The only good news to come out of this week’s English local elections is that Labour took an absolute pasting. Besides losing more than 100 council seats they suffered the rare indignity of losing a parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool, a place traditionally so Labour that under normal circumstances even a monkey with a red rosette would have beaten any Conservative contender.
Before we go on to look at the bad news, let’s just pause briefly to relish Labour’s misery. In Britain’s recent political hisotry, it would be unthinkable for a sitting government to be winning by-elections after 11 years in power. The results have led to much red-on-red recrimination between the left of the party and the hard-left of the party. It has also led to calls for Sir Keir Starmer to resign as Labour leader after just a year in post.
This would be no great loss to anyone. As Patrick O’Flynn points out here, Starmer is the last person on earth likely to win back all those old Labour stalwarts who deserted the party for the Conservatives over Brexit, thus winning Boris Johnson his majority in the December 2019 general election.
As the uber-Remainer, the mastermind of Labour’s betrayal of Leave voters, the knee-taker in chief to the Cenotaph-defacers of BLM and the man who sided with whiney Meghan and Harry against the Royal Family, he would have no credibility as a Blue Labourite. Just a slippery London lawyer in a sharp suit trying his luck with a new message.
Really, though, Labour’s continued decline into irrelevance is nothing to celebrate for it means that Britain is now effectively a one-party state.
Here is a statement from Boris Johnson that should send a shiver down the spine of any sentient being.
‘For me what this means is that it’s a mandate for us to continue to deliver,’ says Johnson.
Continue to deliver what, exactly?
Nothing resembling any policy that’s remotely conservative, that’s for sure.
On the contrary, in the last 18 months, Johnson’s Conservative government has pushed the most unconservative agenda in the party’s history. It has rendered British people prisoners on their own island; it has banned them from hugging or even seeing their loved ones; it has destroyed their livelihoods; it has stopped them from going to restaurants, cafes, the pub or even their gyms; it has allowed the police to behave like fascist thugs; it has curtailed freedom of speech; it has trashed the economy; it has pushed extreme green policies which no one apart from a few hard-left activists actually wants.
That’s what really stinks about these election results. Johnson’s corrupt, mendacious, dismal regime will see them as a vindication of its terrible policies when in fact all the results tell us is how utterly screwed and desperate Britain is and how the opposition does anything but.
Partly, I think, people voted Conservative because they have Stockholm Syndrome. You only have to look at all the pillocks wearing masks as they drive alone in their cars to realise what a widespread problem this is. After a year’s worth of lockdowns and relentless propaganda, the British people have become addicted to incarceration, government lies and pettifogging regulation. Instead of voting against this nonsense, many of them have doubled down by actually rewarding their captors, Patty-Hearst-style, for imprisoning them.
Partly, they did so because the government has effectively used stolen money — taxpayers’ money, and in many cases the money of taxpayers yet to be born, so long it will take to pay this mountain of debt down — to bribe the electorate. The squillions of ‘furlough’ money that Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been paying people to maintain the illusion that their jobs still exist; the hundreds of millions of pounds that the government has used to keep the MSM’s propaganda machine onside: if you pay voters lots of money to think the government is doing a good job it’s no surprise that many voters will think the government is doing a good job. [‘But what happens when the money runs out?’ is a question no one is being encouraged to ask.]
Partly, they did so because there’s almost nowhere else to go. Londoners at least had the option of voting for freedom in the mayoral elections, which had a number of anti-lockdown candidates including Laurence Fox and David Kurten. But for most of us in the rest of the country it was Hobson’s Choice. I searched the candidates’ list in vain for the Anti-Covid-Lunacy Party (or something in that vein).
Had there been a credible opposition to the Conservatives I would certainly have voted for it. But there isn’t one. Almost the only difference between the Conservative government and the Labour opposition is that Labour are slightly more pro-masks and pro-lockdown than the Conservatives are.
At no point, for example, has Labour leader Starmer tried calling the government to account for all the damage its Covid policies have done to jobs, mental health, NHS waiting lists, personal freedom and so on. All he’s done is claim that if he’d been in charge Britain would have locked down even earlier.
But that’s because Starmer, just like Johnson, isn’t really his own man or in any way interested in the views of the electorate. Starmer (a member of the Trilateral Commission) wants Britain to ‘Build Back Better’ in the same way that Johnson does. They’re the merely the useful idiots of Klaus Schwab and his sinister World Economic Forum.
Anyone who voted Conservative yesterday under the illusion that they were voting for conservatism needs to take off their muzzle lest they do themselves any more brain damage.
History is littered with examples of free democracies voting for their own destruction. Add to that long list: the United Kingdom, 2021.
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