I followed the BBC live television coverage of the United Kingdom’s election results for several hours on Thursday night. (Thank you, C-SPAN.) Throughout the West, Jews had taken a deeper-than-usual interest in those elections because, for the first time since the Holocaust, a major political party in Western Europe was running an unbridled Jew-hater, Jeremy Corbyn, at the top of its ticket. Therefore, I stayed up to watch the results for several reasons:
- If Corbyn won, that was going to mean a major exit of Jews to Israel and America.
- A large exit of British Jews to Israel would cause a major skyrocketing in housing prices in Jerusalem, where my dear Ellen and I hope to buy a home. The French Jewish exodus already messed up that real estate market, and we have been catching up since.
- A large exit of other British Jews to America would mean that, in order for me to communicate with those people, I would have to start learning a whole new language, whatever that doggerel is that they speak without moving their lips. Not to mention all their convoluted misuse of simple words: “lift” instead of “elevator,” “lorry” instead of “truck,” “boot” instead of “trunk,” “bonnet” instead of “hood,” “flat” instead of “apartment,” and all that screwed-up misspelling of words like “theatre” and “labour.” At least those Jews are not “People of Colour,” or I would have to reset my auto-correct. I was concerned that a Corbyn win might mean that I would go on a holiday.
- A win by a Jew-hater like Corbyn and his substantially anti-Semitic Labour Party presumably would induce a trend elsewhere in the European Union, like in France and Belgium, where the influx of Jew-hating Muslim Arabs from Syria and other such freedom-loving countries has created a new toxic environment for Jews living in those cursed lands on that cursed soil. (The one island of sacred soil amid the flies, vultures, and frogs is the American cemetery in Normandy. May G-d bless our tens of thousands of fallen heroes who gave their lives to stop Hitler because the French and Belgians could mock us and snicker about us at their al fresco cafés after a hard three-hour day of work but could not stand up to Hitler without us.)
- I despise the European Union because it supports and funds Arab terrorism in the Mideast, funding the “Pay-to-Slay” program of Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), by which the “Palestine Authority” pays lifetime stipends and annuities of some $25,000 per year per family to relatives of convicted terrorists and murderers, even as America’s “Taylor Force Act” bars such payments from the United States. The Palestine Authority Pay-to-Slay program now runs over $300 million a year, comprising more than 8 percent of the terror-dictatorship’s total annual budget. I likewise despise the EU for imposing on its countries the need to admit so many Islamists that the very demographic balance of those countries is swinging, impacting their politics and almost assuring that the coming century will see the end of “Christian Europe” as it is supplanted by a new dominant religion arising in its stead. Moreover, the gutless cowards of Western Europe lack the gonads to stand up to the Iranians and their nuclear program just as they appeased Hitler until they had to beg us to save them. The EU do not pay their proper share of their NATO defense, fail to help defend Ukraine in their own backyard, and even prove unable to stand up to the endless Arab voting against Israel in the United Nations. The EU is a perfect market for Gillette, which just sustained an $8 billion write-down, to run their effeminate #MeToo men’s-razor ads so that EUnuchs can have new options for shaving legs. So I am rooting for Brexit to save England, if none others in the EU, by getting them out of that gutless socialist morass, because my wife and I always enjoyed Upstairs, Downstairs, Downton Abbey, Fawlty Towers, and Keeping Up Appearances.
As I turned to the BBC to watch the results, concerned about what would become of the UK’s Jews, I soon realized that I inadvertently had stumbled right into a moment of downright history. It was like watching the election night returns in 1994 when the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since Daniel and Rebecca Boone fought for Kentucky, or the blessed night of November 8, 2016, when what’s-her-name cried on ABC and Rachel Maddow lost half her smirk on MSNBC as a glass ceiling shattered on Hillary’s yoga mats while Donald J. Trump was declared America’s 45th president. It apparently was an earthquake of an election.
While not one word was spoken about Corbyn’s Jew-hatred through the four hours of BBC election-night TV coverage that I watched — which itself was particularly revealing about prospects for British Jewry’s long-term future there — the reportage and analysis sounded increasingly like an adumbration of the forthcoming November 2020 American presidential elections. Connect the dots:
1. The country is going through a major crisis in health care. They adopted national socialized medicine years ago, and aspects of the system are collapsing. It got to the point that some four-year-old boy was hospitalized but was left to lie on a hallway floor because they lack enough beds. So the father had to cover the child with a blanket. There are demands for increased federal funding of the financially collapsing system, but the government just does not have all the money needed.
2. Corbyn turned the liberal-left Labour Party to advocate an outright extreme socialist platform, akin to the Elizabeth Warren–Bernie Sanders–Green New Deal mindset here. The leftward shift became so pronounced that Brits call it “Corbynism” and “The Corbyn Project.” Along the way, he threw out of Labour dozens of established Labour politicians who refused to go as far left as he, and he replaced them with cronies and sycophants, leaving Labour further left than in recent memory. He promised free care for the elderly, free college and university tuition, lowering the voting age to 16, free broadband, free bus travel for people under 25, a net zero-carbon economy in 10 years, nationalizing key industries, and reducing the work week to 32 hours — and he said he would pay for all of it by “taxing billionaires.” People got increasingly concerned about who really would pay for all the new government handouts, if not by their taxes rising. In the words of former Labour voters explaining to the BBC why they chose to vote for Boris Johnson and others: “I didn’t leave [the Labour Party] — the party left me.” As a result, Labour had its worst election result since 1935.
3. The people of the UK, except for those of Scotland, want to get the heck out of the EU as fast as can be. But Parliament was dithering. The previous Conservatives like David Cameron and Theresa May (whom Veep Daddy Joe Biden often calls “Margaret Thatcher”) turned out to be low-energy conservatives, reminiscent of John Boehner–Paul Ryan leadership, conservatives who were so busy treading softly and lightly that they never got Britain out of the EU. Meanwhile, Labour aimed at blocking Brexit without admitting that they were acting as a Resistance, essentially paying lip service to some aspects of Brexit while saying that they were voting against proposals submitted by the prime minister because they just wanted to make “improvements” on the Brexit plan so as to take the teeth out of it and thereby keep Britain tighter with the EU than the Brexit voters demanded.
4. The voting public decided that they had gotten sick and tired of month after month after month of a do-nothing Parliament that, for all its talk, still had not implemented the Brexit that the public voted for. The sense was: get it done already.
5. Labour had moved so far to the left under Corbyn that they actually ended up losing historic constituencies like “the impenetrable red wall” of blue-collar workers such as coal, steel, and manufacturing constituencies that had gone Labour for more than a century. (Note that the British media appropriately identify the Left with the colo[u]r red and the conservatives with blue.) Analysts repeatedly have noted that Labour took its traditional working-class support base “for granted.” That is, even though their very name suggests that they are the party of the working class, those laborers actually jumped over to the conservatives to vote for Boris Johnson because (i) they hate Corbyn, (ii) they don’t trust socialism, (iii) they want to get the heck out of the EU, and (iv) they love that Boris Johnson, unlike the conservative leadership who preceded him and the other conservatives from the party’s Establishment who are embedded all around him, declared that he has no patience to wait and instead risked losing all power by calling for new elections so that he can get it done now.
6. Many of those who voted conservative had not voted for years, and many others never before in their lives had voted anything but Labour, but they so despised the Labour candidate for prime minister that they decided to vote for Johnson. British people really deeply hate Jeremy Corbyn; he is broadly despised. A Corbyn critic who expected to lose her Labour seat in Stoke North openly blamed Corbyn: “His personal actions have delivered this result for my constituents and for swathes of the country overnight.” Another Labour candidate elsewhere said the campaign was brutal especially because of the “monumental unpopularity” of Corbyn. Several Labour MKs who lost their seats — one after 22 years in Parliament — did not hold back their fury and frustration in their BBC TV interviews as they blamed Corbyn forthrightly for their defeats.
As a result of the above, and more and other things, here are some of the most striking results:
- In Britiain’s Parliament, it takes 326 seats to control a majority.
- In the prior elections, the Conservatives (aka the “Tories”) held 317 seats, and Labour had 262. The Conservatives then cobbled together a “minority government” by getting the Democratic Union Party (DUP), a small conservative party based in Northern Ireland with core support among Northern Irish Protestants, to add their 10 seats to the Tories’ votes on an issue-by-issue basis.
- This time, the Tories emerged with a blockbuster catch of 364 seats, with Labour free-falling to 203. Thus, the Conservatives gained 47 seats, and loves Labour lost 59 seats.
- The Conservatives increased from last time by only a very mild 1.2 percent of the national vote, but Labour plummeted heavily by a whopping 7.8 percent.
- Lesser parties like the Liberal Democrats (LD) and the Scottish National Party (SNP) got a few seats, as they always do, and they picked up much of the lost Labour votes.
- Many past Labour voters who deserted the party voted for the LD and SNP to avoid voting Conservative, but the impact of Labour’s reduced tallies turned seats over to the Tories (much as American Democrats who hated Hillary so much that they voted for Jill Stein in 2016, or who hated Al Gore so much that they voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, ended up thereby contributing to the Republican wins).
- A postscript for advanced students: Scotland is of a mindset completely different from the rest of the UK. Both Labour and the Conservatives lost a boatload of Parliamentary seats to the SNP. The people of Scotland want to remain in the EU, and they seem rather desirous of breaking off from the United Kingdom. Think: Braveheart. Expect demands for a plebiscite on secession.
So many of these factors at play in the British vote parallel American electoral realities. The Democrats of John Kennedy, Daniel Moynihan, and Henry Jackson days are long gone. The party has gone off the deep end, and many Independents explain that they never left the party — the party left them. The Democrat Congress has wasted the nation’s year, failing to do the “People’s Business” but instead dallying over an impeachment that is dead on arrival. The public is disgusted. Many voters who have their concerns about aspects of President Trump’s personality and who may feel comfortable criticizing him in polls will be voting for him and down the Republican line in November because the Democrat alternative will be unfathomable and intolerable. The ethnic Catholic blue-collar working class of the Rust Belt states of the Midwest, often perceived as comprising a Democrat “impenetrable blue wall,” have returned to the Republicans as they did during the years of the Reagan coalition. The same has happened in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Iowa. If Americans value freedom as Brits do, the Dems are chopped meat in November. But thanks to the Trump economy, there should be many fine bartender job openings available for their brightest stars to return to.
