Posted on 05/14/2021 5:32:45 AM PDT by Kaslin
Five years ago next month, British voters, in the largest turnout ever, voted to leave the European Union by a 52% to 48% margin. It was an unexpected result, and a harbinger of Donald Trump's even more unexpected election as president five months later.
In both countries, key votes were cast by white non-college graduates. In the U.S., blue-collar Democrats in Pennsylvania and the Midwest switched to Trump. In the U.K., working-class voters long loyal to Labour joined leading Conservatives in supporting Brexit.
Supposedly ascendant coalitions of metropolitan professionals and racial and ethnic minorities were, to their self-righteous rage, defeated. Metro London, with 20 percent of the nation's votes, voted 60 percent to 40 percent to remain in the European Union. But the rest of England, 70 percent of the U.K., voted 57 percent to 43 percent for Brexit.
Five years on, the realignments that produced 2016's surprise have continued, with seemingly different results in the two countries. Here, Democrats regained the White House in 2020 and won majorities in both houses of Congress.
In Britain, the Labour Party, split between metropolitan leaders and working-class Brexit voters, suffered its worst defeat in decades in 2019 and did even worse in local elections last week. It looks to be in danger of joining the old socialist parties of France and Germany as extinct major parties.
But the differences can be overstated. Joe Biden's Democrats have only tenuous majorities and face increasing tensions between woke leadership and historic constituencies on important issues such as crime and immigration.
In Britain, such tension has resulted in Labour losing dozens of House of Commons seats in its "Red Wall" -- the traditional textile, steel and coal mining communities in the Midlands and north of England. Conservatives won more than 40 Red Wall seats as Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservatives won 365 seats to Labour's 202 in December 2019.
After that, Labour ditched its London-based leftist party leader Jeremy Corbyn for London-based barrister Keir Starmer. Like long-serving (1997-2007) Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, Starmer is moderate on economics, but he joined Blair in trying to overturn the Brexit referendum and proudly took a knee in support of Black Lives Matter.
Starmer's stances won him record support, 65% and 70%, respectively, in his home constituency of Holborn and St. Pancras (you've been there if you've ever been a tourist in London). But he foolishly chose an anti-Brexit candidate in last week's special election for the Red Wall seat of Hartlepool, a 70% pro-Brexit port on the North Sea (which few American tourists have ever seen).
Hartlepool was a Labour seat since its creation, won by Blair consigliere Peter Mandelson with 61 percent and 59 percent in 1997 and 2001, respectively, before he was European Union commissioner from 2004 to 2008. Last week, Hartlepool voted for Conservative over Labour by 52% to 29%.
"Labour," writes Telegraph columnist Janet Daley, "has not just, as everybody keeps saying, 'lost touch' with its traditional supporters: it now holds them in open and quite febrile contempt." And she adds some historical perspective: "What is the point of a political party that began as the voice of the industrial proletariat when there is no more industrial proletariat?"
The Labour Party was founded in 1900 as the political arm of labor unions at a time when the working class was the majority of the electorate. Continental parties with similar heritages are in even more trouble. France's Socialist Party, which won the presidency in 2012, got 6 percent of the vote in 2017. Germany's Social Democratic Party, founded in 1863, has now fallen to a distant third place in polling for next September's election, with the Green Party emerging as the chief competitor of the governing CDU/CSU.
It may be natural that, as the working class grows smaller and high-education cultural leftists more numerous, an environmental and anti-nationalist left will replace socialists as major parties in parliamentary systems or as dominant forces in the left party in two-party systems like ours.
One lingering problem: Working-class-dominated parties have concrete goals relevant to large constituencies. But high-education- and class-dominated parties tend to fixate on the abstract aimed at increasingly microscopic groups (transgender rights) or virtue signaling their own superiority over the benighted masses ("systemic racism").
Neither is a winning tactic in a Britain, which "has fundamentally shifted" and "become a more open society," as its multiracial Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities recently concluded, or in an America, which elected a black congressman from a white-majority district in 1972 and a black president in 2008 and 2012.
Seems to me that the UK has the same problems we do:
Two parties that exist to give voters the illusion of choice.
And a Deep State in control of the voting process.
Yep.
Chesterton wrote:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.
We have lost our freedom. All the rest is the window dressing of the political class whose job it is to stop us from causing any trouble to oligarchs and their corporations.
The UK has similar voting machines, too, equipped with similar problematic software.
NOPE.
“Below are links to the websites of the political parties whose representatives were successful in elections to the House of Commons at the 2019 General Election:
Alliance Party
Conservative Party
Co-operative Party
Democratic Unionist Party
Green Party
Labour Party
Liberal Democrats
Plaid Cymru
Scottish National Party
Sinn Féin
Social Democratic and Labour Party”
https://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/members/parties/
Ideological differences are actually worse in the UK, they actually have THREE major parties, ALL of whom think socialized medicine for all, LGBTQ fascists dictating social norms, and unlimited Islamic immigration are awesome. There's very little difference in the party "manifestos" that Labour, Tories, and Lib Dems run on. Even our worst RINOs don't take the positions the so-called "Conservatives" take in the UK. For example, "Conservative" Teresa May wouldn't lift a finger to acknowledge a Christian holy season like Lent, but she loudly and publicly promoted Ramadan every year.
The UK hasn't had a "Conservative" leader who is an actual conservative since Margaret Thatcher left office.
Bless your heart, you think the letter after the name still means something!
Yet the policies are still the same no matter who’s in power....
Funny how that works, isn’t it.
Party means bugger all any more.
Is that why President Trump’s administration was ar better in every way than any other contemporary administration?
Just keep living in far left fantasyland.
For some local elections they do but all members of Parliament are elected by paper ballots hand counted in public
There are no voting machines for election to the UK Parliament (general elections). Traditional hand-completed paper ballots only.
Thanks! Well, this may explain the London results...
Thanks to you, too! :-)
See my reply #14.
Looks like your Deep State is doing its best to rectify the paper problem.
The Lib Dems are like...in-between a major and minor party.
Alliance, minor NI only party.
Co-operative Party, an arm of Labour who’s MPs are all Labour MPs.
DUP, NI only
Green, minor party with 1 MP
Plaid, Welsh only
SNP, major party but in Scotland only,
Sinn Fein and SDLP, NI only
In England it’s pretty much a two and half (Lib Dems) party system.
And no results till they’ve done counting in that seat and unless there is a delay they have them all counted by morning after the election, even the close ones, they do recounts immediately.
Granted the size of the constituencies compared to congressional districts has something to do with that, but still, impressive.
Hartlepool had a strong Brexit party candidate or else it would have gone Tory by a wide margin in 2019.
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