by Christopher Gage
It appears that social media is not the real world. Indeed, contrary to the predictions I read there, the most seismic election in British history was not even close.
Boris Johnson on Friday morning returned as Great Britain’s prime minister atop a landslide of voters whom the progressive Left abandoned long ago.
The results are quite literally shaking. Dozens of seats that have never returned a Conservative lawmaker subsumed to a Red Toryism decidedly middle-road in its inclinations.
As I write with a quiet giddiness, Boris Johnson has a majority of 80, after ransacking 24 of Labour’s ancestral heartland seats. (Given that Sinn Fein lawmakers do not take their seats, the majority is effectively 87.)
In what I have previously called the P.C. Election, Johnson rubbled Labour’s red wall. Blyth Valley, an old mining seat, was the first to fall to an irrepressible wave daubing thick blue across the northern rust-belt, and the midlands.
These are the kinds of places where the term “Tory” is akin to the c-word. The kinds of places that voted to leave the European Union. The kinds of places where the metropolitan Labour party once weighed its votes.
No more. The Labour Party is drudging toward its worst result since 1935, having lost 60 seats, 54 of those to the Conservatives.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum (his Millennial praetorian guard) are vanquished, along with his vaunted successor Laura Pidcock—they turfed her out, too.
At around 5 a.m. UK time Friday, a deliciously symbolic swell drowned Tony Blair’s old Sedgefield seat. The pro-EU creed of that man is now utterly bankrupt.
Brexit Baby Can Finally Walk!
What does all this mean? Well, the Brexit baby is now a toddler. Finally, it can walk unguided and out of the European Union by January 31. Nothing, not Tony Blair, not the phalanx of elite interests, nor an army of unreconciled Remainers can stand in the way.
By the looks of things, this result will take some time to sink in. Not in my lifetime have the Conservatives won with such happy ruthlessness.
Of course, those never reconciled to Brexit must now accept that they have got their “People’s Vote.” The people voted with louder emphasis to leave.
With good reason, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and Conservative Remain “rebels” all worked tirelessly to avoid this election. Labour returned to 1935. The Liberal Democrats’ own leader (who ran on revoking Brexit) lost her seat. And the Conservative defectors all lost theirs.
The true middle of this country rests with economic moderation, and a modern social conservatism. Red Toryism, and its one-nation cousin, romped home.
Boris Johnson shed the skin of Margaret Thatcher. The modern Conservative Party wants more money for the National Health Service, the highest living wage in Europe, massive infrastructure spending to close the opportunity gap between London and the rest. This is no longer the party of Thatcher.
Between Corbyn’s Bleak House of beggars and billionaires, and Johnson’s one-nation conservatism, the British people voted emphatically for the latter.
Perhaps, this defeat is of such marmalizing power that the gross elements of Corbyn’s Labour Party will scuttle back to the conspiracy-theory thickets of lurid online forums where they can blame Jewish people for their woes in the shameful comfort of tragic like-minds.
Emotionalism and Identity Politics Hardest Hit
Let’s not forget, a mainstream party in the mother of all parliaments won a third of the vote while under investigation for institutional anti-Semitism. I’ll spare you the various grotesqueries which many Corbynistas display and of which they are accused. They’ve had enough oxygen.
And let’s not forget that U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) implored the British people to vote for such a party. Surely, Democrats who pined for a Corbyn win must now survey the landscape. Identity politics lost. Political correctness lost. Cancel culture lost.
And lost perhaps irrevocably.
Indeed, the death of P.C. culture could very well be upon us. After all, 80 percent of both British people, and Americans, are opposed to such censorship. Including half of Democrats.
Look at happens when one refuses to bow. Refuses to accept spurious charges of being a “fascist.” One wins, and wins big.
Stand up to these people, Americans.
Because most people are not racist. They want to decide who comes to their country. They want to author their own lives free from the demands of suicidal compassion by the authoritarian Left.
Which is what should worry the Corbynistas, and his American fangirls, most. The playbook of thought-shaming no longer works. Tarring ordinary people with ever-shifting transgressions is not the way to convince them of your argument.
The Conservatives are no longer convincingly caricatured as callous or cold, as the neoliberalism that poisoned the well in the wake of Thatcher is diluted with more common sense.
Unthinkably, the party led throughout the campaign on the NHS, an emotional weapon Labour has successfully deployed in every election of my lifetime.
Corbyn spent the last six weeks insisting that Johnson would sell the NHS to Donald Trump. The emotional blackmail rendered a dud.
And this should shake progressives more than anything else. Their emotionalism is no longer effective. And, of course, if they actually fight on the issues they will lose handily. Not caring to persuade, they’ve lost the ability.
Evidently, most voters struggled to connect Labour’s insistence of Tory callousness with Boris’ Red Tory platform of NHS spending, the spread of opportunity, sensible immigration controls, and Europe’s highest living wage as “Thatcherism on steroids.”
Again, it is tough to paint your opponent as unhinged when your own party is under investigation for the most primitive strain of identity politics.
This is the same party for whom a portion of its voters feel it is acceptable to blame Jews for all of their ills. It’s the same party whose supporters send dead rats in the mail to those who may disagree with their apparent “compassion.” Those things are not acceptable to the majority of voters in the UK.
What is acceptable is this: Corbynism is dead. And its American incarnation is next.
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Christopher Gage is a British political journalist.
