The Hollowing Out Of British Politics

What to make of the British Independence Day elections? At first glance it looks like a huge triumph for Labour and Keif Starmer, the son of a working class stiff. Starmer, of course, replaced Jeremy Corbyn, whom The Israel Lobby/UK dumped for “anti-semitism”. Starmer, an atheist, has a Jewish wife and they follow Jewish traditions, so that’s all cool for Labour now. Oh, by the way, Corbyn ran as an Independent and won convincingly—presumably in what would normally be a Labour constituency.

Alexander Mercouris of The Duran explains what it all means in a not too long video:

Tories crushed. Labour, declining victory. Farage triumphs

I won’t go into the “Farage triumphs” part here, beyond that Mercouris explains what it means that Reform UK did so well in the popular vote but only won 4 seats. The UK system is fundamentally different than ours. Mercouris regard the Reform UK showing as triumphant.

However, here’s my significantly edited version of what Mercouris calls the “hollowing out” of British politics. It’s definitely stunning:

Keif Starmer one big—400 plus seats—or no?

This is a Triumph of machine politics. Let's look at how the Labor party did when it was led by Jeremy Corbyn, and let's look at how it's done now that it's led by Keif Starmer. I'm looking now at absolute actual vote numbers.

In 2017, the first election in which Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour party, Labour won 12.8 million votes.

In 2019, which Labour lost--and of course that was the Brexit election when the Conservatives were led by Boris Johnson and they campaigned on getting Brexit done--the Jeremy Corbyn Labour party won 10.2 million votes. So a significant decline from 12.8 to10.2 and that was because working class voters in the Midlands and in the northern constituencies voted Conservative because they supported Brexit.

In this election which has produced the gigantic Labour landslide 412 MPs, or whatever it is, Labour won 9.6 million votes. So the actual number of votes is falling--it's not growing!

Why has that happened? Because of machine politics. Labour has the organization on the ground and we are looking at a complete Conservative collapse.

So let's look at the Conservative numbers. Terry May in 2017 won 13.6 million votes--ahead of Corbin but not by very much. Boris Johnson in 2019 increased that to 13.9 million--not a huge increase but a significant increase achieved largely, in my opinion, because of Farage's support and because Johnson promised to get Brexit done.

In this election they've collapsed to 6.7 million. They've lost more than half their vote--it has been a total implosion. This extraordinary collapse means that even though the Labour vote has fallen the Conservative vote has fallen very much more.

So you you can see how hollowed out British politics has become. 9.6 million votes would have never delivered you a landslide in British electoral history, in any election since basically the end of the first world war. It's only happened because of the total collapse of the Conservative party--from which, in my opinion, there is no recovery. And why are the Conservatives collapsing? Because they've governed abysmally, because they failed to carry through on their promises with regard to Brexit, because Nigel Farage has come out and is telling more and more people to vote against them because he sees them as betraying the promises they made to him and to the voters in 2019, and because so many British voters agree with him.

Next up, November.