Conservative Wins in UK Elections? By Richard Miller (London)
My go-to site for on-line conservative optimism and hope is Dr Steve Turley. British trained, he rejoices in conservative gains in regional and municipal elections. That struck me too as being positive. But, then I started reading other sites, and the black pill was taken yet again. James Delingpole, in particular, takes this apart. I guess it is important to give the audience “hope,” even if illusory, since otherwise they do nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jix7Yx9UL18&t=182s
“Well, Thursday this week there were elections over there. These mostly weren't parliamentary elections. There was a national general election two years ago, and the next one isn't due for another three years. Thursday's elections were for regional and municipal positions—mayors, town councillors and such. You could think of it very approximately as like our mid-terms, although more heated than usual because last year's elections were postponed on account of covid.
There was one parliamentary seat up for grabs Thursday: Hartlepool, a grimy seaport in the far northeast of England.(It’s fictional hometown of one of Britain’s most famous cartoon characters, the flat-capped, working-class loafer Andy Capp).
The Labour M.P. resigned in March under a cloud of allegations of sexual harassment, so this was a special election to replace him.
What about this James Delingpole piece that I liked so much?
Its thrust, and what will return an echo from the bosoms of American conservatives, is the pathetic uselessness of institutional Conservatism.
In Britain, institutional Conservatism means of course the Conservative Party, who have held power over there for the past eleven years.
You have to qualify that, and Delingpole does, by noting that for the first five of those years the Tories were in coalition with a junior partner, the Liberal Democrats, a sort of concentrated essence of gentry liberalism, so they were under some restraint. For the last six years, though the Tories have ruled supreme.
Delingpole's beef is that those eleven years were, from a conservative point of view, an utter waste of time. The three big-"C" Conservative Prime Ministers accomplished nothing of a small-"c" conservative nature.
The only small-"c" conservative advance in those years was Brexit. That was by referendum, though, and against the inclinations of big-"C" Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who resigned when the referendum result came out.
The signature achievement of Cameron's Prime Ministership was the legalization of homosexual marriage.
Brexit aside, Delingpole gives a wish-list of seven things that a small-"c" conservative person, eleven years ago, might have hoped for from a big-"C" Conservative government. Here's his list. I've abbreviated the entries, with just a couple of short direct quotes.
- Controlimmigration.
- Restore education. For example: "History should be a celebration ofgreat men (and women), a catalogue of battles and key events, and inspiration for future heroes—not a breast-beating whinge about the slave trade."
- Quote: "Stop sucking up to Big Business, Woke Corporations, and such-like because they are scum, they have no loyalty to Britain."
- Maintain a strong Armed Forces—for protection, national pride, tradition—but don't use them on foreign wars of intervention which cause far more harm than good.
- Win the culture wars. Utterly destroy Wokism wherever it rears its hideous head.
- Stop with the "Green Crap" Remove the wind farms; frack for shale gas. Go for energy which is abundant and cheap.
- Law and order.
Sound good?
Eleven years of Conservative Party government have, says Delingpole, delivered nothing, zip, zilch, nada, nichts, rien, ничего, nothing on any of those items. The solution? Stop voting for institutional conservatism.
In the U.S.A., institutional conservatism means the Republican Party. The GOP has controlled both houses of Congress for twelve of the past twenty-six years; for six of those twelve it had the White House, too.
Those twelve years have, like Britain's eleven, delivered nothing to conservatives. The last time our Republican Party had trifecta control—Congress and the White House—its signature accomplishment was a minor tax cut.
The solution here is the same one James Delingpole recommends to his countrymen: Stop voting for institutional conservatism. I shall follow his advice.
I'm sorry to say the Brits have did not follow it on Thursday. This week's elections over there were a triumph for institutional conservatism and for the perfectly useless big-"C" Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson. [Labour has lost trust of working people, says Starmer, BBC, May 6, 2021]
The Conservatives, like the GOP/GAP, is benefitting from seismic social shifts, particularly the working class’s rebellion against the Woke Left. But neither party deserves it.
So in Britain, the downward spiral continues. I don't care. Let's just try to stop it happening here.
Don't vote for institutional conservatism!”
Here is the James Delingpole piece:
“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 history, 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 … 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.”
Delingpole puts his finger on the fundamental dilemma facing conservatives, true conservatives, namely that the parties do not represent them. Yet, until there are parties that do, not voting will allow the Left untold power. It is a pretty pickle indeed.
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