Jeremy, we hardly knew ye
And what we did know we didn’t like.
So Corbyn says buh-bye as party leader:
Boris Johnson’s gamble on a snap election looks set to have paid off with the Tories likely to win a sizeable majority, according to an exit poll.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Too bad he resigned. I thought he did a great job for the Conservatives. 🙂
Gringo:
Well, he won his seat, so he’s still an MP. Cheer up, maybe he’ll make a comeback as Labour leader some day.
Good news, so far.
According to the Guardian, the Tories just broke 326 for an absolute majority.
Now let’s see how many they can rack up over 51%.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2019/dec/12/uk-general-election-2019-full-results-live-labour-conservatives-tories
Yay Boris! As of now he’s up to 359 (I can’t believe how excited I feel about this!)
Corbyn won’t be going anywhere in the short term. All he has said is that he won’t lead the Labour Party into the next election, which is five years hence. Meanwhile he has promised to stay on and oversee the Labour Party during a period of refelection.
Marxists do not resign, they hang on until they can hand over to another Marxist.
… or get hung from a lamppost.
Is it too early to move from delirious celebration to cold blooded evaluation? Well, yes, probably yes.
But in a week or so, consider reading Steyn
https://www.steynonline.com/9913/boffo-boris
It’s true that today’s Conservative Party is pretty weak kneed in ideological terms. Steyn makes this point too but I like a commenter’s formulation:
Yes, it’s high time for the Conservatives to stop having the courage of someone else’s convictions. If they won’t do that with a significant majority in Parliament, I don’t suppose they ever will. Although the diehard Remainiac faction in the party is now gone (from Westminster, anyway), I suspect that the new membership will turn out to be wishy-washily centrist, as the leadership has been conditioned to be since John Major’s time, to some extent, and especially since Cameron’s.
Unfortunately, the thinking now will be that the Conservatives have cracked the way to win elections: to pretend to be Tony Blair, all over again.
For the first time, last night I regretted not having BBC1.
Great news! But now Boris has to produce and it has to be good. Fingers crossed.
Pretty good week.
Horowitz exposes the perfidy of the G-Men (and G-Women).
Boris prevails. Jeremy down the toilet of British history.
Viacom’s free (with ads) Pluto TV has Sky TV News on it, and last night they ran the feed with almost no commercials. Pretty amusing, especially when watched and read in tandem with UK commenters on a UK site. I didn’t even have to stay up late to get that stay up late feeling! Smarmy newscasters with bias are funnier when they are not your own country’s problem.
I thought it was hilarious when they asked this Labour MP named Smeeth what was to blame for the loss, and she outright said, “Jeremy Corbyn.”
Neo: … he won his seat, so he’s still an MP. Cheer up, maybe he’ll make a comeback as Labour leader some day.
Not likely because that would go against the grain of how things are done in UK politics. Once you are gone from the leadership, you are gone. No “bitter clingers” like Clinton even if Corbyn were to come back “tanned, rested and ready”. Also, I doubt he needs to be a sitting MP. The former Tory Canadian PM Mulroney won the party leadership when he wasn’t even a sitting MP. In fact he had never contested any election when he won the leadership although he had tried to win the leadership once before. After he became the party leader, a sitting MP had to resign his safe seat so that Mulroney could run in a special by-election.
Lastly, it was those Russians – again!
https://twitter.com/CHSommers/status/1205298943426514945
Johnson’s victory is a sign of a major realinment in definition of political spectrum: now the main issue is not the size of the government or of welfare, but nationalism vs. globalism. A new surge of nationalism is expected everywhere, as people rediscover long neglected or villified values of national sovereignity and patriotic pride.
Curious (for JC, no doubt) that his dream of turning the UK into Venezuela seems not to have ignited the popular imagination.
Nor can one imagine that he’ll EVER understand just quite why the voters didn’t share his enthusiasm….:
“Bad marketing, I tell you! Less than optimal optics. If only we’d been able to iron out those wrinkles, we would have made it across the line. After all, the voters don’t truly understand what it is they want….”
Johnson was quoted as saying: “Johnson also promised that his Conservative Party’s top priority is to massively increase investments in the National Health Service and “make this country the cleanest, greenest on Earth with our far-reaching environmental program.” “You voted to be carbon neutral by 2015 and you also voted to be Corbyn neutral by Christmas and we’ll do that, too,” he said.”
He may be the vanguard for Brexit, but it looks like in everything else he’s fine with a very leftist agenda.
…while it does appear that Ken Livingstone has been hired by the “Babylon Bee” to be its on-site reporter in what he most likely bemoans is not—or at least not yet—“Caracas on the Thames”.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/351313/
What’s happened in Britain is most pleasant. Three caveats:
1. The possibility that remoaners will be numerous enough to continue with their sabotage. A caucus of 49 among the 372 Conservative and Unionist MPs is what it would take.
2. The possibility that Boris himself will pull a bait-and-switch and arrange for a set of institutional arrangements which do not actually deliver Brexit. Most salient item: control over the border.
3. The possibility that the Conservative Party will not act to control immigration. British fertility deficits are modest compared to those of other European countries and the number of settler’s visas you might be advised to issue to cover the deficits would be around 80,000 a year. Currently, the number of work and family visas issued in the UK is around 300,000 a year.
He may be the vanguard for Brexit, but it looks like in everything else he’s fine with a very leftist agenda.
Publics have their shticks and politicians have to make the sale to the publics they have. A command economy in the provision of medical services is a British shtick. A command economy in the provision of primary and secondary schooling is an American shtick. I’d be pleased to see a Republican politicians advocate replacement of public schools with a mix of voucher-funded and tuition-funded private schools. I’m also aware that suburban voters would commonly have a visceral reaction to that…and not one I’d like.
Corbyn, of course, refuses to accept responsibility for Labour’s massive defeat.
No doubt he feels it was a conspiracy led by … those people … Wink … Wink … you know … the ones with hooked noses and all the money.
He is disgusting and I am pleasantly surprised that the British people repudiated his repellent worldview.
When the Left has lost the workers…
I keep wanting this to be about a return to Conservative values, reduction in the size of govt and more freedom.
But this comment is the objective truth
Sergey on December 13, 2019 at 7:33 am
What does the bizarre clownish costumed figure standing tall behind Corbyn at his acknowledgment of defeat represent? The absurdity of the Labour Party?
I lifted this tidbit from the long post Neo linked – would that our FCC would mandate likewise! There are some government regulations I can get behind.
“The airwaves will be politics-free until the polls close at 10pm, giving the candidates time to catch up on sleep for the long night ahead.”
https://spectator.us/labour-anti-semitism-shame-never-forgiven/