The future of Britain

Well, here we are. The snap general election of 2019 has came and gone, and it has delivered us a shocking majority for the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party won with 358 seats, a majority of 78, while his main rival, the Labour Party under Jeremy Party, has taken a massive defeat with 203 seats. Apparently this is a historic situation. Boris’ majority is being compared to the majority that Thatcher gained in 1987. With 358 seats next to Thatcher’s 397, it’s not quite there, but it has still been a long time since the Tories came close to that, so I oppose it’s an apt comparison. Labour, meanwhile, appear to have suffered their biggest defeat ever, getting even fewer seats than Michael Foot did in 1983.

What we’re seeing is a moment of unprecedented failure for the Labour Party, and for the left who threw all their weight behind him even though there were no radical socialist credentials behind him (despite what the media and “the left” would have you believe). And to underscore this failure, just consider how many old Labour seats fell to the Tories. Wrexham, a seat that has never been held by the Tories in its entire history, has voted for the Tories. Blackpool South, a which was held by Labour since 1992, went back into Tory hands. Vale of Clwyd, a consistently pro-Labour seat, was won by the Tories. Clywd South, which supported Labour since its creation, voted Tory. Stoke-on-Trent Central always voted Labour until this year, when it was won by the Tories. Sedgefield had been in Labour hands since 1935, but has now voted for the Tories. Bishop Auckland, a seat that never voted Tory until this year, voted Tory. After just over a century of Labour dominance, Workington changed hands to the Tories. Blyth Valley, which has been a Labour stronghold since its creation in 1950, voted Tory. Same with North West Durham, having never voted Tory until this year. Even Dennis Skinner lost his seat; Bolsover had voted Labour since its creation, and has now voted Tory.

Now just think about that for a moment. The Conservatives manage to win control of seats that had opposed their rule for generations, in some cases well over a century. To make it even more poignant, consider how just a few weeks ago The Guardian was shitting on “the Workington Man” as an irrelevant right-wing caricature, and then the people of Workington decided to vote Conservative. That’s just one out of a variety of examples demonstrating what happens when you array yourself against the “reactionary” working class just to satiate your liberal narcissism.

And speaking of liberalism, that Remain Alliance that I kept hearing about all month? It proved to be an abysmal failure. The Greens got only one seat in Parliament, Plaid Cymru was unaffected by the Tory wipeout and it also hasn’t managed to change their gains in Wales, and the Lib Dems not only lost a considerable number of seats (including all of their Welsh seats), their own leader Jo Swinson lost her some seat in Dunbartonshire East to the SNP. The best the Lib Dems got out of this election was unseating Zac Goldsmith, but that’s honestly overshadowed by Jo Swinson losing her seat and (for my money) their complete and total annihilation in Wales. In fact, after losing her seat Jo Swinson announced her intention to quit her role as leader of the Liberal Democrats, after only having been leader since July. It was just that bad for the Lib Dems. The only liberals who made any real gains yesterday were the SNP, and they weren’t even part of the Remain Alliance for some reason, even though they basically wanted the same thing as the Greens and the Lib Dems! And true to the narcissitic condition of liberalism, the Remain Alliance will never admit that their tactics didn’t work and weren’t going to work. Several Remainers took to blaming Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party for refusing to join their alliance and refusing to call for Brexit to be cancelled. One even described Labour’s attitude as “the narcissism of small differences” – yes, “small differences” such as the difference between social democracy and laissez-faire liberalism and the difference between “maybe we’ll do Brexit but I’d prefer that we stay neutral on the subject” or “fuck Brexit and fuck you if you voted Leave”. The fact is that the Lib Dems were never going to win this one, and I’m sure they knew that already which is why they thought that they were going to have a collection of other parties take Tory and Labour seats by storm, but that never worked out either because as it turns out almost nobody likes them.

Of course, their polar opposite in the Brexit Party didn’t win out either. In fact the Brexit Party won no seats in Parliament despite a political climate characterized by Brexit stagnation and delay, mistrust of the establishment and media, weariness of mainstream politics and skepticism over Boris Johnson’s deal and its efficacy, and of course the immigration issue. That surprised me a little because I thought they would win a few seats in Wales, but I suppose that’s what you get with a party that only exists as a personality cult for Nigel Farage.

I think by now I should address one giant red elephant in the room: the Labour Party. I already talked about just how badly they lost, and how this is probably the worst defeat for them that I’ve ever seen, but that’s not really saying much is it? It’s still not properly dealing with the rammifications for the Labour Party, and why they lost out. But before we get that, there’s one thing worth pointing out.

Remember in 2017 when the Conservatives narrowly lost their majority in parliament, and then had to enlist the DUP to form a coalition with them in order to meet the number of seats needed to form a majority? Remember how, in the last two years, the Tories found themselves greatly limited in their ability to carry out their plans for Brexit, until finally they got cornered by a minority government? Now the Tories have so great a majority that they don’t need the DUP anymore, and they’ll have an easier time passing through legislation in parliament. Of course the DUP lost out anyway yesterday: although they managed to retain a majority among Northern Irish parties, they also lost a significant amount of votes, and will have to contend with Sinn Fein in parliament as republicans and liberals gain some votes.

In a broad sense, this is what we’re left with. This is our future for the next five years. A Tory government under the leadership of Boris fucking Johnson, presumably with a harder conservative bent than the previous government, with the biggest majority it’s had in years, meaning almost a free hand to pass through whatever legislation it wants. Maybe we’ll finally leave the European Union, maybe, but we’ll also have to live through a nightmarish phase of neoliberal acceleration as public services are put in greater and greater danger, and the threat of the NHS being privatized under US ownership looms large over the national psyche. Of course Boris assures us that the NHS will never be sold, and he even claims that he wants to end austerity, but I don’t think we can trust him to live up to that. On that note I would say now more than ever that Americans should concentrate all of their efforts on making sure Bernie Sanders becomes President of the United States, because that just might be the only thing that can turn this around (at the very least it might save the NHS from becoming private property of the US). But in any case, we now have an overwhelming Tory majority, a massive beating for the Labour Party, and in my opinion the blame lies squarely on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. I know this must be a heretical opinion for someone on the left, considering that all the so-called socialists I know were busy shilling for Corbyn and his Labour Party and are now busy blaming everyone except themselves for their defeat, but this is the inescapable truth of the matter.

A common thread among Labour pundits and politicians when responding to the exit poll, when they weren’t shitting on the masses, was effectively to blame Brexit. Or, to put it more fairly, Labour supporters are of the assessment that they have failed to change the focus of the election towards issues other than Brexit. They tried to make this election about anything other than Brexit, but they failed because the entire election has been defined by Brexit to begin with. The only reason the election was even called is because it was the only way to get out of a minority government impasse that was created by a series of government defeats and failures related principally to the subject of making Brexit happen. There is no way around this. And so naturally the election gets referred to as “The Brexit Election” and parties who took the wrong side on Brexit lost out. In Scotland, this would of course have meant the side of remaining in the EU (or pehaps in Scotland it all came down to the issue of independence), but in the rest of the country the message was clear: if you want Britain to Remain in the EU, you won’t prosper in this election.

Now as much as people would complain that Labour were too Remainer, their actual problem is that they were too neutral. Their whole stance was that they would declare a second referendum and remain neutral on the subject. Compare that to the last election, in which they were prepared to accept the result of the referendum, and gained more seats partly because of it. Now as bad as Labour did in this election, just look at how the Remain Alliance went nowhere. In many seats, the Brexit Party actually came in third place, or the Greens came in last behind the Brexit Party. Nationally speaking, the Lib Dems came in fourth place – not third, not second, fourth, and the Greens got overshadowed by the Northern Irish parties. The Remainer surge never happened, none of the Remainer parties got more than 50 seats. So if we accept that the problem is being on the wrong side of Brexit, then logically it follows that Labour would have done better if they had just taken up the side of leaving the EU, which they were more than happy to do in the past until New Labour arrived on the scene.

But of course, there really were more issues in the background than just Brexit for the Labour Party. Their brand of bourgeois identity politics put them out of touch with the working class, a phenomenon that was exemplified by the fact that they were the only party on the ballot to publish a “Race and Faith” manifesto, the title of which honestly reads like the motto of the Traditionalist Worker Party (“Faith, Family and Folk”), and the fact that they were the only party who was so interested in us lashing ourselves about our colonial past. The working class doesn’t give a shit about this, and indeed nor many of the other countries who were once colonial powers. Hell, I’m pretty sure France, Italy and Greece don’t care either, so why is it just the US and the UK that give so much of a shit? And then there’s the fact that so much of Labour’s economic policy is predicated on borrowing. Not even good old-fashioned expropriation of the assets of the rich. Just borrowing. This is supossed to be the class war Labour fights on behalf of the proletariat? And then there’s the anti-semitism problem, and a report detailing many of the allowances given to anti-semites and anti-semitism, and how basically the Labour party was just the equivalent of /pol/ pretending to be woke progressives. Jeremy Corbyn had a weak defence against anti-semitism accusations. All he could do was say “anti-semitism has no place in the Labour Party”, but this is just a platitude unless you actually hit back and say “I’m not an anti-semite and I’m gonna tell you why right now”. Labour supporters had to do some of that for them, and even then all they could do is engage in rapacious denial of reality coupled with “muh evil Zionists!”. And then there’s the fact that there was a video where somebody managed to trick Labour supporters into tolerating or embracing anti-semitic stances, and another where they harrassed Jewish activists. And then there’s just the fact that Corbyn is physically incapable of answering the serious questions, as his interview with Andrew Neill demonstrated decisively. And whenever he and his supporters are asked about the accusations of sympathizing with terrorists, they run away and never attempt to refute the arguments.

The bottom line here is that the Labour Party failed because they were a shitty, incomptent, cultish party drenched irreparably in hubris, and now all their supporters can do is blame the media for talking about all the bad things about them and the masses for wanting Brexit more than they want a confused, arrogant and somewhat bigoted party that thinks bourgeois reformist bribery is the new socialism. Their defeat stands as a repudiation of the identity politcs praxis found in many corners of the left, and while I should be celebrating that, all I have to say right now is that I will never, ever forgive Labour for giving us Tory dominance for another five years. Only the wholesale reform of the left, and perhaps a Bernie victory in the US, can save us now.

We’re having a new election in December

So, after all the parliamentary kabuki theatre surrounding Brexit, which has continued to intensify under Boris Johnson’s tenure, we now have a new snap election set to take place on December 12th. This comes after a motion for an early pre-Christmas election passed by a majority of 438 to 20, making for an overwhelming and unanimous parliamentary majority if you ever needed to be sure of one. It also comes more than two years after Theresa May called a snap election in June 2017, in an attempt to consolidate an absolute Conservative Party majority in parliament that would allow her to do almost whatever she wanted. And to be quite honest, that might not be a good sign for Boris Johnson.

You might think that the Conservatives are going to be on track to victory in the coming election given that, despite the uniformly awful performance of the Conservative Party within the last year, under both Theresay May and Boris Johnson, the Conservatives have managed to keep a steady lead in the polls – I believe last time I checked it was somewhere around 40%. But consider the fact that, before the 2017 election, opinion polls showed the Conservatives at a similar or often even higher lead, even as Theresa May’s campaign proved to be exceptionally poor (her unwillingness to attend the debates being easily the worst thing about it). In addition, Boris’ thus far short term as Prime Minister has already yielded a spectacular record of failure, with numerous defeats in parliament and most notably including him being forced to break his key promises: that he would not delay Brexit and that we would leave the European Union by October 31st. So although right now the opinion polls still have the Conservatives in the lead, I honestly have a hard time imagining that . This does not guarantee a Labour victory, however, and I think Jeremy Corbyn is going to need to work his ass off in order to get Labour the most votes. I think what will most likely happen is that the Tories will somehow manage to get the most votes but we’ll have a hung parliament again, and it is going to be really wild time finding out what sort of coalition he has to form in order to retain power. Will it be with the Lib Dems of all people, despite their ostensible commitment to opposing a No Deal Brexit? Will the Tories and the DUP have enough MPs to somehow restore the status quo? Will the impossible happen and Labour enters government again? Only time will tell.

In either case, I think it’s clear that this new election is the only way at present to resolve the parliamentary impasse that has been characterizing the Brexit negotiations for the last two years, and it was inevitable. Now, I remarked last month that the Labour Party were deeply afraid of this prospect because they kept opposing the idea of a new election on the grounds that they fear getting roundly defeated and a No Deal Brexit would be all but assured. But it seems that they’ve changed their mind. Confident that a No Deal Brexit will be off the table, Labour have decided that now they’re all for a new election, and they’re prepared to contest the Tories for power. I’m not confident about supporting them, in fact I’m not confident about supporting any party at all, but who knows, maybe the new campaigns and manifestos will wow me this time, or maybe they won’t. Either way, for me it’s just a matter of sitting back and seeing whether or not someone actually manages to defeat the Tories. It’s a long shot, but I feel like it’s so hard to predict what’s coming that almost anything can happen, except of course for the return of UKIP.

The proroguing of parliament is (in large part) a nothingburger

Much has been made of Boris Johnson’s decision last week to suspend parliament until October 14th if MPs attempt to block a no-deal Brexit, and, to be honest, for a while I’ve had very little say on the matter. But there is something that, perhaps, is worth saying on the subject. Though, to be honest, the best way to summarize my own thoughts on the subject is simply this: I don’t care, or at least I can’t say I care too much.

A lot of liberals and the left (much as I dread to call them the left) in my country have rallied behind the sentiment the proroguing of parliament represents a blatant attack on the British democratic system, and to be fair the fact that Boris Johnson invoked the monarchy in order to do so would seem to be the greatest symbol of this, and as a republican I do have big problems with the fact that we have to have our affairs decided by a monarch rather than, say, a president. But, in the long run, this critique is riddled with problems, for it is in practice hypocritical. Prorogation is certainly not a normal process, but there are a few instances of it having happened before, and to relatively little fanfare. Clement Atlee, the prime minister under whom our beloved NHS was established, prorogued parliament in 1948 in order to pass the Parliament Act of 1949, which was intended to curtail the power of the Lords over the government. And most crucially, in 1997, John Major, who is now one of the leading opponents of Boris Johnson’s prorogation, himself prorogued parliament in order to avoid a debate over the cash-for-questions scandal and a report related to the subject. But now that Boris Johnson is proroguing parliament in order to enable a no-deal Brexit without being impeded by opposition, let alone with royal support, this is being treated as a threat to democracy, on the grounds that the will of parliament (not the people, conspicuously enough) is being denied. Really? This is what we’re running with?

Furthermore, to say that democracy is under attack is a rather foolish point to make because by now the idea that we have a democracy has been shown to be an illusion. Just the fact that a monarch can be invoked to exercize authority over popular government should already tell you that our democracy is hollow, fake and even fraudulent in character, but the fact that our democratic will as regards the original 2016 referendum can be so brazenly disregarded by our elected officials in the first place, namely the MPs who have fought to cancel Brexit since 2016, tells you that our democracy is a joke. And really, let’s touch on that. Why are the same people who argued that the democratic will of the British people should be negated because the people were misinformed by racist propaganda, thus bringing democratic exercise under the heel of the elite, now suddenly whining that democracy is being undermined by the elite? They never cared about democracy to begin with, they didn’t want it as long as it meant people voting against their desires, and now they’re going to tell us how much they care about democracy? What kind of fool do you take me for?

So in sum, I don’t care about the prorogation of parliament as it stands.

 

On the European Parliament election results

While I did not participate in the European Parliament elections, the results have certainly proven to be interesting to watch. This post will be a reflection of what I have seen of the results and what they mean in a broad sense.

 

The British results

Most of the country appears to have voted for the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage’s right wing pet party, with the BXP dominating most of the twelve regions in decisive fashion. It was incredible, a mixture of awe and terror, to behold this upstart right-libertarian party just devour whole constituencies, in many cases replacing the Conservative and UKIP vote. However it would be wrong to say that the Brexit Party was the only party to be making out like bandits in the election. For the first time in ages, the Liberal Democrats, having positioned themselves as the anti-Brexit party, have surged to second place in the overall results, and they’ve managed to come first in London (which I’m sure is really no surprise because London is liberal as all hell). The Greens have also had some modest success; while they didn’t beat the Labour Party, they managed to surge past the Conservatives in fourth place. In Scotland, the SNP dominates basically all of Scotland except for the Orkney Islands (which went to the Liberal Democrats), with the Brexit Party likely to stick behind them. In Wales, Brexit Party dominates the scene, as I predicted, but with Plaid Cymru in second place, placing the traditionally dominant Labour Party in third place, a new low for the party all things considered. The Conservative Party across the country has had a horrific night, getting wiped out almost everywhere, with only 4 Tory MEPs (including arch-capitalist and arch-Brexiteer Daniel Hannan) remaining. The Labour Party, while it has managed to hold out, coming second place in North West England for instance, the general trend is a picture of defeat, with many on the liberal faction of the party calling for Jeremy Corbyn to resign as Labour leader. The real losers, besides the Tories, might just be Change UK, having utterly failed to capitalize on the Remain vote, often falling below even UKIP (a party that has only managed to be marginalized further and had all of its MEPs wiped out, not to mention the party leader Gerard Batten losing his seat), and are now considering folding into the Liberal Democrats (where, to be honest, all of its MPs belong).

So what does all of this mean for me? What can we take from any of this? Well we can start with the obvious observation that this showing was a victory for parties that were unambigious in their stance on Brexit, whether pro-Remain or pro-Leave. The Conservative Party failed to deliver to Brexit, and have persisted in a quagmire of indecisiveness, insecurity and compromise. As such, they have paid the price for their weakness. The Labour Party too has been murky on the subject: while many in the party are in favour of remaining in the EU, Jeremy Corbyn has often held an indecisive position, and it is not clear whether he actually supports or opposes the EU – really, it’s only clear that he wants there to be a new general election. The Brexit Pary and the Liberal Democrats, by contrast, offer decisive positions – with the Brexit Party fighting to ensure that leave the EU, deal or no deal, and the Liberal Democrats fighting to try and stop Brexit entirely. The Greens too are unambiguously pro-EU, and so are the SNP and Plaid Cymru. There’s another lesson to take from this though. In the run up to the elections, many right-wing political candidates have had milkshakes thrown at them by left-leaning protesters, who have since taken to rallying behind milkshakes as a symbol of anti-fascist praxis. While it is to me hilarious and ridiculous that the right wing have decided that getting sploshed with milkshakes is a form of fascistic political violence, it once again shows how inept the left is, considering their performative antics have failed to prevent the surge of right-wing populism in the UK. The only thing they can gloat about it is the fact that Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), Markus Meechan (Count Dankula) and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) failed to win any seats, but if you believed they were going to make any serious gains in politics then you are frankly too dumb to be talking about politics. Benjamin was UKIP’s second candidate for the South West, so he had no chance of winning anyway, and Dankula was UKIP’s fourth candidate for Scotland, which means he had even less chance of winning than Benjamin, and Robinson conceded his campaign and would have been steamrolled anyway as an independent (in fact, he lost to Change UK). Progressives who take credit for “stopping hate” while their larping antics failed to defeat the Brexit Party are worthy of my contempt.

This in my mind underscores just how shallow and cynical the British media really is. In the run up to these elections, the media hyped up the UKIP candidacy of Carl Benjamin over his past trolling of Jess Philips and his aggressive conservative stance against all of the parties except UKIP, running multiple stories about his stupid comments, and Carl in turn thought he could use this to his advantage in order to get people to talk about him so that he might get elected, but it never happened because the party wasn’t going to run him as one of their top candidates. They similarly hyped up the pathetic Change UK party, who ended up doing worse than UKIP. They paid a fair bit of attention to Tommy Robinson, whose only life force in British politics comes from that money-grubbing Rebel Media boss Ezra Levant. The British media strikes me as being interminably obsessed with losers, which will probably go along way to explaining why they ultimately sympathize with the Remain faction of politics.

There is also something to take from the thorough routing of the Tories besides their indecisiveness: Nigel Farage now poses an existential threat to the Tories, at their own admittance, and this to me opens the possibility that the Conservatives might seek to rush the leadership contest so that they can usher in a hardline Brexiteer Prime Minister in order to nip him in the bud. The specter of the Brexit Party presaged the resignation of Theresa May just a few days ago, so it seems reasonable to predict that Farage’s European Parliament election victory will lend itself to a more erratic leadership contest as well, because the Tories cannot afford to waste any more time than they already have on the Brexit issue – especially if they don’t want to face the prospect of an early election.

In general, I think people are overlooking just how much of a strong right-wing victory this was for Britain. I don’t just say this because of the Brexit Party, but because the Liberal Democrats are not the champions of the left that the Remainers want them to be. Considering the fact that the Liberal Democrats support neoliberal privatization policies and signed off on Tory austerity and never looked back, whether you’re a Leaver or a Remainer, the right won big.

There are several things that bother me about some of the reactions to the results. Jeremy Corbyn remarked that the results amounted to a proxy second referendum, yet he then extrapolated from this assessment that we should be discussing a second referendum, or a general election, in the hopes of perhaps changing the outcome of our exit. Surely, if this really was a proxy referndum, the Leave side appears to have emerged triumphant through decisive Brexit Party domination. But such delusion is not confined to Jeremy Corbyn. The Remainer faction in general appears to be trying to spin the European Parliament election results in favour of a Remain outcome on the grounds that adding up all the Remain parties would lead to a mandate for the Remain parties and thus remaining in the EU. The major problem with this, besides the fact that that’s not how politics works, is that the Remain faction can’t even agree if Labour is a part of their dream coalition, especially with Corbyn’s seemingly non-comittal stance and the fact that Labour doesn’t seem to want to drop their ambiguous commitment to the referendum result. How then, does any Remain coalition pan out? It is simply nonsensical to think that you can simply merge all the Remain parties who still lost the European parliament elections in order to turn them into the winner, especially when you consider that, if you count Labour and the Conservatives on account of the fact that they want Brexit just that they want one with a deal, you ultimately get a pro-Brexit majority rather than anti-Brexit majority. It strikes me as the Remain side obsessing with the idea of minoritarian governance. In Wales, I would say the most delusional figure in politics is Adam Price, the leader of Plaid Cymru, who went air to declare victory for the Remain faction in Wales moments after the Brexit Party won that victory with 2 MEPs and 32% of the vote share. He, more than anything else, is why you will not find me supporting Plaid Cymru despite my desire for Welsh independence.

Also, the people who are clamoring for a new general election appear to be blissfully unaware of what that might mean for the Brexit Party. If we call a new election and we still haven’t left the European Union, this creates the opportunity for them to campaign on that front in order to try and repeat their success in the European Parliament elections. Nigel Farage has confirmed that the Brexit Party will fight the next general election in such circumstances, and if their recent success is any indication they could pose a real threat to other parties. The Conservatives would almost certainly lose out in such an election, they would become irrelevant, but where Labour supporters might think this presents an easy road to power, it may actually leave space for Farage’s party to gobble up the conservative vote just like it did before, presenting a real obstacle to any left-wing party hoping for the top job.

As I write this, it is worth establishing that the only thing not accounted for is the Northern Ireland results, but seeing as they are going to take forever to declare due to their stupid religious custom of not counting votes on Sundays it seems pointless to wait for them. It does appear, however, that the liberal Alliance party may be on track to win, suggesting that the Remain side will have Northern Ireland.

 

The European results

Whereas the UK paints a decisive picture, the European continent presents a much more variagated and complex picture. While the EPP (the “center-right” pro-European bloc) remains dominant in the European Parliament, it will struggle to form a coalition as the traditional parties collapse in various countries. Indeed, last night’s election results have seen a rise for the liberals, greens, and nationalists in various parts of Europe.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party (formerly known as Front National) achieved victory over Macron’s En Marche by a narrow majority, scoring 23% of the vote share (as opposed to En Marche’s 22%) and electing 15 MEPs, inspiring Le Pen to declare the results a victory for the French people and demand Macron to dissolve the French Parliament. In Italy, Lega Nord are the clear winners in about the same way the Brexit Party was here in the UK, achieving 34% of the vote share and 29 MEPs. In Belgium, two Flemish nationalist parties lead the scene, with the New Flemish Alliance leading a majority of 13.5% of the vote share and Vlaams Belang following them with 11.5%. In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party leads an utterly decisive majority of 52.3%, which to be fair is to be taken with a grain of salt considering Hungary is barely a democracy. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party have a majority of 45.6%. These represent major victories for the nationalist/populist right in Europe. Bulgaria and the Czech Republic are strange cases in this trend where the dominant parties, GERB and ANO 2011 respectively, are populist parties but are pro-EU, and so while they might be counted as populists they can’t be counted among the more radical, nationalist contingents of the right.

On the other hand, the trend of nationalism we are seeing is not universal. In some countries, the left-leaning bloc have made major victories. In Spain, the social-democratic PSOE won a clear majority of 32.8% of the vote share. In Portugal, the “Socialist” Party (another social-democratic party) won 33.4%. In the Netherlands, the social-democratic Labour Party won a majority of 18.9%, a victory that was accompanied with the collapse of the nationalist PVV vote. In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party won a majority of 23.6%. In Malta, the Labour Party won a decisive 54.3% share. Across Europe, however, it seems that the status quo conservative-liberalism has triumphed once more. In Finland, Ireland, Greece, Austria, Luxembourg, Germany, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia, Romania, Cyprus, Slovenia and Denmark, conservative-liberal “centrist” parties have retained a majority and ensured that the EPP retains dominance, albeit with a reduced majority. However, their leftward opponents have been growing. In Cyprus, it is my pleasure to note that the communists have come in second place, with the Progressive Party of Working People (who are Marxist-Leninist) took 27.5% of the vote share. In Denmark, the Social Democrats also came in second with 21.5% of the vote share. In Greece, Syriza held on in second place at 23.7%, and the Communist Party is in fourth place and is one of the only communist parties to have any seats in the European Parliament. In Germany, the Social Democrats came in third place, taking 15.8% of the vote share. In Croatia, the Social Democrats came in second place with 18.7%. In Austria, the SPO came in second with 23.4%. In Slovenia, the Social Democrats came in second place with 18.7%. In Belgium, the Social Democrats came in third place with 10.5%. In Romania, the Social Democrats are in second place with 23.4%. In Estonia, the Social Democrats came in second place with 23.3%. In Latvia, the social-democratic Harmony party came in second place with 17.5%. In Lithuania, the Social Democrats came in second place with 15.9%. In Bulgaria, the social-democratic Bulgarian Socialist Party is in second place with 24.4%.

This election is also noteworthy for the emergence of green parties, which have taken substantial shares of the vote in Parliament. In Germany, the Greens came in second place and took 20.5% . In Finland as well, the Green League came in second place, taking 16% of the vote share. In France, Europe Ecology came in third place with 13.5% of the vote share. In Denmark, the Socialist People’s Party, which is aligned with the European Green bloc, came in third place with 13.2% of the vote share. In Luxembourg, the Greens came in third place with 18.9% of the vote share. In Ireland, the Green party is in third place with 15% of the vote share. In Austria, the Greens came in fourth place with 14% of the vote share. In Sweden, the Green Party came in fourth place with 11.4% of the vote share. It is worth noting also that the Scottish Nationalist Party is aligned with the Greens in Europe bloc, which means that their dominance over Scotland during the British vote means that the green bloc can increase its hold in the European Parliament. More broadly, the growth of the Green Party in the rest of the UK, where they have won 11.1% of the vote share and a record 7 MEPs, seems to bolster perceptions of a rising “green wave” throughout Europe. Lithuania is a strange case in that their Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union is a green party but they are also a “centre-right” agrarian party and are not aligned with the European Green bloc. Nonetheless, they are notable for taking third place with 12.6% of the vote share.

However, in places where the nationalists didn’t win, they still managed to get a fairly large share of the vote. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats came in third place with 15.4%. In Germany, the AfD are in fourth place with 11%. In Latvia the National Alliance, which is a patently alt-right party, came third place with 16.4%. In Finland, the True Finns (who came second in the general election last month) came in fourth place with 13.8%. In Cyprus, the nationalist Democratic Party came in third place with 13.8%, followed by the nationalist social-democratic Movement for Social Democracy. In Austria, the Freedom Party of Austria came in third place with 17.2% of the vote share. In Slovakia, most horrifyingly, the neo-fascist Kotleba party came in third place with about 12% of the vote share. 

So what does all of this mean? It means, quite simply, that while the establishment has secured its dominance it will have to deal with three growing currents. The social democrats present one of the larger challenges to the liberal-conservative establishment, being the second largest bloc throughout most of Europe and victorious in some major countries. The greens will likely be the subject of attempts at coalition, with major parties already courting the German greens and possibily striving to court Green party voters. This development is likely to be taken as a sign that, throughout the continent, the threat of man-made climate change has emerged as one of the primary issues of the elections, and that Europeans likely want to push for reform in the EU on this subject. The nationalists/populists may prove to be a threat with much of the Western and Eastern bloc under their influence, especially now that the Brexit Party has emerged as a big part of the movement having secured much of the British seats. This will be very important for us because it could effect how quickly we leave the European Union and whether or not we get a deal from it, and it might be important for Europe as well because, while we haven’t quite seen the tidal wave of nationalism that  I would have wanted to see two years ago, that spark of right-wing nationalism is clearly still present.

I worry especially for Western Europe because it is there where the left seems to be suffering. The Italian left has an abysmally weak presence in the European Parliament, which is dominated by right-wing populist parties and the liberal Democratic Party. The French left is weak, with all the real estate going to either Macron’s neoliberalism, Le Pen’s nationalism or the Greens. Here in the UK the left is weak as it is, being represented chiefly by the class collaborationist Labour Party and that having suffered considerably in the European Parliament election this weekend. The revivification of the left still seems very much distant.

The 2017 UK general election results

Well, I know it’s late, but now that the dust has settled I think I’ve gathered my thoughts and I can safely say that this election has been a clusterfuck. I didn’t comment on the announcement of the general election as part of a rule I imposed on myself to not comment on current events and politics during the spring holidays so I can concentrate on down time and my plans for the blog, but now the time is right and I can offer my thoughts on the events.

First of all I’ll say straight up: this election was completely pointless. Prime Minister Theresa May called the election in April 18th out of nowhere, and I don’t think many people asked for it. May claimed at the time that she called the election in order to secure the ultimate democratic mandate for Brexit. However, as I saw it, we already had the mandate in every possible sense of the word. In case you don’t know, back in 2015 the Conservatives under David Cameron promised to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union, and the British people gave them a parliamentary majority, thereby giving the Tories the democratic mandate to hold that referendum. Then, last year, we held that referendum, as was promised to us by the Tories, and the majority of the British public voted Leave. This was the basic democratic mandate that we needed in order to invoke Article 50 and leave the Union, but time and again Parliament insisted that we couldn’t leave without giving the Parliament a say, even though it was not their place to vote on the issue. Parliament voted on the Brexit issue three times, and each time they voted in favor of triggering Article 50. So despite all the bullshit from the British political establishment, we had the democratic mandate already. I always suspected that the election was a response on May’s part to the constant whining from Remoaners (the term we Brits use to refer to pro-EU people who constantly whine about the referendum) who always refused to accept the democratic mandate of Brexit and refused to accept the legimitacy of Theresa May as Prime Minister because she was unelected, having been appointed via a leadership contest following Cameron’s resignation immediately after the Brexit vote. What irony then that we could have Gordon Brown as our unelected Prime Minister in 2007 following Tony Blair’s resignation and we’d hear ne’ery a word about the democratic legitimacy of his rule.

But anyways, in order to achieve this “ultimate democratic mandate”, she called the snap election to strengthen the Conservative Brexiter support in parliament and weaken the opposition. At first, it seemed like things were going very well for the Tories. They seemed to be the party that was going to support Brexit, and the other Eurosceptic party, UKIP, was becoming increasingly irrelevant. In fact, we had local elections a month before the general election, and the Tories absolutely dominated the polls, with Labour crashed and UKIP annihilated. All the Tories had to do was not fuck up.

And then, they actually released their manifesto.

And just like that, the Tories instantly became more reviled than ever. They announced plans to introduce more control over the Internet by the state, peppered with some nice Orwellian language to prop it up (“Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet. We disagree”). That alone, i think, instantly drove young and tech-oriented people away from the Tories, leading straight into Labour simply because they were the second largest party and weren’t the Tories. Oh but that’s not all. They also came out in support of fox hunting, despite that most of the country doesn’t want fox hunting to come back. They introduced a set of social care proposals that came to be collectively known as the “dementia tax” and the death tax (which is basically the same kind of idea that harmed Gordon Brown’s campaign), which was widely condemned as being directly harmful to the elderly, only for Theresa May to back-peddle on that policy almost immediately. She also apparently planned to scrap free school meals. Before the manifesto, she could have done nothing but endlessly repeat Brexit sound bites on a loop and she would have won the majority.

And that wasn’t the end for May’s woes. When it came time for the leaders’ debates, she almost never showed up to represent her party to debate the other leaders. From what I’ve seen of her she is a capable public speaker, and I think she could have defeated Corbyn in the debates. But no. She didn’t. For some reason she thought that getting into debates with the other leaders was pointless. This cowardice made her the subject of ridicule, for she was seen as incapable of defending her own policy ideas. Oh, and then there’s that questionable moment when she said “if human rights laws get in the way of stopping terrorism then I will change them”, which quickly became translated into “I will rip up human rights” by everyone else.

All of that served to give a black eye to the Tory party, to the point that in my thoroughly honest opinion it’s a miracle that the Tories managed to win more seats than they did. To their credit, the Tories managed to weaken the SNP’s hold over Scotland, and that’s no small potatoes: had they failed to break the absolute dominion the SNP had in Scotland, we would probably be forced to enter into a coalition with the SNP, maybe even with Labour being the larger party instead of the Tories. Not to mention, had the SNP performed worse, the Tories might have won an overall majority after all. But in many respects, they failed to achieve what they set out to achieve. They failed to win Wales for the first time, where Labour maintained their 100-year long hold over the region, they failed to achieve the decisive majority nationwide and they may well have alienated large sections of people that might otherwise have supported them. Far from strengthening their democratic mandate as May had hoped, the Tories had actually weakened it. And it was all down to Theresa May’s booming hubris and delusion. May thought that she was unstoppable, that she could do anything she wanted, propose anything she wanted no matter how stupid and awful, and the British public would still support the Tories in droves. But she was wrong, and now she looks set to pay the price for her arrogance.

And then there’s the Labour Party. Apparently Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters are delusional enough to believe that they have claimed victory yesterday, when in objective reality all they have “won” is a hung parliament in which they still gained 56 seats less than the Conservatives. He hasn’t really won anything, yet Corbyn talks about how he’s ready to launch his “new program”, while his supporters and the media make the election result out to be some kind of massive victory for Labour when all they did is lose to the worst Tory campaign ever. It’s like Kim Jong-un losing a game of soccer and the North Korean papers declaring he won somehow. Corbyn wasn’t alone either. Tim Farron of the Liberal Democrats joined him in claiming that this was some kind of golden opportunity for them and defeat for the Tories, even though they only won 12 seats. Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP did it as well. In fact, when a reporter questioned her about the possibility of a second Scottish independence referendum, she dodged the question as thought trying to deny that her referendum might not be possible.

And let’s talk about Corbyn himself for a moment. I personally find it baffling how the youth could ever support the Labour Party, let alone under Jeremy Corbyn. This is a man whose central economic proposals echo the old kind of socialism that Labour believed in before their historic defeat by Margaret Thatcher. Corbyn wanted to nationalize the railways and the energy industry, raise the corporate tax to 26%, raise income tax everyone earning not £100,000, not £200,000, not £1,000,000, but £80,000, grant extra powers to HMRC to prosecute whose who avoid paying taxes, and create a Ministry of Labour in order to grant more power to trade unions. The last time the unions had any power, they almost take over the government during the 1970’s. Before the 1980’s, everything was nationalized and the British government eventually began running out of money to pay for it. Corbyn himself is nothing more than a well-meaning moron, with often confused stances on key issues. He refused to say anything about immigration other than he would impose no cap on migration. He said nothing about Brexit other than he doesn’t want a second referendum. And when asked about whether of not he would retaliate in the event of nuclear strike, he repeatedly dodged the question and fumbled all over the place. He is also a relic of perhaps more radical times during the 1970’s and 80’s, which goes a long way towards explaining why his links with Sinn Fein and far-left movements, not to mention past involvement with violent extremist movements, has come to the far, which we’ll explore further later on.

The Labour party itself, it must be said, is still not a party of the working class as I see it, much as they would claim otherwise. Before Corbyn, it was the party of Tony Blair, New Labour and their corporate masters. Now it’s the party of Marxism, socialism and the middle class twatwaffles who actually support it, even though it doesn’t quite work the way they think it does. That said, they did still manage to gain a considerable amount seats across the nation (other than Northern Ireland). And most shockingly of all, Diane Abbot – perhaps the least competent MP Labour has to offer -, a noted anti-white racist and apologist for Mao Tse Tung’s regime, actually managed to increase her majority in Hackney North and Stoke Newington by around 9,000 votes and effectively winning in a landslide. All-in-all, I am glad that Labour didn’t win this one. Given not just Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot, but also the presence of John McDonnell –  an avowed Marxist – and Seumas Milne – a communist apologist – in the party, I really don’t want to see those kinds of people in my government. Sadly, because Labour managed to do better in this election than they did last time and made out like heroes even though they won nothing, I don’t think the Marxists are going away, and it looks like they might actually influence British politics for the next few years. This is the Labour we have to live with now.

In the day of the vote and the day of after, I swear that the left, particularly the Corbynites, have been proving themselves to be very anti-democratic if not borderline or outright fascistic, if you’ll pardon the fairly liberal use of the term. The Corbynites actually went out of their way to buy tons of right-wing newspapers such as The Sun or The Daily Mail and burned every copy they bought, because they are apparently so confident about their candidate they just couldn’t stand media outlets talking shit about him. It’s basically the same thing as Christians burning Beatles’ records because they said they were bigger than Jesus: all you’ve gone and done is give the people you hate more money, and you look like literal Nazis. And on social media, I saw Corbynites come out virtue signalling about the importance of democracy and voting, only to bemoan to the public for voting against them and accusing them of ruining the country, with at least one even proclaiming that all Tory MPs should be jailed. And just like with Brexit, they’re supporting petitions calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government so that their Dear Leader can become Prime Minister instead.

What really grinds my gears is simply this: how can young people justify voting Labour in order to oppose the Tories in order to save the Internet from Tory regulation, without any guarantee that Labour actually cares about Internet freedom? I’m not kidding. I haven’t seen any evidence that Labour has come out in support of internet freedom, not even after the release of the Conservative manifesto. In fact, Jeremy Corbyn has come out in support of passing laws that would crack down on what he deems “sexist hate speech”. In fact, it was the Labour Party (albeit before Jeremy Corbyn became leader) who promised to introduce a mandatory version of the Internet filters proposed by the Conservatives to block websites based on age verification. So all these people are doing is replacing one form of Internet regulation and control with another. The only difference, of course, is that in this election the Tories were more arrogant and in your face, openly proclaiming that they want control of the Internet, whereas Corbyn and the left use sneaky terms like “hate speech” and “misogyny” to justify regulating how people speak online. In short, the young people who were outraged by the Tories would have been better off if they voted for neither the Tories or Labour, and instead voted for literally any other party. And yet Labour managed to capture the youth, sometimes in the most cringeworthy way possible. Jeremy Corbyn may as well be Pastor Jim Colerick, and my generation ate it up just like that!

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe that can be counted as something of a victory for Labour after all.

We haven’t even addressed the other major part of this result yet. Because the Tories failed to win an overall majority, they will have to form a coalition for the second time this decade. The Liberal Democrats will not be forming the role of the smaller party, having already done that in 2010 and thus having no desire to repeat that outcome. Believe me, I wouldn’t want to see that either. Instead, that role goes to the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, who won 10 seats (which, for the UK as a whole, is less than the Liberal Democrats, but in Northern Ireland amounts to over half of all seats, making them the majority party). The DUP is a socially conservative party that was founded by a Protestant Christian preacher named Ian Paisley, who was apparently known for his staunch opposition to Catholicism, republicanism and homosexuality. Looking at them, they don’t seem to be as horribly evil as the salt-bearing Twitterati make them out to be, but they’re not that good a party. They are strident opponents of gay marriage, and the party has actively blocked the legalization of gay marriage in Northern Ireland. They are also known in Northern Ireland for having supported a campaign in 1977 to oppose the decriminalization of homosexuality.  And when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, the DUP were apparently the only major party to oppose it. It is, then, somewhat understandable why the DUP are treated with contempt, which leads me to wonder how they managed to achieve a majority in Northern Ireland. A lot of the anger I have seen directed at them comes from things their MPs have said rather than recent actions, but it’s not like the DUP were such a good party.

The DUP are also reviled by some sections of the media because they are accused of being sympathetic to Northern Irish terrorists, specifically a group called the Ulster Defense Association – a Loyalist paramilitary group that opposed Republicanism and wants Northern Ireland to remain in the UK. The group made headlines recently for shooting a man named Colin Horner in front of his child in broad daylight. DUP has recently stated that they do not accept endorsements from UDA, and I haven’t actually found any explicit links between the UDA and DUP other than the fact that the party’s leader, Arlene Foster, met with the UDA chief recently – by an unfortunate coincidence, that meeting took place 2 days after the murder of Colin Horner. But despite the vagueness of this connection, the left seems to be using the DUP and the UDA to smear Theresa May and the new government. To me, it seems that the same people who would’ve have defended Jeremy Corbyn, and by proxy the Labour Party as a whole, from accusations that he is sympathetic to the IRA – the Republican paramilitary who wanted Northern Ireland to be unified with the rest of Ireland – are now scaremongering about how our government is entering with the DUP because they are apparently supported by terrorists. And that’s strange to me. I have whereas I have little links between DUP and the UDA, in fact the DUP has outright condemned the DUP and other paramilitary groups, Jeremy Corbyn has not only refused to condemn the IRA on multiple occasions, but has also not just talked to Irish terrorists, he’s even invited IRA-linked individuals into Parliament, had tea with terrorists and opposed anti-terror legislation. Unlike the DUP, Corbyn has found himself in situations where he got involved with the side of terrorists, several times. Clearly, it seems that the left is playing the terrorism card where it suits them by, as is characteristic of them, creating false equivalencies.

I feel like I should be clear: I do not support the DUP in any meaningful way other than they were only realistic option for a Tory-led coalition. Like I said earlier, the Liberal Democrats outright rejected a new coalition with the Tories, and I don’t see the SNP forming a coalition with them either. Not to mention, both of them aren’t exactly pro-Brexit. And while I don’t support the Tories either, I want my government to carry on with the Brexit. And since the DUP at least wants some kind of Brexit, coupled with the fact that they had enough seats to actually prop up the Tories as a coalition partner, I simply don’t see any other coalition that would work. The alternative, to me, is a Tory-SNP coalition where the SNP grinds the Tory government to a halt on Brexit and could pressure them to give them what they want by using the threat of a second independence referendum as a bargaining chip. Oh, and I reject the idea of a Labour-led coalition with minor progressive parties. Not only is it mathematically impossible because none of those parties would have enough seats combined to make an overall majority, but it would also make for an unstable minority government without proper democratic legitimacy. Not to mention, Alex Salmond of the SNP suggested pretty much the same idea when it was called the “rainbow coalition” in 2010, and it would’ve been impractical for the same reason.

Of course the main issue for me is Brexit. Contrary to what you might expect from a party as traditionally right-wing as DUP, the party is actually soft on Brexit. They don’t want a “hard” Brexit – that is we leave the European Union full stop, including the single market and customs union – because they fear it would create a hard border between the UK and Ireland. Theresa May, by contrast, has been pursuing full departure from the European Union and believes that getting no deal from Brussels is better than getting a bad deal. This had led to concerns that the Brexit pursued by Theresa May will end up being watered down in order to keep the coalition together.

I know this has gone on for quite a while, but at this point I need to mention UKIP. Because I voted to Leave in the EU membership referendum, my choice was between either the Conservatives or UKIP – all the other main parties were pro-EU, and thus could not be trusted. For a while, I wasn’t totally sure who to go with, but then the local election results came (I didn’t vote in those, by the way, because all the local candidates in my town were leftists) and UKIP were resoundingly crushed. Because of that I felt I had no choice but to support the Conservatives in order to see Brexit go through. And then, when they released their manifesto, I just couldn’t reconcile their ideas with my own views or principles, so I considered either voting UKIP or spoiling my ballot in protest. Either reading the main points of UKIP’s manifesto, however, I decided it was better than the Tories – and that they can’t possibly fuck up worse than the Tories did – so I decided to vote for them, even though I knew the party was done for. And sure enough, UKIP tanked in the general election, winning no seats and taking an 11% drop in the vote share, which led the party leader, Paul Nuttal, to resign after only six months in office. However, some are suggesting that UKIP may yet become the benefactor of this disastrous general election, as former leader Nigel Farage has hinted that he may return to politics and to UKIP if he thinks the current government will compromise our exit from the European Union. Given the options available to me in today’s political climate, if this turns out to be true, I would be happy to support Farage and UKIP for the foreseeable future.

Overall, this election was an unfortunate one for everyone: neither Labour nor the Tories won, the other parties suffered significant losses (including the Liberal Democrats, whose former leader Nick Clegg famously lost his seat), and we are about to enter into what is technically a minority government propped up by the DUP, with an emboldened left-wing opposition, and a tumultous political climate where progress on Brexit is in danger of being pushed back. There is even talk of Theresa May being “done for”, with her being expected to resign within the remainder of this year and a new Tory leadership contest down the line is already being speculated. Whatever your views on either of the parties, or on Brexit for that matter, this will most likely go down in history as a major failure for the Tories, and May will come to be seen as a uniquely terrible Tory leader and arrogant Prime Minister. And all the while, I suspect that my country is not heading in a good direction regarding liberty, and perhaps would not have fared much better in that regard whether you voted left or right.

Pictured: the only sensible conclusion