A Very Special UK Edition Of LFTW.
Their general election for every seat in Parliament is being held on July 4th. 😏
British politics have always fascinated me, and while Letters From The Wasteland is about the slow crumbling of American empire, the fact that their election is on July 4th makes for a fair tie-in to this publication. Furthermore, their election is a likely foreshadowing of how our own is likely to go. Brexit was, we know now, the precursor to Donald Trump’s shocking win in 2016. Both campaigns utilized much of the same shadowy right-wing apparatus for funding, Russian social media tricks heavily involved in both campaigns, and Cambridge Analytica worked for both campaigns. Nigel Farage and Donald Trump are fascist besties, too, with Farage suspending his campaign work for Trump here to go home and run for a seat in Parliament.
In short, this is worth our time.
Note: For those of you unfamiliar with British politics, a brief guide to terms I will be using.
Labour = Labour Party, the steadily drifting to the center main opposition party. Technically call themselves socialist from time to time, led by Sir Keir Starmer, a pale imitation of Tony Blair.
Tory/Tories = Common name for Britain’s Conservative Party. Has been in power since 2010, with four consecutive election victories. Current Prime Minister is Rishi Sunak, who is the second Tory PM in this Parliament to be chosen without any input from the electorate.
SNP = Scottish Nationalist Party, a party dedicated to Scottish independence that runs for seats in Parliament in hopes of forcing a new referendum on Scotland leaving the United Kingdom.
Lib Dems = Liberal Democrats, brought about by a merger of the old Liberal Party and the Social Democrats, who split from Labour in 1982. Their agreement to form a coalition government with the Tories in 2010, against their political beliefs, took them from a power broker in the center to near-irrelevance. Running on a very progressive platform.
Reform = Nigel Farage’s fascist political party, responsible for the Brexit debacle and, despite zero seats in government, gets a ton of media attention.
Greens = The Green Party, who get very little media attention despite actually holding substantial numbers of seats at the regional level.
Now that we’ve laid out the general information, let’s begin.
The United Kingdom is the only nation amongst the G8 to still be in an economic malaise post-2008 crash. The Tories came to power in 2010 and introduced austerity measures, which basically meant that poor people saw their benefits cut and the National Health Service declined in quality. Despite bragging in 2015 how much better things were, objectively, they were not, but Labour ran a dismal campaign and lost. The Lib Dems, who’d helped the Tories take power in a coalition government, were roundly booted out of office, as the Tories got their platform pushed through, and the Lib Dems didn’t even get votes on their platform policies.
Flush with confidence, then-Prime Minister and current Foreign Minister Baron David Cameron decided he would appease his lunatic fringe (basically the British MAGA) and allowed a referendum to be held on European Union membership. Cameron, who was proudly pro-European, thought that it’d be an easy win, but Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson made a ton of promises that leaving the EU would fix all of their problems economically. Brexit won by one percentage point. The economy has been in a tailspin since, made even worse by COVID, energy price spikes, and bungling incompetence by the Tories, who have gone through five Prime Ministers in eight years time—most noteworthy Liz Truss, who was the last Prime Minister to see Queen Elizabeth II alive, and following the official mourning period, launched an economic plan so divorced from reality that in 48 hours the British economy had completely crashed and wiped out years of hard-won gains.
That’s not even including scandals like sewage in the water systems, which were privatized decades ago by the Tories, with the expected result, or that schools are literally, physically collapsing at an alarming rate after the Tories accepted a bid from a contractor using substitute materials for their construction. This has rendered close to a third of the nation’s schools unusable for years while repairs are performed. Rail, another privatized area, has also fallen into disrepair and bankruptcy, forcing the government to renationalize certain lines, instead of just doing it wholesale. The same for the water supplies, piecemeal nationalization only. Inflation is at near-Argentine levels during the winter months, when 60% of the country cannot afford rent and heat. Surely, Labour should smash them at the ballot box, except….
Jeremy Corbyn was driven out of the Labour leadership after a concerted campaign accusing him of anti-Semitism, with the result being that anyone remotely against Israel in any way, including the genocidal Gaza campaign, have been roundly shoved out of candidacy by Labour under Starmer. Much like the Democrats here in America, the only allowable position is fealty to Israel, while Palestinians in politics on both sides of the pond are silenced. Labour has gone so far as to make one of their prime candidates this cycle a guy named Luke Akehurst, who runs a group called We Believe In Israel, and is an ardent Zionist who calls the United Nations antisemitic and describes Jews as “politically black,” while an actual black woman, Diane Abbott, was hung out to dry for a year by Starmer for saying the opposite of Akehurst. It’s driven a severe wedge in the party, creating unnecessary infighting at a time that is least opportune, with many of their leftist base threatening to bolt for the Green Party, which holds….checks notes….ONE seat in Parliament, and that member has resigned.
Despite all of this, despite a platform (manifesto in Britspeak) that is more centrist than the alleged centrist party, the Liberal Democrats, Labour continues to surge in polling, largely based upon the Tories repeatedly and comically shooting themselves in the foot. The campaign was all of six weeks, and somehow, in that time, the Tories managed to do the following:
Have close to two dozen members of the parliamentary party, including Sunak’s own chief aide, be under criminal investigation for illegal betting, placing massive bets on the choice of Election Day hours before it was announced.
PM Rishi Sunak left D-Day celebrations early, the last major D-Day anniversary where any veterans will still be alive to celebrate it, so he could conduct a prescheduled television interview with Sky TV.
Put forth a platform with culture war items up top, at a time where swathes of the country do not have clean drinking water, properly functioning trains, and cannot afford their food, rent and electric bills, and topped off by a massive shortage of doctors caused by the Tories insisting upon the most extreme Brexit possible.
Went on TV to allege the teaching of gender identities and sexual orientations to young children, while only citing a paper put out by two extreme right-wing groups with zero evidence other than, “We say so.”
Refused to consider any sort of revenue raising measures, including sanctioning the privatized water/rail companies that sold ownership to overseas investors while refusing to perform basic maintenance.
In short, the Tories had fourteen years in charge, utterly torched the country and its economy, and are trying to pit genders, age groups, and races against each other in a desperate bit to suppress turnout and cling to power. Labour has run a bland, colorless campaign designed to offend nobody and say, “We are competent, please elect us so we can be competent and fix this hellhole.” They keep ruling out any wealth taxes or increases to top-level income taxes, despite it being necessary should they want to achieve anything they want to do, let alone fix everything that is broken.
Britain is a nation on the brink, a preview of our future in America under Trump should he regain office. What happens tomorrow should give us an idea if we have hope in voter sanity, or despair for the remnants of democracy.