Britain’s General Election
Scottish and Northern Ireland Unionists took my advice and, quite unexpectedly in Scotland’s case, saved the UK from a Corbyn government.
The closeness of the election was apparently due to the decline of UKIP: Their pro-Brexit working class voters reverted back to Labour while their white collar voters returned to the Tories.
I am not familiar enough with the negotiating minutiae to guess how the results will impact Brexit talks beyond causing their delay while the Tories decide on how to conduct a leadership challenge.
I do know that the Corbyn-Mandelson dynamic still has a ways to play out within Labour particularly with Brexit negotiations looming (with or without PM May) and the Corbyn wing being quietly anti-EU and the Mandelson wing being in the tank for Juncker, et al.
Originally, the Fabian’s were expecting May to crush Corbyn for them. But by overperforming it has become impossible for the Blairites to remove Corbyn on their own.
Corbyn rubs the Blairite wing the wrong way because Corbyn, as an actual Marxist, doesn’t want to crush the remnants of the British proletariat. Blairite Fabians, which is to say “Anti-Proleterian Communists” are very interested in finishing the bastards off once and for all, regardless whether or not the end game sees the ISIS flag raised over Westminster for good.
How well Corbyn can keep a hold on his party with the still powerful Mandelson partisans looming in the background will go a long way to explaining how the next election goes.
The Tories would be well advised to encourage tensions between Labour’s proletarian and anti-proletarian factions as much as possible.
Comey – Again
It’s time to start considering a pardon of Flynn and other former, or current advisers, such as Manafort for any procedural crimes (perjury, tax evasion, registration issues, etc) if the Russian investigation is now focused on a reckless fishing expedition for procedural crimes, not an underlying “collusion” crime with Russia.
I’m tempted to say Trump should also consider eliminating the special counsel since Comey admitted he manipulated the administration into appointing one in order to convert the original intelligence probe (which is not a criminal investigation) into a criminal investigation.
However, why would Comey admit empowering a special counsel was his intent?
By saying this Comey, now exposed as the devious operator I always said he was, must know that his admitting it to the Senate will only risk provoking Trump into firing the special counsel.
Does Comey actually want Trump to fire Mueller?
If so, why?
Dilbertian Persuasion
In terms of spinning this pointless distraction to his advantage, Trump should continue to undermine Comey’s aura as a subject matter expert by raising more confusion in the minds of voters about what is actually being investigated.
Something, more or less, along these lines:
- “Comey testified I am innocent of collusion. If there was no collusion, why isn’t the case closed?” “Bizarre/Strange/Weird”!
- “If there was no collusion, what was Comey DOING this whole time?”
- “The investigation is pointless if Comey says there was no collusion. This is a media distraction.”
Obamacare Repeal
The odds of the Senate approving a repeal bill are good so long as Trump holds the possibility of ending exchange subsidies over the heads of Senators. The exchanges are imploding. As they fall apart the Senate will calculate, correctly, that they will eventually have to vote on something to fix the exchanges. If actual legislation is inevitable they might as well come to an agreement soon on a partial repeal now that the House has sent them their bill and they have a Republican President eager to sign something.
Based on reporting it seems the last remaining obstacle to a deal is how to phase out the Medicaid expansion. I recommend breaking the deadlock over this issue by giving a longer phaseout to any state if a Republican Senator wants their own state exempted. The remaining states would have Medicaid phased out more quickly. This may be the best compromise for Conservative Senators who want a more aggressive timeline and Moderate Republicans who worry about their own constituents losing coverage.
Pragmatically Distributed 
The decline of UKIP was a factor, but May ran a terrible campaign. She ducked out of debates, gave wooden interviews in which she just repeated weak, tautological soundbites, introduced policies at the last moment that then had to be scrapped within a few days, and was relentlessly negative in the face of Corbyn’s much more appealing old-fashioned politeness and reasonableness.Most unforviveable of all she offered nothing but weakness in the face of Islamic terror thereby passing up the chance to look statesmanlike and to actually do something useful for her country.
I’ve long been of the opinion that Brexit may never happen, and people are already talking about the ‘soft’ Brexit of not pulling out of the single market–in other words, not leaving the EU at all. Having said that, I’m of the opinion that if the Tories were to elect a new and better leader and then have another election in which they don’t make the stupid mistakes that they made in this one, they could do a lot better next time.
Who do you prefer take the helm from May?
Boris, Gove, Davis?
May’s weak campaign was certainly the main factor.
But she also took the UKIP vote for granted by assuming their voters would overwhelmingly default to the Tories. But for that to happen the working class needed a reason to vote for her. May didn’t offer a reason against Corbyn who knows how to appeal to traditional Labour voters and the collapse in UKIP support wound up being more or less a wash.
Having some glitches here, my laptop doesn’t like your site. Boris and Davis would both be a big improvement. I don’t know whether the party bigwigs have forgiven Boris for Brexit though.
My choice–Jacob Rees Mogg. An outsider, but still would be in the running. If you haven’t heard him and are interested, he’s a very entertaining and agile speaker. Like Boris in some ways, but for real.
“But she also took the UKIP vote for granted by assuming their voters would overwhelmingly default to the Tories”
True, but wiser commentators saw that coming and so should she. But you are right in your analysis.
I do think Corbyn may have hit a ceiling with the support he can get and that he may even lose some of the ephemeral youth vote next time. He won’t have the advantage of being the overperforming underdog too.
Having some glitches here, my laptop doesn’t like your site.
Is it a new or old laptop? Does it run Microsoft, mac, or Linux?
I have seen Mogg’s name come up when I periodically scan the British papers, but don’t know a good deal about him.
How popular is Corbyn actually when you exclude the youth vote? His policies seem like they would be alarming in many respects to older, centrist voters. If his appeal is limited and more a reflection of anti-May sentiment he could rapidly lose centrist support at the next election when, unlike this campaign, he would have more realistic odds of winning. A protest vote given to Corbyn when he was expected to be blown out 1983 style is one thing, to actually put him in power is a whole other calculation.
There’s an interesting angle to this wrt Northern Ireland. This was already going to be an awkward situation because this is the only part of the UK with a land border with an EU state. Whether this border would remain open or be closed has, as you can imagine, has consequences either way. The fact that fate has put a Northern Irish party in such a key position is a brilliantly chaotic twist. Brexit really is the gift that keeps on giving.
‘How popular is Corbyn…’
Yes, this comment is exactly right. I’ve heard that a lot of local labour candidates used this precise tactic in their local campaigns. Next time around a lot of older people would come off the fence and vote to keep him out. The Tories made a huge mistake by suddenly introducing a policy concerning the way they would recoup the costs of care for the elderly from middle class homeowner’s properties. There was a slump in her support from that moment on. But that’s the kind of thing that can be easily fixed with soothing overtones next time.
My laptop is Microsoft…I think it’s the anti virus that’s causing it. But then I’m a techno-neanderthal so as far as I’m concerned it could just as easily be Jupiter rising or a surfeit of melancholy.
Yes.
British Unionists voting to secede from European “Unionists”.
Search a bit for whether there is a whitelist feature on your antivirus. If there is one, add the site to it and see if that improves things.
Steve Sailer has some of the demographic data from the election: British Jews 75% for May. The anti-semitism (I don’t use the term lightly but in this case it’s justified) of the Labour Party and Corbyn seems to have hit home. I was quite surprised when I was in Jerusalem last year that Corbyn’s views were well known, although I suppose I shouldn’t have been. Given the relative size of the Jewish and Muslim communities I suppose Corbyn feels it is a position worth holding.
The anti-semitism (I don’t use the term lightly but in this case it’s justified) of the Labour Party and Corbyn seems to have hit home.
Milliband also lost British Jews, though he lost them by margins somewhat narrower than Corbyn’s.
I think the Blairites, like other Progressive EU European leaders, were essentially as anti-Israel as Corbyn. EU policies on the West Bank if implemented would in practice have as much negative impact on Israel as Corbyn’s would.
Corbyn merely drops the diplomatic jargon that Blair and Brown couched their language in when Palestine was the foreign policy topic.
I was quite surprised when I was in Jerusalem last year that Corbyn’s views were well known, although I suppose I shouldn’t have been. Given the relative size of the Jewish and Muslim communities I suppose Corbyn feels it is a position worth holding.
On the Continent both Progressive and Communist parties gave up whatever is left of their Jewish populations for the Muslim vote decades ago.
Aside from basic electoral arithmetic there is also the fact EU Progressives are increasingly afraid of angering their Islamic immigrants.
To establishment European Liberals the perceived advantage to increasingly overt bashing of Israel is that it may divert anger that could be channeled into serious rioting and domestic terrorism while they face little consequences from getting into diplomatic spats with the Israelis.