Leftist politicians used an inconclusive seven-way election debate to bash Donald Trump and scare voters with claims he wants to buy the National Health Service (NHS), and refused to commit to cutting immigration.
Asked by host Nick Robinson what they would say to the U.S. leader if they had 30 seconds with him, Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish First Minister and leader of the left-separatist Scottish National Party (SNP), sneered “Please stand down.”
Welsh left-separatist and relative non-entity Adam Price echoed Sturgeon, saying he would tell President Trump to “Resign and take Boris [Johnson] with you”, while Green politician Caroline Lucas — who has previously branded the President a “racist bigot” — said she would berate him over the Paris climate agreement.
Willing to wound but afraid to strike, Labour representative Rebecca Long-Bailey said “I’m a good Catholic so I won’t say in public what I probably would say to him,” adding that, like Lucas, “the most important point I’d make is about the climate emergency and how he needs to change his position.”
For the Conservative Party, Rishi Sunak opted for a polite “Happy Thanksgiving”, while Brexit Party chairman Richard Tice went with “Let’s get a quick trade deal done” — prompting Sturgeon to chip in “and here’s our NHS” sarcastically.
Claims that Boris Johnson and Brexiteers more generally are plotting to see the British state health service “flogged off to Trump’s America”, as Lucas put it, were a common theme throughout the debate — with Liberal Democrat leader saying she would (facetiously) congratulate the President on “getting his wish” for Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage to come together — which, in fact, has not happened — but “the British public still has a chance to stop him”.
Despite his frequent invocation by British leftists as a kind of folk devil, there is little evidence President Trump has any interest in buying the NHS — and indeed, while he strongly supports a mutually beneficial British-American trade deal if Brexit enables Britain to take back control of international trade from the EU, he has also been clear that “It’s not for us to have anything to do with your healthcare system” and that he does not see healthcare provision as being part of trade.
More broadly, Rishi Sunak for the Conservatives pitched BBC viewers “frustrated that Parliament’s been stuck going round in circles” on Brexit on Boris Johnson’s commitment to getting a withdrawal treaty with the EU ratified by Christmas.
Richard Tice for the Brexit Party backed a clean break with the EU, in which “the least well off [would] benefit the most” from cheaper fuel, food, growing wages, infrastructure projects in the regions, and new jobs from “hundreds of new fishing boats filling our harbours, many built in Britain.”
Meanwhile, the leftist politicians all said they would make the British people vote on EU membership again in a second referendum — except Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson, who insisted that if she somehow won the election outright she would feel entitled to simply cancel Brexit, with no need to consult the public further.
Sturgeon also reiterated her commitment to re-running another supposedly “once in a lifetime” referendum — the 2014 vote on Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom — and said she wanted the SNP to “play our part in locking Boris Johnson out of Downing Street”, while Adam Price said he hoped to “make this winter our Welsh sping”.
All of the debate participants either enthusiastically embraced or at least refused to challenge the “climate emergency” orthodoxy, with Caroline Lucas claiming the world is “on fire” from “the Arctic to the Amazon”.
Asked something of a throwback question on whether if they would use nuclear weapons to defend the country if it was under nuclear attack, the response was mixed, with Sturgeon, Price, and Lucas for the SNP, Welsh separatists, and Greens all agreeing “absolutely and emphatically not”, and Rishi Sunak, Tice, and even Jo Swinson and Rebecca Long-Bailey for the Tories, Brexit Party, Lib Dems, and Labour saying they would.
However, it is certain that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn does not share Long-Bailey’s view, given he has long campaigned for Britain to disarm unilaterally.
On the perennial but increasingly suppressed issue of mass immigration, voters who would like to see it reduced will have been in despair, as only Richard Tice said it should be, due to its negative impact on working-class pay packets for local people.
Rishi Sunak said he expected numbers would come down under the Tories, but added that “more important than the numbers is having control” — which is not especially encouraging, given non-EU immigration, which unlike EU immigration the British government can already control, is rising.
No-one else on the stage said they supported reducing immigration from its current near-record levels, with Jo Swinson saying “immigration is a brilliant thing” and insisting it is a good thing that migrant “work in our restaurants and bars”.
Other leftists simply denied the influx has any impact on wages, in defiance of the law of supply and demand.
The British general election will be held on December 12th.
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