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Election In Britain
The Tories have lost the election in Britain.
Labour, under Keir Stamer, did not win the election. It received less votes than it had received under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and 2019.
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The turnout was low. The overwhelming voter sentiment was 'anything but Tory'. There was no enthusiasms for Labour and Stamer's program.
Labour, under Corbyn, had been a real worker party with socialist tendencies.
The deep state, with the help of the Israeli embassy, had launched a media campaign against Labour alleging that it was hiding anti-semitic tendencies. Corbyn made the huge mistake of not fighting back against it. In the end he was kicked out despite Labour's healthy election results.
Jeremy Corby, no longer in Labour, has been reelected. So have been five MPs who campaigned on a pro-Gaza position.
Stamer is a controversial figure. He seems to have been placed in his position by the deep state. His previous position was the Chief of the Crown Prosecution Service. He had a major role in indicting and incarcerating Julian Assange.
After being installed he has moved Labour to the right. It is now occupying a pro-capitalism center-right position:
“What Keir has done is taken all the left out of the Labour Party,” billionaire businessman John Caudwell, previously a big Tory donor, told the BBC. “He’s come out with a brilliant set of values and principles and ways of growing Britain in complete alignment with my views as a commercial capitalist.”
The Labour Party highlighted his endorsement.
Stamer will hurt the British public more than the Tory did under Sunak.
There will soon be an uproar against him.
I do note expect him to survive for long.
Richard Seymour on the UK elections:
We now have a Labour government for the first time in fourteen years, but its majority is grossly disproportionate to its actual support in the country: 64% of the seats, 34% of the vote: far from the 45% polling indicated at the start of the election. Indeed, Labour’s share of the vote is scarcely different from that obtained in 2019, the ‘worst result in Labour’s history’. The only real difference is the composition of the vote, as it accumulated centrist swing voters in roughly the same degree to which it lost voters from the Left. It was elected on a record low turnout (59%), with plans, the details of which were not disclosed to the public, but without a substantial political offer.
The biggest change in this election was the collapse of the Tory vote and the concomitant rise of the far-right Reform UK, which took four seats with 14% of the vote. This is not as big as the polls suggested, but it is an accomplishment given that Reform has no real party structure or constituency organisation. No doubt the media’s systematic tendency to overrepresent Nigel Farage and his issues in national debates is part of this, but I fear it reflects a real enthusiasm among parts of the public. The Conservatives, with 25% of the vote, were knocked down to 121 seats, but this isn’t the wipe out some polls had anticipated. There is every chance that, as they regroup and elect a new leader, they will veer to the farraginous right and seek a new electoral agreement with Reform. Given that their combined vote was bigger than Labour’s share, that would be significant for 2029.
The Left also did better out of this election than it deserved to, given how little preparatory work it did. Four Greens in parliament, five pro-Palestine independents including Jeremy Corbyn. Leanne Mohamad, a hitherto unknown figure, almost unseated shadow health secretary Wesley Streeting. Labour strongholds like Bethnal Green & Stepney, and Birmingham Yardley, are now marginals. However, the far-right surge will have the stronger immediate effects, both because national media will give it more attention and because Labour will always yield more readily to rightist pressure over immigration than to pressure from the Left.
There are three big issues that were almost totally absent in the campaign fought by the main parties: Gaza, climate change, and infrastructural decay. They all contributed to the fragmentation at the base despite the fact that the election was fought without detailed attention to any of them. Gaza wasn’t an issue for the main parties because they don’t differ substantially on foreign policy. Climate change was nearly absent despite record flooding, extreme heat and the growing economic costs, because no one in power wants to seriously address the scale of adaptations and the speed of change necessary. The conspiracy of silence around the funding requirements just to keep public services working was abetted by a media credulously absorbed by endless trivialities. As Simon Fletcher points out, just to keep public services at their current disastrously poor level would require £142bn extra spending a year by 2030, but this was absent in the campaign.
This is an untenable and volatile situation. Labour is about to govern on the basis of an agenda that hardly anyone understands or wants. Its leadership has little real political nous and its doubtful it can handle the fall-out. His every instinct under pressure is to lean harder to the right. When he lost in Hartlepool after running a dismal, patronising, beer and flags campaign, he surrounded himself with Blairite advisors. When he didn’t win in Uxbridge, he blamed the unpopularity of London mayor Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emissions zone (ULEZ) policy – then Khan went on to win London again, with a bigger share of the vote than Labour got in the city. Most of his tactical blunders have followed from this right-cleaving instinct: barring shadow front-bench ministers from attending picket lines, supporting the siege on Gaza, blocking left candidates in the election campaign by all manner of bureaucratic fixes. It is obvious what he will do when his already negligible popularity plummets, his government is afflicted by crises, his plans for investment don’t deliver, the main opposition in parliament and media comes from the Tory-Farageist Right and his global interlocutors include Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. He will pass new anti-protest laws, round up more immigrants, give police more powers, break a strike, make it illegal to sleep rough, impose an emergency law, join another war – and all of this will strike the incurably moronic lumpencommentariat as terribly clever, ruthless, decisive, winning.
So, enjoy the Tory demolition job as much as you can for now: there’s work to be done.
Posted by: JAB | Jul 5 2024 16:36 utc | 54
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