Tory Landslide, Corbyn’s Failure And The American Left: Analysis Roundup

[Elderberry]

Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 12/13/2019

There are lots of conclusions to be drawn and lessons learned from Boris Johnson’s Conservative landslide victory over Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, especially for the American left, who I suspect will learn none of it.

First, let’s establish how many American liberals lionized Corbyn as the future of politics:

“Only Socialism Can Defeat Trumpism,” by Nicole Aschoff and Bhaskar Sunkara, The Nation, November 2016

“The past year has shown that millions of ordinary people are ready for an alternative, one pointed to by the success of Sanders and the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in Britain …

As with the collapsing social democrats in Europe, the Democratic Party’s best bet is to move left and embrace a platform that speaks to the real needs, fears, and aspirations of working people-----

Andrew Sullivan offers up (mostly) keen insight into Johnson’s win and Corbyn’s fall:

The sea of Tory blue seats that now envelop Labour’s heartlands on the electoral map of Britain is one kind of future for Western democracies. Unleashed by a revolt by ordinary people to take back control of their own laws and rebuild national sovereignty, and by their insistence that their decision to leave the E.U. be respected and implemented, it may have changed Britain’s politics in a structural way. Three political parties were decimated yesterday: the Labour Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, and the Brexit Party. Each party’s defeat tells you something more about a potential realignment of new politics.

The revulsion at Jeremy Corbyn was a big factor — especially, it seems, in the safest Labour seats in the north. The British people, after giving him the benefit of the doubt in 2017, turned on him. On his expansive, super-ambitious plan for massive investment in infrastructure and public services, they just didn’t believe the math. On his rancid long history of sympathizing with terrorists, they feared what he might do to the security services. On his anti-Semitism, they righteously humiliated the old codger. It tells you a lot about him that he still hasn’t resigned after the Labour Party’s worst showing since 1935. He has only promised not to lead the party into the election. He will stay on to control the succession battle and try to keep his faction in power. His goal was always controlling the Labour Party, not winning elections. He has lost two elections, but his grip on the party is going to be very hard to break. It took Labour 18 years to return to power after its drubbing at the 1983 election. It may take as long to recover from an even worse shellacking.

More: https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=42871

[Elderberry]

What the Boris landslide means for the climate debate

Watts Up With That? By Christopher Monckton 12/15/2019

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/12/15/what-the-boris-landslide-means-for-the-climate-debate/

The fasmunist haters of democracy in Antifa have been rioting in London in protest at the landslide that the voters accorded to Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party in Thursday’s general election.

Like the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the election of Boris Johnson in 2019 demonstrates just how far the totalitarians in the “Democratic” and “Labor” parties have departed from their working-class roots, and how much they hate and fear democracy itself, and how much good reason they have to fear the common sense of the voters – especially those in the working class.

Johnson, like Trump, concentrated his campaign on rust-belt constituencies deserted by the now-metropolitan-illiberal hard Left and, worse still, laid waste by official global-warming policies – ironically, by the very global-warming policies that Johnson, unlike Trump, slobberingly endorses. Johnson’s current partner – the First Squeeze, as the tabloid newspapers call her – is a climate fanatic, and his father Stan has joined the violent urban terrorist mob Extinction Rebellion.

More at link.

A Communist cartoon from the
general election campaign