in London, he identified the culprit in … British foreign policy... For the past years, some of the most influential progressive politicians and commentators in the United States have portrayed Corbyn as the model they seek to follow... Corbyn’s defeat should put these arguments to rest. In the end, his far-left vision proved to be no match for Johnson’s shrewd brand of populism, which wedded the promise of a cultural revolution on Brexit to a moderate economic program with renewed investment in schools and police officers.
So much for claiming that Labour's policies were popular
Strange how the people who hate the Conservatives keep ranting about austerity, even though BJ said it was ending (not to mention the peculiar obsession with claiming he'll sell off the NHS to the US and UK healthcare will become like the US). It looks like their FUD doesn't work, after all
Boris Johnson is more trusted than Jeremy Corbyn, new poll of voters reveals - "Boris Johnson is more trusted to care for the NHS than Jeremy Corbyn... Asked which leader had the best health policies, 36 per cent of voters said Mr Johnson while 34 per cent opted for Mr Corbyn. In another blow to the Labour leader, nearly one in six supporters of his party are terrified at the thought of him becoming prime minister. And four in ten would be more likely to stick with Labour in the December 12 General Election if Mr Corbyn stood down.Even Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson was seen as stronger, more statesmanlike and smarter than Mr Corbyn in the Survation poll of 1,010 voters. The Labour leader yesterday used his last Commons clash with the Prime Minister before the election to accuse him of putting the NHS 'up for grabs' to secure a trade deal with the United States... Nor were voters convinced by Mr Corbyn's excuses for initially holding out against a December election. Nearly half say he did so because he was scared of losing... A total of 44 per cent blame Parliament for forcing the Prime Minister to break his 'die in a ditch' pledge to leave the EU by today; 32 per cent point the finger at Mr Johnson himself; 11 per cent blame Brussels."
I guess most people don't believe leftist claims that Boris will sell off the NHS after all. To hardcore Labour supporters, if Corbyn says it it must be true
Contrary to leftist claims that Labour's policies were popular, on the NHS, the Economy, Defence, Jobs, Foreign Relations and Trade, BJ polled more favorably than Corbyn (Welfare was the exception). And Swinson polled even worse than Corbyn. Interestingly, all 3 were judged poor statesmen, but Johnson was the least bad. He was also rated stronger, more intelligent and more charismatic than the other two, though less caring
Doubtless to leftists, since this is reported in the Daily Mail it must be wrong. Which is consistent with their view that the election results were warped by the "right wing media". Since obviously the People are dumb and not good enough for the Labour Party
We won the argument, but I regret we didn’t convert that into a majority for change | Jeremy Corbyn | Politics | The Guardian
“Despite losing we won”
Eoin Madsen on Twitter - "Britain is not a democracy. Even if you refuse to see the massive propaganda and socioeconomic coercion at play, you can't ignore the basic lack of proportional representation. Under FPTP, the number of votes doesn't even vaguely correspond to the number of seats."
Imagine not knowing how FPTP works in democracy
Kurt Hackbarth on Twitter - "Feeling so bad for Jeremy Corbyn right now. An honest, decent man, lifelong anti-racist campaigner and fighter for justice around the world, denigrated, demeaned and slandered to the point of being reduced to practically a subhuman caricature. This is on you, media."
I guess shutting up and listening to minorities doesn't apply when they're Jews
Womp Womp - Posts - "can someone fucking explain this? how the support for labour is overwhelming and yet exit polls predict a huge tory majority. smells like a fixed election if im honest."
Razor on Twitter - "Stop me if you heard this one before: overconfident liberals have a tantrum after losing a national election because they put up a bad candidate and stayed home, electing a brash braggart with bad hair Next up: a bad-faith investigation into the winner and zero self-reflection."
Labour has built up a world of alternative facts – but we can see Britain is no Dickensian slum - "A PM who took the Kremlin line during the Cold War? A grimly unfunny Citizen Smith bent on expropriating private pensions, private schools and private companies? A leader who has never backed his own country in a quarrel with others? We are surely a more level-headed nation than that. Aren’t we?... The revelation that a politician worked with diplomats from Warsaw Pact states during the Cold War should rule him out of contention. The fact that the former head of MI6 is moved to describe him as a “present danger to our country” ought to put his unfitness for office beyond doubt. Corbyn’s repeated and open dalliance with Britain’s enemies would until very recently have been considered a disqualification, and not only by the Right. Even The Guardian used to deplore Corbyn’s “romantic attachment to the IRA”... One after another, his MPs walk away, warning that Corbynism means the end of the non-Marxist Labour Party Britain has known for the past 100 years. Yet Corbyn gains support... no one, not even the most committed Momentum fanatic, truly thinks that Britain can pull off a budget increase equivalent to creating an entire new NHS each year simply by taxing the top five per cent. But, again, Corbyn gains support... The explanation may owe something to the sheer profusion of media outlets. Never before has it been so easy to find facts, or purported facts, that sustain your prejudices.Talking to Corbynistas, especially first-time voters, I am struck by how many of them march to drums inaudible to the rest of us. In their milieu, the story is of a principled leader who stands up for the poor against a government of billionaires. Their online timelines are filled with near-deranged reports about rising poverty, tax cuts for the rich and Americans buying the NHS. These narratives don’t intersect with reality. Poverty is falling in both relative and absolute terms. According to the IFS, the number of people suffering from severe deprivation has dropped by a fifth since 2010. Unemployment keeps dropping, and Boris Johnson proposes to take low-paid workers out of National Insurance while raising the minimum wage. There are more doctors and nurses in the NHS than ever before. But, if you don’t like these facts, you can now shop around for alternative ones... this election is being fought on outdated boundaries... it takes more ballots, on average, to elect a Conservative MP than a Labour MP... there is an unusually high rate of voter registration. Some 3.9 million people have joined the electoral roll in the past year, two thirds of them in the under-35 age group that is Labour’s most dependable base. There have been reports from university towns around the country of students being enrolled en masse without being asked... an alarming number of people seem to have lost their moral bearings as a consequence of the 2016 referendum, moving from “Brexit is racist!” to “Vote for the racist to stop Brexit!”... Labour is repeating the mistake it made during the referendum, treating voters as thickos. Its insistence that we are living in Dickensian conditions doesn’t match most people’s experience. More people are in work than ever. Wages are rising. The deficit is back to pre-Gordon Brown levels. Our schools are shooting up the international league tables. Worse than assuming that voters lack brains is assuming that they lack empathy – specifically, that they are not concerned about the welfare of their Jewish neighbours. Earlier this week a Brighton rabbi reported: “I was forced to light Chanukah candles under police protection, Corbynista militants were discovered organising a march against my synagogue.”"
Alternative facts are good when they support the left
There is only one message to the British people: you are wise, undaunted and quite magnificent - "The people of Britain have spoken - the real people. Not the social media trolls or the Twitter addicts or that whole parallel universe of ghosts... And because Boris Johnson insisted that this was a Brexit election - with that endlessly repeated mantra about “getting Brexit done” - this was more than an election: it was a second referendum too.So that’s the end of that. What this must mean is that the Red Wall has well and truly collapsed. Labour has lost its birthright to the working class vote. But the size of the majority must also mean that many, many Remainers did the gracious thing and admitted that in a democracy, the minority must honour the will of the majority."
A big majority is a victory for Boris Johnson, Brexit and everyone slandered by the far-Left - "the Left poured a bucket of bile over the Tories in this election. They portrayed them as heartless monsters from the black lagoon, hell-bent on selling off the NHS to Donald Trump. And, if these figures I'm looking at are real, then it hasn't worked.On the contrary, it's possible that all the negativity has backfired. Not only did social media and the celebrity mafia get this election horribly wrong but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't cost Labour a lot of votes. Steve Coogan: this one's on you. A-ha... this is a vindication for Boris Johnson. Again, he is not the man the Left says he is. He is perfectly moderate and really quite popular - as footage from the campaign trail almost consistently showed. He had a great campaign, displaying the discipline he allegedly lacked, and even when it wrong it was oddly wonderful (hiding in a fridge: love it). Never has the gulf between London opinion and the rest of the country been so stark. I'm not claiming BoJo is our Churchill or is universally loved. But what he's not is universally hated just because Channel 4 doesn't care for him. He has rescued his party from Theresa May and - this is the big thing - maybe saved Brexit."
It’s curtains for the Corbyn clown show... and on TV the pundits are reeling - "On TV, everyone looked stunned. Not just Labour. Everyone. From every party. On every channel. Motionless, pallid, blank. Like shocked shop dummies. Such was the Tory onslaught, even the swingometer was struggling to cope. “They’ve virtually broken it,” whimpered Jeremy Vine.Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, however, had to snap out of their stupor. Quickly they agreed the line to take. Simply: that Labour’s crushing defeat was all down to Brexit. Not anything else. Or anyone else. Just to make that clear... Alan Johnson – a Labour centrist who served under Tony Blair – took a slightly different view. In his eyes, there was possibly another reason for Labour’s catastrophe. In extraordinary scenes on ITV, he tore into Jon Lansman, co-founder of Momentum – the official Jeremy Corbyn fan club (join today and get a free signed poster and badge).“Everybody knew [Mr Corbyn] couldn’t lead the working class out of a paper bag,” snarled Mr Johnson. “Go back to your student politics.” “I don’t think we should rush into these things,” protested Mr Lansman, feebly. He added that Mr Corbyn “had achieved a great deal”. Well, quite. Mr Corbyn promised “real change”, and he delivered it. Burnley, Redcar and Wrexham turning Tory. That’s change more radical than even he could have dreamt... Jeremy Corbyn, for his part, gave a narked and graceless speech, scrupulously void of humility or self-criticism, but thick with mutterings about “the way the media behaved towards me”. He did at least promise to resign, but not immediately – first he would lead the party in “a process of reflection”. Which he and his followers will presumably use to work out who else to blame... a dazed Boris Johnson thanked his constituents, his fellow candidates, and the public in general. Disappointingly, however, he forgot to thank the people who made his great triumph possible.The membership of the Labour party."
This massive Tory victory spells the death of the disgraceful People's Vote movement - "The battle to prevent Brexit is over. It failed. It was the most scandalous, anti-democratic, reactionary movement since the opposition to the Great Reform Bill of the 1830s.It trampled on our constitutional traditions. It broke the Conservative Party into pieces. It left over 17 million people with the Establishment openly declaring them mentally and morally deficient, incapable and unworthy of making democratic decisions. It was a disgrace and shamed Britain before the world... [Boris] is the hero we needed, to defeat the scandalous, shameful Labour party, which has sold its soul to Marxist anti-Semites who ran one of the most xenophobic (yes, Corbynistas – anti-Americanism is xenophobic) and shamelessly mendacious campaigns of the past century. British voters didn’t buy it. They didn’t want quasi-Communism. They didn’t want anti-Semitic anti-Americans representing us before the world. And they didn’t want Corbyn’s policy of making Brexit go on and on and on."
Boris Johnson has crushed the Remainers. If only they would lose with grace - "Other Remainers preferred just to stick their head in the sand, no matter how ridiculous they looked, as former People's Vote chief Tom Baldwin explained to BBC viewers that Mr Johnson "may have a majority in Parliament" to deliver Brexit but not a "majority in the country" – even though the country has just delivered the Conservatives a thumping majority to do just that. Andrew Neil put it best in warning that people would conclude he was in "cloud cuckoo land": "You lose and lose and lose and you still say they don't have a mandate". Such ridiculous excuses are clearly a sign of the shock Remainers are feeling about the result, as the scale of Mr Johnson's victory sinks in. He is set to end up with a majority bigger than anything John Major and David Cameron were able to boast of, rivaling that of Margaret Thatcher. His rivals have bombed so badly that they – namely Jeremy Corbyn and Jo Swinson – have had to announce their resignations"
City cheers Brexit certainty after crushing Conservative victory - "The City has cheered Boris Johnson's crushing election victory, urging him to rebuild confidence in the UK's ailing economy and break the uncertainty that has stifled business for the last three years. Business leaders from across Britain welcomed the result, saying they hope it will release pent-up investment and boost consumer confidence in the coming months... "We were stuck in this terrible place with nothing going on. We've now got certainty."... The pound enjoyed one of its biggest surges overnight before settling around $1.3322, while the FTSE 100 closed 1.1pc higher. It had risen close to 2pc earlier in the day as traders breathed a sigh of relief that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's radical agenda had been avoided. A number of City tycoons had threatened to relocate if Mr Corbyn won the election. Tory donor Sir Henry Angest, the chairman of private bank Arbuthnot Latham who had said he would seriously consider moving back to Switzerland if Labour won, called it a “fantastic result” and said his plans to move were off... "The problem was that Corbyn offered such an appalling manifesto that for business it’s just a sense of relief. It’s more that than anything else - what a ridiculous manifesto."... Unlike previous Conservative leaders, Mr Johnson did not place business and the economy at the forefront of his election campaign. He abandoned plans for a £6bn corporation tax cut and instead focused his manifesto on Brexit and pumping cash into public services... due to Labour's extreme plans such as renationalising key industries and a stealth tax that would have seized 10pc of shares in every sizeable company, the Tories were still viewed as the favourite party in the City... The Tories have suggested a points-based immigration system that would prioritise highly skilled overseas workers and treat EU migrants the same as people from elsewhere... The party also set out plans to borrow £100bn over five years to fund longer-term infrastructure projects."
Strange how markets are optimistic about Brexit, even though it will, we are told, lead to the UK's ruin
Strange how the Tories are supposed to be about slashing taxes and letting ordinary people starve, but the corporate tax cut was abandoned and cash is to be pumped into public services
For the sake of liberalism, disastrous and deluded Jo Swinson had to go - "Having been put through the wringer as a result of its pivoting on tuition fees in the coalition government with David Cameron, it’s remarkable the Lib Dems came into this election with a lifeline at all. By all rights, they ought to have been finished long ago. Brexit, and the dithering of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, offered them a lifeline to return to prominence. But in truth, Swinson’s bold approach, to initially call for the revocation of Article 50, and to unilaterally decide to remain in the EU, without even a second referendum, failed to reap the rewards she no doubt hoped it would. Why that happened comes down to a number of factors. A great deal of the public, despite being Remainers, were not keen on the idea of a party threatening to overturn the result of the largest democratic vote in their nation’s history... Many more were prepared to back Labour instead, because at least the party made an effort, no matter how ludicrous, to make their own desire to remain appear democratic... aside from revoking and remaining, what, exactly, the Lib Dems stood for, was largely unknown. Their leader made a song and dance about her gender, and how she felt she was being treated differently as a result. That wasn’t a policy, but it set the tone, that she was someone who would look to seek excuses for things beyond her control. She also caused a stir when she told the Today Programme that she believed "sex and gender" weren’t always as binary as they were made out to be — which raised the odd eyebrow, not only from among those who remembered her wielding them as a weapon, but also among those voters who, frankly, didn’t agree with the stance. It was not a seismic moment, but in many a mind, it served to confirm that here was a leader perhaps not quite as straight shooting as she had tried to sell herself as being."
Nick Brown on Twitter - "Quite enjoying watching all the psychologists posting on social media about how they don't understand why so many British people voted Conservative yesterday. Maybe they could run some experiments with a small number of undergraduates to find out."
Conservative voters 'vermin' jibe by lecturer sparks outrage - "A Cardiff University lecturer has been criticised by a Welsh Tory for branding Conservative voters "vermin".In a post-election tweet, Dr Andy Williams said: "British men & boomers [are] statistically more likely to be vermin than women & the young."... "If this was about race, religion or sexual orientation there would be outrage," Mr Davies said. "What's alarming is he's a lecturer in one of our premier universities and he's in a position of trust. "You're meant to look after students from every background. It shows a bias that's dangerous." Dr Williams, who previously spent a short period as a researcher for Plaid Cymru assembly member Leanne Wood, responded to critical tweets by defending his choice of words. In one response he said: "I was quoting Nye Bevan, a political hero of mine. I stand by my view of Tories as vermin. "Those who support, whether wittingly or not, the human devastation doled out by the Conservative Party are not worthy of respect." In another response, Dr Williams said "the only problem with the vermin metaphor is that I've known quite a few decent rats". During a speech marking the creation of the NHS in 1948, the then Labour health minister Aneurin Bevan spoke of his "deep burning hatred" for the Conservative party, saying that "so far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin"."
I guess dehumanisation is good when it's against "the right"
Corbynism lost, but its cultists are still blaming the Jews - "One thing I have learnt this election: British people are a lot more anti-Semitic than I thought... If you don’t support Labour, you hate the NHS. If you oppose Corbyn, you hate disabled people. If you’re Jewish as well, then you’re part of an organised smear campaign to malign Corbyn, the world’s bravest campaigner for Palestinian rights. And probably rich and greedy, too. All the greats were rolled out to show the Jews that other Jews were telling them they were wrong, they were victims of false consciousness, right-wing shills and undeclared agents of the Israeli state - Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Haaretz’s own Gideon Levy... The Jewish conspiracy was alive and well and living in the mind of otherwise woke and well-meaning progressives. For most British Jews, social media has been - at its kindest - a barrage of Jewsplaining posts from Corbyn fans who seem to think that posting a picture of two guys from an extremist ultra-orthodox Jewish sect holding a “We heart Corbyn” sign would convince us of the error of our ways. At worst, it’s been abuse, bullying and death threats to prominent Jewish Labour parliamentarians, like Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth... I’ve been challenged over and over again to give a single example of Labour anti-Semitism, usually after giving multiple examples of Labour anti-Semitism. I seem to be expected to present my own credentials as “the right kind of Jew” – left-wing, hyper-critical of Israel – while explaining patiently that no, there is no “right kind of Jew.”... It seems that the Jew-hatred did at least feed into Corbyn’s overall aura of untrustworthiness, along with the incompetent economic madness that promised free everything, with high-speed broadband on top. And Corbyn’s Labour was no less morally defective when it came to the IRA, or Syria, or seeing Russia and Iran as brave anti-imperialist forces... There won’t be any healing time either now, not least when Corbyn boosters still cling to the delusion that they were robbed of their rightful victory. Labour’s policies were “popular.” The hostile oligarch far right and centrist media conspired against them. Sinister lobbies were brought into play. “The Jewish vote was not very helpful,” said Ken Livingstone, with rather notable restraint from a man who doesn’t usually let a spurious Hitler analogy pass him by."
Kerry-Anne Mendoza on Twitter - "“Boris is finished when Brexit fails”. No. When it fails, he blames us: The Left People of colour The mythical “benefit cheat”, Immigrants Jews Sick and disabled people And his fans will believe him. That’s how fascism works. You can’t wait it out. You have to fight it."
Sargon of Akkad - Posts - "Labour supporters think that "when Brexit fails", Boris is going to blame "Jews". This is the most hilarious projection I've seen yet"
YouGov on Twitter - "The age at which a person becomes more likely to vote Conservative than Labour is 39 - down from 47 at the last election"
So much for leftists crowing that they are the future since young people are more likely to vote left
It is significant that a majority of 2017 Labour Leave voters voted Labour this time - putting paid to Labour supporters' self-serving claim that it was all the fault of Brexit
Tories won more working class votes than Labour amid stark generation gap at general election, poll suggests - "Tories out-polled Labour by double-digit figures among both manual workers and households with incomes below £20,000... Tories outperformed Labour in every social class"
So the answer is for the Party of the People to blame the People for being dumb/dumb enough to be so easily mislead/bigoted
Safiyyah on Twitter - ""We've survived a Conservative government before" No. You've survived. Poor people haven't. People with disabilities haven't. Trans people haven't. 130,000 people haven't because of austerity. Just because you'll be fine bc you're privileged, doesn't mean everyone else will be."
Since the Conservatives have been in power since 2010, I assume this means there're no more poor people, people with disabilities and trans people left in the UK
One of Boris Johnson’s newly-elected Tories has become first openly gay Muslim elected MP in the world - "Equality campaigners hailed Imrad Ahmad Khan as a breakthrough moment for gay Muslims across the world after winning Wakefield from Labour last week. He is one of 24 openly gay or bisexual Tories now in the Commons - more than any other party. Labour has at least 18 - taking the total to more than 50 LGBT MPs, making Westminster officially the "gayest Parliament in the world"."
Clear proof of Tory Islamophobia! And, presumably, homophobia too
Ex-Cabinet minister: 'Labour activists believe English people are knuckle-dragging Neo-Nazis' - "one of the biggest problems in the election was Labour's inability to connect with voters who feel English.'There has always been a strand on the Left that disparages national identity and disparages patriotism,' he said.'Labour doesn't mention England. Most Labour activists think that all English people are knuckle dragging Neo-Nazis.'There is a basic inability to frame progressive politics in terms of the nation, the people of the nation and the national interest.' Mr Denham said previous Labour leaders such as Clement Attlee had no such problem. 'In the past, under Attlee for example... politics was expressed as national patriotism and it was progressive., We have completely lost the ability to do that,' he said. 'Parts of the Left just say the only thing you need to know about Britain or about England is that you were slavers and imperialists. 'That is part of the history. But there is also the history of England that is the struggle for the vote, the struggle for democratic votes... 'We have lost the ability to say there are things that we can be proud of about what we have done. 'The issue is not so much Britain, the issue in this last election was England and the people who feel English.' Tony Blair today delivered a lacerating verdict on Mr Corbyn's 'comical' leadership and branded Labour a 'cult' - as he finally admitted defeat on Brexit. The former PM, who won three elections, tore into his successor for turning the party into a 'glorified protest movement'. He said the astonishing rout at the hands of the Tories last week - the worst performance since 1935 - was a source of 'shame', warning that Labour faces total destruction if it does not evict the hard-Left.
Sargon of Akkad - Posts - "Boris Johnson to enshrine £34bn NHS spending pledge into law"
Diane Abbott: "I thought we said he was going to sell the NHS"
Jeremy Corbyn: "Fuck off Diane"
Corbyn humiliated as joke Queen’s opening of Parliament looked like PANTOMIME falls flat
It's good to be a sore loser if you're on the left
Rebecca Long Bailey hires man who wore a badge joking about Trotsky's assassination - "Labour will never again win power if Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Stalinist-backed’ favourite Rebecca Long Bailey becomes the next leader, party moderates warned... the Shadow Business Secretary appeared to confirm her status as the darling of hard-Left activists by picking ‘self-proclaimed’ Stalinist Alex Halligan to help run her campaign. The Momentum organiser is credited with a key role in getting Mr Corbyn elected as party leader in 2015. Two years ago Mr Halligan was pictured wearing a badge with the slogan ‘Good Night Trotskyite’ and a silhouette of a man attacking another with an ice pick – a reference to the assassination in 1940 of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky on the orders of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin."
Boris Johnson poses with his 109 new Conservative MPs - "This new breed of Conservative is more working class than toff and will leave behind jobs in the NHS, schools and some more exotic professions such as training dolphins or running a microbrewery."
British Jews Are Worried by Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party - The Atlantic - "It is an astonishing statistic: Some 87 percent of British Jews believe that Jeremy Corbyn—one of two men who could be prime minister in a few days’ time—is anti-Semitic... The litany of alarming incidents is well rehearsed: Corbyn’s support for an artist who drew a mural depicting hook-nosed bankers getting rich on the backs of the poor. (He said he had not looked properly at the mural.) His assertion in 2013 that British Zionists “don’t understand English irony.” (He said he would now be more careful about using the word Zionist, because it had been “hijacked by antisemites as code for Jews.”) Labour’s refusal to adopt in full an internationally recognized description of anti-Semitism. Each of these individual incidents was made more toxic by the party’s slow handling of complaints filed by Jewish members. During the campaign, Corbyn refused four times to apologize for the distress caused to the Jewish community... The party is currently being investigated over allegations of institutional anti-Semitism by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission... Jewish voters I spoke with over the past several weeks told me of feeling as though the entire community had been “gaslit”—that the reality of anti-Semitism was being minimized by the party leadership—and that denying this reality had become a way to demonstrate loyalty to Corbyn and his radical anti-austerity agenda. This feeling is aggravated by persistent suggestions from the hard left that anti-Semitism is merely the pretext for a “smear campaign” against Corbyn and the left in general... 39 percent of Britons overall believe Corbyn is anti-Semitic... Disproportionate hatred of Israel is one strand of left-wing anti-Semitism. The other is the conspiracist turn, turbocharged by social media, which gains succor from attacks on “the elite,” “the 1 percent,” “the mainstream media,” and “billionaires.” Corbyn has made such attacks a key part of Labour’s appeal, adopting the slogan “For the many, not the few.” The trouble is that while all of these are superficially innocent phrases—as well as useful ways of describing a world in which wealth and opportunities are unequally distributed—it is clear that some supporters hear them as a dog whistle. Jews have long been accused of running shadowy cabals: References to the Bilderberg Group, the Rothschilds, and George Soros are staples of online conspiracy theories. This tendency intersects with the anti-colonialist view of Israel, Mike Katz, the chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, which represents Jewish socialists, told me. “In the way people talk about ‘who’s bankrolling Zionists?’ Jews have always been accused of having divided loyalty,” he said. “Prior to Israel, it was some shadowy world government.”... Shinwell’s great-niece, Luciana Berger, herself a Labour MP since 2010, left the party. She said she could no longer tolerate the hatred and threats she had received for being Jewish, and the lack of support she felt she had gotten from her local party and the leadership... their concerns are dismissed as driven by a right-wing or anti-Corbyn agenda. “We have been treated by many as an irritant, as opposed to a minority community with genuine concerns”... “I consider myself to be left-wing,” Peter Mason, secretary of the Jewish Labour Movement, told me. “There’s not much in the manifesto I disagree with. But because I talk about anti-Semitism and I’m Jewish, I’m pigeonholed as being more right-wing than Genghis Khan.”"
Of course, we all know that only the Right is capable of dog whistling
Listen when minorities raise concerns. Unless they're Jewish
Labour’s lost working-class voters have gone for good - "Ideologically, Corbynism was a break from New Labour centrism but sociologically, it was more Blairite than Tony Blair. As the Labour MP Jon Cruddas has argued, the Corbyn revolution in the Labour party has narrowed its social base even further, making it the party of young, middle-class southerners, popular in London and some prosperous university towns... After three years of leave supporters being dismissed as racist and stupid, and seeing Labour eventually get off the fence and back the People’s Vote campaign, how on earth did the party expect its leave supporters to react?... For leavers, Brexit has always been about more than just policies. Membership of the EU denoted a fundamental change in society – a movement from being a nation state to being a member state. Governments increasingly seemed to be getting their legitimacy and sense of purpose not from their voters but from their association with other governments across Europe. Over time, a gap opened up between politicians and voters. Many people felt as if it didn’t matter who they put in Downing Street – they still had little say over the country’s governing structures or the most important decisions that shape society. The current Labour leadership was often portrayed as dogmatic Marxists but on Brexit they demonstrated an incredible willingness to compromise on the question of rule by democratic consent... As an indication of what may lie ahead for Labour, it is worth looking across the Channel. On the Rue Solférino, a stone’s throw from the River Seine, stands the historic headquarters of the French Socialist party. It was recently sold off and converted into luxury flats."
Boris Johnson announces extra money to tackle homelessness - "The government has set up a £63m grant scheme to help homeless households in England into accommodation.The prime minister has also restated his commitment to end rough sleeping by 2024 and an extra £3m to aid rough sleepers during the cold winter months."
Oh, the humanity! How awful! Boris is literally killing the homeless
The Blundering Brilliance of Prime Minister Boris Johnson - "he has been lambasted for a number of passages from his long journalistic career that suggest racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia — and that he viewed as satirical excesses. Trump deploys the same defense, but outside of Boris’s purple prose — “tank-topped bum-boys,” burka-wearing women looking like “letter boxes” — the evidence of his bigotry is a little thin. A bigot would be unlikely to win two elections as mayor of London, a vast multiracial, multicultural metropolis. And his Cabinet is the most ethnically diverse in British history. Or take gay rights. Back in 2003, Johnson was one of a handful of Tories who rebelled against Conservative Party policy, voting for an end to the Thatcherite ban on teaching about homosexuality in state schools... As London mayor, he marched in several Pride parades, and as foreign secretary, he reversed a ban on rainbow flags at British embassies. On a trip to Russia, he defended gay rights, saying at a press conference with Sergei Lavrov that “we speak up for the LGBT community in Chechnya and elsewhere.” Islamophobia? Johnson had previously favored the entry of Turkey, with 81 million Muslims, into the E.U. He is hostile to the illiberalism in contemporary Islam but has defended the religion as a whole: “Everything that most shocks us about Islam now — the sexism, the intolerance of dissent, the persecution of heresy and blasphemy, the droning about hell and shaitan, the destruction of works of art, the ferocious punishments — all of them have been characteristics of Christian Europe. It wasn’t so long ago that we were burning books and heretics ourselves.” Boris also appreciated the moderation of Barack Obama: “He is patently not the Marxist subversive loony lefty that some of his detractors allege.” And, of course, he has shown a deep contempt for Donald Trump... The truth is Johnson has a record as a liberal Tory: a conservative who can celebrate “our fantastic National Health Service” and has no interest in politicians’ preaching about morality. And it was this conservatism that enabled him to become mayor of London, a largely Labour city, where he thrived. He brought back the double-decker bus; launched a successful, if unprofitable, bike-sharing scheme, “Boris Bikes”; backed an amnesty for illegal immigrants; banned booze on the tube; raised the recommended living wage in London; and presided over an Olympics that became a public-relations coup for the entire country. Crime declined — as it did everywhere. And Boris became one of the most famous cyclists in the city, careening back and forth, often on his mobile phone. By the end of his term, a YouGov poll found that almost twice as many Londoners thought he did a good job as mayor as those who didn’t. As always, Johnson’s ideological flexibility was key — so much so that it led him to resist the more doctrinaire forces in his own party. As mayor, Johnson complained about the austerity measures of the Tory Cameron government... He seems most emotionally comfortable in front of an audience, cracking jokes. On television, even as he was a journalist and an MP, he became something of a star in his own right. He regularly went on a satirical quiz show on current events called Have I Got News for You? and was as funny as the professional comedians who were permanent guests. In turn, he was invited back to guest host. He began cracking people up on various interview shows and became a very rare politician with true pop-cultural appeal. He was the kind of celebrity figure who could advise the readers of GQ that under a Conservative government, “your wife will get bigger breasts and your chances of driving a BMW M3 will increase.”... “I am a European. I lived many years in Brussels. I rather love the old place,” he wrote in the first paragraph of his pro-Brexit column. “And so I resent the way we continually confuse Europe — the home of the greatest and richest culture in the world, to which Britain is and will be an eternal contributor — with the political project of the European Union. It is, therefore, vital to stress that there is nothing necessarily anti-European or xenophobic in wanting to vote Leave on June 23.”... In a campaign he didn’t personally run, Boris can’t be faulted for things he didn’t say or do, but he didn’t protest or stop the lies coming. (It is also true that the “remain” campaign grossly overstated the immediate economic consequences of voting “leave.”)... on the one promise no one believed he could fulfill — a new deal with the E.U. — he succeeded. It turned out that a credible threat to leave without a deal (which May never made) concentrated minds considerably. And a burst of intense personal diplomacy with the Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar — when Boris deployed his maximal charm — delivered a solution to the core Irish problem: a customs pseudo-border in the Irish Sea... Emmanuel Macron congratulated the new prime minister: “He may be a colorful character sometimes, but we all are at times. He’s got a temper, but he’s a leader with a real strategic vision. Those who didn’t take him seriously were wrong.”... Far from confronting people with hard economic choices and threatening ever-deeper austerity amid soaring unemployment, as she did, Boris is promising much more public spending than his Tory predecessors, in an era of very low unemployment, while trimming tax for the working and middle classes. The cut in corporation tax, planned by Theresa May, was scrapped. He plans big increases in spending on the National Health Service and schools and doubling the government science budget... He’s gambling that Brexit is largely a symbolic issue — a new statement of British sovereignty and independence — and that the details of future trade don’t really matter. And he may be cynical about this but also right. One sign of this possibility is the immigration issue. It was critical to the Brexit vote but disappeared as a major issue in the polls as soon as the referendum was over... the ability of most people to move on from difficult subjects once they feel they’ve been listened to should not be underestimated. It is this aspect of Boris’s politics that some of his close allies insist has been misunderstood. He has done what no other conservative leader in the West has done: He has co-opted and thereby neutered the far right. The reactionary Brexit Party has all but collapsed since Boris took over. Anti-immigration fervor has calmed. The Tories have also moved back to the economic and social center under Johnson’s leadership. And there is a strategy to this. What Cummings and Johnson believe is that the E.U., far from being an engine for liberal progress, has, through its overreach and hubris, actually become a major cause of the rise of the far right across the Continent. By forcing many very different countries into one increasingly powerful Eurocratic rubric, the E.U. has spawned a nationalist reaction... Consider, by contrast, Germany, where the center right is reeling and the extreme-right AfD has 91 seats in the Bundestag. Or, for that matter, France, where the mainstream right has collapsed and Marine Le Pen won 34 percent in the last presidential election. Compare it with the U.S., where the GOP has been overthrown by a far-right insurgency and turned into a disturbingly fascistic personality cult. Or Hungary and Poland, where reactionaries control the entire system... Yes, Boris has shifted and lied and betrayed on his path to this moment. But he will gladly point out that the same criticisms were made of Churchill, who switched parties, alienated almost everyone in the Establishment, and was regarded long into the 1930s as a crank and a joke with a funny way of speaking. But Churchill was right about the one thing that mattered, and Johnson not so subtly implies the same is true about him and Brexit."
Of course, according to leftists it doesn't matter that Boris opposed austerity (and has announced its end) - since he's a Tory it means he'll only increase it
Socialism declining in Europe as populism support grows - "Populism has tested the ability of mainstream parties to adapt and some on the centre-right are regaining their footing. That cannot be said of the traditional left. It gravitated towards the middle ground in the 1990s, and then paid a price for selling out. But a pendulum swing to 1970s-style radical ideology has been shown to be just as out of sync with the times.This year ends with the humiliation of the Labour Party in the UK’s 12 December election and Germany’s Social Democrats more unpopular than at any time in living memory. In Italy and Spain, the centre-left are in government only thanks to precarious alliances with the anti-establishment groups that grew from the 2008 financial crisis"
Brexit must be causing the decline of the left all across Europe, just like in the UK!
BBC World Service - The World This Week, NATO takes on China - and Trump - "The main opposition Labour Party used Mr. Trump's visit to highlight concerns that the UK’s very large and much loved government owned and run health care system, the NHS, would somehow be on the table in any post Brexit trade talks with the US"
The BBC notes that Labour's claim (uncritically taken up by all the Tory haters) about the NHS being sold off is totally unfounded
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, John McDonnell meets a billionaire - "‘Some of the labor rhetoric I accept, but the central ethos, when I hear phrases like, nobody deserves to be a billionaire, it frightens the living daylights out of me. You know and John, the thing is, if the Labour rhetoric was, we admire billionaires, and we'd like them to pay a bit more tax, be more charitable and admire their success. I would absolutely support that philosophy. But when I hear condemnation and divisiveness-’...
'It's about confidence. So what you're doing… as a Labour Party is destroying confidence. And if you destroy confidence, you are definitely destroying confidence. Nearly every wealthy person I know, is thinking of leaving the UK, including me if Labour get in.'"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, John McDonnell: Labour promises won't mean more tax for most people - "‘You have promised double the amount of extra spending that you promised only two years ago in your general election manifesto. You're promising the biggest state that we will have seen since the 1970s. And yet, you're not saying, look, guys, we're all gonna have to pay for this. Your claim is that only the rich can pay. And I'll put it to you that the Institute of Fiscal Studies have described that as simply not credible’
‘I have a great respect for the IFS. Of course I do. I just think they've got it wrong on this one.’...
‘Do you think for example, trade unions on the railways should be allowed to go on strike in sympathy with trade unions running hospitals?’
‘I believe any worker should have the right to withdraw their labor but the reality is… We're creating a new climate in this country, which is based upon a stakeholder economy where we all recognize we've got a stake in this economy, where we actually recognize we all have responsibilities as well. We've got to change the atmosphere about how we go forward. And in that way, you know, we've been arguing this for about 30 years, we'll all share in the wealth we create more equally. We all have much more of a stake in our society.’
‘Understood. And one problem, and you’ve given this a lot of thought, I know you have, is that Britain is very, very dependent and has been for those 30 years on investment from abroad. Now, if you run a business, or if you're a shareholder, and you're listening to this interview, why would you invest here, when the next Chancellor for the Exchequer, the man who hopes to be, had said, I'm prepared to confiscate your business using the law, I will increase your business taxes to the highest level in the world and I will give control of your company to those who I say, will run it democratically, wouldn’t you be ever so slightly tempted to invest somewhere else instead?’...
'The most important economic decision facing this country is about Brexit. And you can't even tell us whether the Prime Minister that you want to put into Downing Street, Jeremy Corbyn will vote to leave or remain even if he gets the deal he wants. Now, you said something very interesting yesterday, you said your own vote in a future referendum will be determined by Labour's special party conference. Isn't that confirmation that even on this most important of decisions, you want to give control to a sort of cabal of Momentum activists, trade union supporters. That’s what you mean by democracy?'"
Labour's voodoo economics!
Brexit will ruin the UKs' economy so it's bad. Labour will ruin the UK's economy but that's good because it's a left wing policy
"The happiest place on earth"
Friday, January 17, 2020
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