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All change: Britain's general election produced a result no less seismic for being predicted
MELANIE PHILLIPS
King Charles invites Sir Keir Starmer to form a government
Here are my initial thoughts on the results of Britain’s general election.
The most significant results are: Labour 412 (up by 211), Conservative 121 (down by 250), Liberal Democrats 71 (up by 63), Scottish National Party 9 (down by 38), Independent 6 (up from zero), Reform 4 (up from zero), Green 4 (up by 3).
Labour’s enormous overall majority of 170 seats means that it can broadly do whatever it wants because it faces a fractured and weak opposition.
However, the country did not express any enthusiasm for Labour. The party achieved less than one third of the popular vote — the lowest of any governing party in modern history, and even less than the 40 per cent secured by the hard-left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. Yesterday’s Labour share of the vote had hardly changed from the last general election in 2019.
The country remains wary and suspicious of Labour and the new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. What voters were determined to do was get rid of the Conservative party, whose share of the popular vote accordingly imploded. Some 11 Cabinet ministers were swept away along with swathes of other former MPs, leaving a pitiably small rump of Tories in parliament to face the jubilant and crowded Labour benches. The Conservative party — previously known as Britain’s “natural party of government” — is now in the wilderness for the forseeable future.
The Reform party led by Nigel Farage achieved extraordinary success from a standing start. Despite the high bar against third parties set by the British electoral system — and despite some deeply questionable candidates, the result of a campaign thrown together at a moment’s notice with next to no organisation or party discipline — Reform won four seats, putting Farage himself into parliament for the first time.
The significance of this achievement, however, goes much deeper than the number of seats the party actually won. Reform did enormous damage to the Conservatives (and more than a little to Labour too) by the high numbers voting for it, costing the Tories no fewer than 180 seats. Reform is now a serious insurgency on the pattern of “populist” insurgencies against a monolithic political establishment that we have seen developing in Europe.
A deeply ominous development is the emergence of an Islamic sectarian vote, with four previously Labour-held seats lost to independent candidates whose pitch — in a British general election concerning British national interests — was about Gaza and “Palestine”.
Although even Labour “moderates” generally side with the international “human rights” and “humanitarian” establishment which is virulently hostile to Israel, British Muslims are angry that Starmer supported Israel’s defence against Hamas after the October 7 pogrom. As a result, Labour candidates have been harassed and intimidated by Muslims and other anti-Israel types and lost votes in yesterday’s election.
In the Birmingham Yardley constituency Labour’s Jess Phillips, who only narrowly kept her seat under pressure from this “Gaza” lobby, was met with boos and jeers as she made an angry acceptance speech in which she denounced the “aggression and violence” in “the worst election I have ever stood in”. All this is entirely foreign to British democratic traditions and does not bode well.
So what is likely to be the outcome of this election?
This is a deeply paradoxical result. Starmer has an unassailable majority in parliament, but must now govern a country that has not embraced his agenda. To his credit, he detoxified the Labour party to make people feel it was safe enough to give it their vote — which they needed to do to achieve their principal objective to get the other lot out. But now he has to win hearts and minds. This will be a tough call.
He inherits a country with severe structural economic, social and cultural problems. He has made promises which he won’t have the money to deliver. Crises with which Rishi Sunak unsuccessfully struggled, such as stopping the migrant boats in the English Channel, collapsing public services and rising lawlessness and anarchy on the streets, all now land in Starmer’s lap.
He also inherits an appalling epidemic of Jew-hatred, which will undoubtedly worry him greatly — not least because he has Jewish family members, and because he is a decent man. However, dealing properly with antisemitism will mean acknowledging the symbiotic link between the Palestinian cause and Jew-hatred — which, as a man of the left, he has never done — and standing up to both the Muslim community and the far left, constituencies which are represented within his own party.
Buoyed by the success of the “Gaza” election campaigns and by the refusal of the authorities to stop the pro-Hamas intimidation and disorder on the streets, Islamic sectarianism is now likely to increase. A Muslim bloc has emerged which is likely to demand not just policies hostile to Israel but measures to adapt aspects of British society to Islamic requirements.
Starmer will be less hostile towards Israel than the far-left or the Muslim bloc are demanding; but since his instincts remain those of the radical human rights lawyer he originally was, he is unlikely to stop the demonisation of Israel that oozes from every pore of the liberal establishment (including the Foreign Office) and which is fuelling the harassment of Britain’s Jews.
Moreover, while he will be economically cautious he’ll let rip on the “culture wars”. The result will be more transgender abuses of children and women and more demonisation of white people and British “colonialism”. He’s also likely to outlaw “Islamophobia” — which could have an even greater chilling effect on necessary discussion of Muslim antisemitism or Islamic terrorism than is currently the case. The rumour that the veteran “human rights” ideologue Harriet Harman is to become head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission in place of Baroness Falkner, who has bravely tried to counter the transgender lunacy, chills the bone.
Starmer is also committed to an insane acceleration of the already ruinous Net Zero target, and to developing “ever closer” ties with the EU which will further stifle the entrepreneurial freedoms that Brexit enabled but the Tory government never delivered.
With this agenda, the Labour government will be as one with the entire administrative state and the entire cultural and intellectual establishment — precisely the dogmatic cultural tyranny against which millions of Europeans and Americans are in revolt.
And so what of the Tories? They will now descend into civil war. Indeed, it’s already started, with different factions accusing each other of having lost the country.
The fact is that for decades the Conservative party has failed to articulate basic conservative values — conserving what was best and most valuable in British and western culture. Ricocheting between liberal universalists and free market ideologues, the Tories persisted in the lie that the welfare state could coexist with reduced public spending; they broke their promise of controlling mass immigration; they failed to break the grip of the administrative state to take advantage of Brexit; they were largely supine in the face of the transgender lunacy and anti-white racism; they were paralysed in the face of widespread anarchy on the streets; and they failed to protect Britain’s Jewish community against attack.
So when it comes to opposing Labour’s agenda, the Tories will have nothing to say because they helped enable much of it.
Meanwhile Nigel Farage, who has now achieved what he set out to do in pulverising the Conservative party, will be moving onto the next part of his agenda — taking the fight to the Labour government in order to bring about the reconfiguration of British politics, by reconnecting it with the British mainstream and recovering the true centre ground, that he has long envisaged.
Farage — the true and only begetter of Brexit — is the most consequential politician of the post-Thatcher period. He has his own flaws. His free market principles line him up with the wing of the Tory party that disappeared inside its economic tunnel vision. And his tendency towards international isolationism and indifference towards defence are alarming.
But he speaks for millions by his promotion of the independence of the nation within borders that are properly policed and with immigration kept to manageable levels, and his defence of a culture based on its own history and traditions enshrining fairness, social order and a grounding in reality that people can recognise as a shared national endeavour and that they can call home.
Unless the Tories acknowledge that this is the ground they have so disastrously abandoned — and unless they become committed to promote and defend it — they’re finished.
On the steps of Number Ten, Starmer said he would govern “unburdened by doctrine”. A disillusioned and sceptical nation is about to see just what he thinks that means.
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Haley Releases Delegates, Urges Them to Back Trump Ahead of RNC Convention
She was very popular so this is good. Aiming for Veep?
Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley announced on July 9 that she is releasing her 97 delegates and urging them to support former President Donald Trump.
The move comes days before the Republican National Convention when the 45th president is set to be nominated as the party’s 2024 presidential candidate.
“The nominating convention is a time for Republican unity,” said Ms. Haley in a statement.
“We need a president who will hold our enemies to account, secure our border, cut our debt, and get our economy back on track,” said the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Ms. Haley went on to call on her delegates to back former President Trump at the Republican National Convention, which will be held July 15–18 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Politico first reported the news.
The former candidate will not be attending the convention.
“She was not invited, and she’s fine with that,” Ms. Haley’s spokesperson, Chaney Denton, told The Epoch Times.
“Trump deserves the convention he wants,” Ms. Denton said. “She’s made it clear she’s voting for him and wishes him the best.”
In May, a few months after suspending her presidential campaign, Ms. Haley announced she will be voting for former President Trump.
She said that she wants a “president who would support capitalism and freedom. A president who understands we need less debt, not more debt.” While former President Trump “has not been perfect on these policies,” she said, he is preferable to President Joe Biden.
Ms. Haley also urged the GOP frontrunner to “reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not assume that they’re just going to be with him.”
After dropping out of the race in March, Ms. Haley continued to receive a notable share of votes in Republican primaries around the country. She notched 20 percent of the vote in the primaries in Maryland, 18 percent in Nebraska, and 22 percent in Indiana.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/haley-to-release-delegates-to-trump-ahead-of-rnc-convention-5682895
************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
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