Britain voluntarily steps deeper into the morass
/POSTED ON JULY 5, 2024 BY JOHN HINDERAKER
THE U.K. BLOWOUT: MARK STEYN’S VIEW
Mark Steyn comments on yesterday’s U.K. election ….
Across the United Kingdom almost every constituency voted for lefties of various stripes – not just victorious Labour lefties, but also Scots nationalist lefties, Irish republican lefties, eco-lefties, Islamo-lefties and, of course, duplicitous pseudo-conservative lefties: you can get it in any colour as long as it’s red. So, if you’re one of those Britons concerned about, say, transformative mass migration or the right to freedom of speech, things are going to spend the next few years getting worse before there is any prospect of course correction.
“Red” in the U.K. is blue in America.
This is not 1997, and Starmer is not Blair. Sir Keir has pulled off what the commentators are calling a “loveless landslide”. He was the beneficiary, in England, of the implosion of the Conservative Party and, north of the border, of the implosion of the Scottish National Party – both entirely deserved. Yet Labour’s share of the vote is five points lower than Jeremy Corbyn’s supposedly humiliating defeat in 2017: in fact, it is the lowest share of the vote for any majority-winning party ever – just thirty-five per cent.
Attention, Dan Quigley and friends:
The Conservative Party’s fundamental problem is that it stopped being conservative:
Effective politicians don’t “move towards the centre”; they move the centre towards them, as Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan did. Instead, the Conservatives squandered fourteen years playing on the left’s terms, and the result is a political culture that has never been less conservative, and a land where nothing works, from the creepily fetishised National Health Service to the wanker constabulary.
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Mrs Thatcher’s famous line was: First you win the argument; then you win the election. The “Conservative” party spent fourteen years not making any conservative arguments, and thus last night was entirely predictable.