Might Britain Survive After All

Over the last decade, the socialist/marxist policies of the Labour government and the European Union combined in a horrendous synergism to drag down the economy of Britain and quite literally war against anglo-saxon culture and history. On Thursday, the British people seemingly stirred a bit from their stupor. In local elections, they handed Labour their worst electoral defeat in a half century. And that was just the beginning of the good news.

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When the votes were totaled, the Tories – ostensibly Britain’s conservative party, though they would be seen as well to the left of center in the U.S. political continuum – picked up the lion’s shared of the vote at 44%. The Liberal Democrat Party, a relatively new party that is trying to mark out the mid point between the Tories and the Labour party, came in second with 25% of the vote while the ruling Labour Party was in third with 24% of the vote. Both the UK Independence Party - the true home of conservatives in the UK - and the British National Party increased their margins.

What all that means is a royal drubbing for Labour in the local councils. Labour lost 331 Councilors and control of 12 Local Councils. The Tories picked up 256 Councilors, which gives them now a huge lead at the local level over Labour. This bodes ill indeed for the Labour Party, who are searching today for any message in the election results that they can latch onto and perhaps salavage their party before the next general election. As several commentators, the most colorful of which was The Times' Matthew Parris, have noted, there are no life preservers in the electoral sea in which Labour now finds itself adrift:

It's over. There was nothing constructive in the voters' message. These elections were not an invitation to change. They were a big two-fingered salute [the Brit equivalent of the middle finger salute on this side of the pond], a raspberry, a pressing of the de-trousered national buttocks to the window of the polling station. The voters are bored, tired, disillusioned and out of love. The affair [with Labour], which in 1997 was (for the British people) uncharacteristically intense, is over, and the falling out is correspondingly bitter. Such flames are not rekindled - and certainly not by Mr Brown, whose personal stamp characterises this administration.

Read the entire article. Not everyone agrees, of course. At least one ardent leftist, John Kampfner - not surprisingly a BBC personality, writing at the Guardian has suggested that Labour can win by taking an even harder turn to left, apparently readopting the marxian economic ideas of large scale income redistribution and nationalization of major businesses jettisoned from the Labour plank only a bit over a decade ago by Tony Blair. Good luck with that.

The most important part of the local election was the race for Mayor of London, a post held for the past eight years by the odious Ken Livingstone – better known as Red Ken – a true enemy of Western civilization. Red Ken has thankfully been handed his walking papers by London's voters who gave victory to the Tory candidate, Boris Johnson, by a wide margin.

This is all good news, though only a small first step, really. In the end, the most important question will be whether Britain is consumed by the EU in a transfer of sovereignty with no referendum of the Brtish electorate. And thus the big news of the week may well be the little noted court approval given to a case brought by Stuart Wheeler to force the UK government to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. More on that court decision here.

Showing how history repeats itself if you survive as a nation for a millenium, the good folk at Brits at Their Best saw the apparent mood of an angry electorate summed up in in John of Gaunt's speech about the state of England in Shakespeare’s Richard II.

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Read the entire post. And another British blog, EU Referendum, one of the best blogs on either side of the pond, puts the election in perspective.

. . . [T]his was a catastrophe for the Labour party of some magnitude and one from which they will find it difficult to recover.

However, for the rest of us, life goes on and, let us face it, these were just local elections, which will change little and which were decided on a low turn-out as usual. In other words, for the majority of the population, even in the affected areas, they were of little concern. This will not change until there is a root-and-branch reform . . . [of local and national government].

. . . We have a new mayor, though many of us prefer not to have one at all. Nor are we all that desperate to have a London Assembly or the rest of those quangos that together make up the GLA or, more widely, “London’s government”. London does not need a government as it has managed spectacularly well without one for centuries. This supposed government is little more than a money-hungry incubus on the whole city.

On the other hand, if we do have a mayor, even temporarily, it is better not to have a power-hungry, self-centred, no-much-reformed socialist who brought in huge white elephants, thought of new ways to fleece the public and saw himself and his entourage as another foreign office. The truth of how much those trips abroad to places like Venezuela or to conferences about global warming has not yet come out.

. . . On to the new Mayor. Boris Johnson has won very handsomely. Despite the ridiculous system of three ballot papers, two preferences for the mayor and two separate votes for the assembly, which has consistently created more spoilt ballots in London than anywhere else, the victory is clear and uncontestable.

The turn-out seems to have been around 45 per cent, about ten per cent higher than last time and about 13 per cent higher than the time before. This is still not spectacularly high but by standards of local elections, not bad.

The irony here is that we were told twice by pundits of the stature of Simon Jenkins that the magical personality and popularity of Ken Livingstone would bring the voters out in far greater droves than ever before. It didn’t and neither did the media blitz on the subject. It was actually the presence of a credible rival that did the trick.

. . . David Cameron must have some ambivalent feelings. It does not take too many brain cells to work out that Boris Johnson will now have power base that is completely independent of the leader and, unlike Livingstone, he has never made the mistake of antagonizing other members of his party.

. . . Final count was 1,168,738 for Mayor Johnson and 1,028,966 for ex-Mayor Livingstone. One can but hope he will now disappear from public life and go back to spending more time with his newts.

Contrary to what the media tells us, Livingstone has not been a success in his life. Nothing but a career local politician, he actually helped Thatcher to destroy the GLC, which he had seen as his power base. Then he became an MP, only to find that as a back-bencher and a greatly disliked one at that, he had no role to play.

. . . It was time for [Red Ken] to go. Otherwise, the Conservative have not done as well as they had hoped in London. They lost one first-past-the-post seat in the Assembly and failed to gain another one they had high hopes for. They have gone down to eight constituency members with Labour having six. However, their vote across London has gone up by 6.20 per cent, so they will make the seats up, from the top-up list system. Labour’s vote went up by 3.36 per cent. A combination of higher turn-out and smaller parties being squeezed. It was rare to see any group quite as glum as the Greens were in the Great Glass Egg yesterday.

What about those top-up members? The big news is that, as expected, the BNP has passed the 5 per cent threshold and now has one member in the Assembly. Incidentally, if it is true that the main party candidates walked out of the room when the BNP mayoral candidate spoke but happily listened to the tyrant- and terrorist-supporting Lindsay Germain of the Left List, one can only marvel at their stupidity as well as bad manners. Then they wonder why people vote BNP. Richard Barnbrook, the man in question, will now be in the Assembly, so, as the song has it “ho, ho, ho, who’s laughing now”.

Having found the full list, I can say that the Conservatives have got three top-up seats, so two mayoral hopefuls, Andrew Boff and Victoria Borwick will be in the Assembly. Again, one can but wonder at their notion of what constitutes important political placing.

Labour has two top-up seats, with Nicky Gavron and Murad Qureshi back in place. That means there will be 11 Tory members and 8 Labour ones. The Lib-Dims have lost two seats and are down to three and the Greens have retained the two they had. BNP has one. What a jolly set-up that is going to be. . . .

Read the entire post.