Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

The general election was not just a crushing defeat for Corbynism. It was a resounding verdict on the entire history of “Labourism”. Labourism is the name of a specific political ideology – a habit of political thought and action – that is almost unique to the British left. According to this belief, there is only one true vehicle for progressive politics, the Labour party. Trade unions have their place – to represent their members at an “industrial” level, in workplaces and on shop floors – but actual political campaigning must be delegated to the party, and the primary focus of the party must be winning elections. No other party can ever represent the working class, and any political movement that is not subservient to either unions or party is to be treated with the greatest suspicion. The naive belief in the unique political virtue of the Labour party consistently prevents it from developing creative political strategies. Decade after decade, Labour has pursued no other cour...

Will Boris Johnson agree a trade deal with the EU?  Yes. That is his aim and he has a good chance. By announcing the deadline will be set in law, however, the prime minister has set his sights low. It will be near-impossible to negotiate much beyond a bare bones deal covering trade in goods during the time available. Mr Johnson has emphasised his aim is to remove tariffs and quotas on all goods trade. The EU27 also have an interest in such a deal; collectively they have a large surplus in trade in goods. But there will be pitfalls. Watch out for French insistence that fisheries be included in any deal and that Britain give assurances that it will not seek to undercut EU standards on labour and the environment.  Will Britain’s Labour party return to electability? No. Labour’s outgoing leaders have recommended a “period of reflection” on the way forward for the UK’s main opposition party after its worst election defeat since 1935. Those still in the party who feared o...

In the 2019 election, the Brexit Party stood only in opposition seats and asked its candidates to stand down in Conservative-held seats. Pippa Norris estimates that the impact of this strategy doubled Johnson’s parliamentary majority. So, despite his party being wiped out in this election, Farage’s role has been one of kingmaker in terms of both the predominance of the Brexit agenda and the size of the Conservative majority. On election night and its aftermath, all the headline attention focused on Boris Johnson’s triumphant 80-seat parliamentary majority, the Conservative party’s largest since 1987. This result is all the more remarkable given years of austerity cuts by successive Tory governments, doubts about Johnson’s flamboyant character, and fratricidal internal party division over Britain’s membership of the EU. The outcome has been attributed to the focused message and disciplined, but ultra-vague repetition of the ‘Get Brexit done’ mantra, and the aggressive targeting o...

Woke politics has been a disaster for the left. For all Jeremy Corbyn’s emphasis on economic inequality, his continual appeasement of the woke middle-class has alienated Labour’s traditional support base. His most raucous cheerleaders have been those committed to a divisive form of identity politics, in which race, gender and sexuality supersede issues of class. In the run-up to the General Election, Corbyn even publicly announced his pronouns at an LGBT event, a gesture guaranteed to please the few and baffle the many. Why is it that there seems to be such a close correlation between those who champion identitarian grievances and those who mistrust democracy? I suspect it comes down to a sense of entitlement, one that for obvious reasons is likely to be more common among the more privileged in society. We have seen this on university campuses where, as studies repeatedly show, the universities with the most affluent students are those most likely to have issues with censorship. ...

A simple one today, a video of Paul Mason interviewed by France 24 after the election. This demonstrates the degree of lack of understanding by the left. In this, Mason actually manages to call people in Northern towns outright racists but then goes on to say the only way that Labour can beat the Tories is by an alliance with the centre left and by offering northern voters "something" but can't actually say what that might be. He seems to fail to note that it was the likes of him that drove Labour away from the centre left to the hard left, exactly the position that prevents any alliance with the centre left because the Limp Dim's simply won't do business with them and even the SNP will only do so if it means independence. There's a fundamental failure of any coherent logic, how is the hard left going to compromise to the Limp Dims when the entire purpose of Corbyn and the party electoral changes is to prevent any form of centrism. Apparently there...

The 2019 general election will be remembered as one of the most consequential elections in Britain’s recent history. Aside from rejecting a more economically radical Labour Party, the British people used the election to provide what their elected representatives had been unable to provide: an answer to Brexit. For Boris Johnson and the Conservative party, the election was a triumph. They won their largest majority since 1987 and the largest majority for any party since New Labour’s second landslide in 2001.  Remarkably, and despite older arguments about the ‘costs of ruling’, a Conservative Party that had been in power for nearly a decade attracted nearly 44 per cent of the vote; this was not only its highest share since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 but its fourth consecutive increase since entering power in 2010. A Conservative party leader who had been widely derided before the election became, after John Major, only the second...