Further on the Farage wins. A surprisingly sharp comment in todays' NYT from an editor. (At: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07/02/opinion/thepoint#labor-election-uk ) "July 5, 2024 Matthew RoseOpinion Editorial Director 39 comments
What Labour’s Sort-of Landslide Means for Biden The superlatives came thick and fast Friday as Britain reported its election results. The Conservatives won the fewest seats in the party’s nearly 200-year history. Tory cabinet officials and one former prime minister — the one with the life span of a lettuce — lost their seats. At last count, Labour tallied 412 seats, an increase of 214, while the Tories eked out a miserable 121, having shed 252. The Tories’ previous worst result came in 1906, when even poor Arthur Balfour managed to win 35 more seats than Rishi Sunak. At first glance, this looks like a landslide for Labour and its incoming prime minister, Keir Starmer, who emerges with a dominant parliamentary majority that looks a lot like Tony Blair’s in 1997. Blair’s win kicked off a long period of dominance for the center-left and a grim trudge through the wilderness for the right. But there is something disquieting in these results that doesn’t bode well for Labour and, by extension, Democrats in the United States. Both electorates seem gripped by a malaise that no political leader has adequately addressed. Despite the Labour landslide, its percentage of the overall vote was unimpressive. Compared with the most recent election, in 2019, it was up a paltry 1.6 points to 33.8 percent. That’s not exactly a thumping endorsement. What appears to have happened instead was the cratering of the Tory vote and its dispersal to everyone other than Labor — specifically the Greens, the centrist Liberal Democrats and the anti-immigration Trump-adjacent Reform Party. It’s Reform’s performance that should be sparking the warning flares. This is the party of Nigel Farage, the arch-Brexiteer and wannabe Trump acolyte who won a seat in Parliament on his eighth attempt. Reform won only four other seats but accounted for a large chunk of the Conservative collapse with its roster of often unsavory candidates and its hugely expanded vote total (14 percent compared with, uh, 2). Similar parties are romping across Europe, and Reform’s success suggests that even Britain, a place that still sniffs at populism for being a little gauche, hasn’t learned its lesson from the chaos of the Boris Johnson era. What does this mean for the United States? It’s easy to overdraw the parallels, but some things stand out, and most of them don’t look great for the White House incumbent. Even after years of mismanagement and haphazard governance from the right, voters didn’t favor the center-left in any large numbers. If this was an anti-incumbency moment, it seems it hit both major parties, if unequally. And the hard right made some of the biggest gains of all. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#31029): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/31029 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/107060020/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
