Up until July 4, Nigel Farage was the most influential politician to never have won a domestic election in the U.K.
That changed when Farage, after several tries, finally got elected Britain’s House of Commons, essentially the British version of U.S. House of Representatives.
This outcome was a declaration of independence from the political establishment.
In the parliamentary election, Farage and four other members of the upstart, populist Reform Party managed to win seats, which is a difficult proposition in the way the country’s electoral system is structured.
Farage, a close and well-known confidant of ex-President Donald Trump, and a longtime member (pre-Brexit) of the European Parliament, is perhaps the best orator in the world.
And he doesn’t need a teleprompter, file cards, or planted questions.
If President Trump wins in November, it will be beneficial to have at least one or more vocal advocates in the U.K, parliament.
Trump’s Unofficial Ambassador
According to to a GB News report, moreover, Farage may be Trump’s backchannel, more or less, to the U.K., traditionally one of America’s strongest allies, because the new U.K. foreign secretary suffers from Trump derangement syndrome.
“If Farage is on the opposition benches, he’ll become [Trump’s] link with the UK,” political commentator Theo Usherwood claimed.
Farage’s victory came in the same election where the far-left Labor Party, with a similar identity-politics philosophy to the Democrats here, won in a landslide over the incumbent “Conservative” Party, a.k.a. the Tories, unseating the latter after 14 years in power.
Labor should really consider changing its name, though, because the party generally represents the “progressive,” London-centric, globalist, open-borders elite, predictably including most media outlets, rather than the ordinary working man or woman.
Now that it has power, it remains to be seen if Labor will come up with a procedural gimmick to try to impede Farage from speaking regularly in the House of Commons or even prevent him from questioning new Prime Minister Keir Starmer directly in a legislative session regularly set aside for that purpose known as Question Time.
Farage’s speeches in the mostly ceremonial and globalist-dominated EU assembly were epic.
Here in the U.S., we obviously vote separately for Member of Congress and the president.
The U.K. prime minister as the head of government is functional equivalent to a president.
By voting for their local parliamentary candidate, U.K. voters only indirectly vote for the prime minister.
The incumbent prime minister and the would-be prime minister, who seek election like other candidates in their own constituencies (roughly like congressional districts), are very influential on voting behavior.
No Real Choice
The choice between PM Rishi Sunak for the Conservatives [in name only] and Starmer for Labor, however, might have been akin to a scenario where, e.g., American voters this fall have a choice between Harris/Biden and a RINO like Mitt Romney instead of Donald Trump.
The Tories probably made a big mistake in pushing out the charismatic Boris Johnson, Sunak’s predecessor, over Partygate, even though Johnson was pretty much all talk, and no action, and also allegedly has his fingerprints on the Ukraine war.
As an aside, independent journalist Tucker Carlson claims that Johnson recently demanded a $1 million payment to sit down for an interview.
Labor Landslide
Some Conservative heavy-hitters lost their seats on Thursday, including Jacob Reese-Mogg, Liz Truss (who was prime minister for 45 days before Sunak took over), and Penny Mordaunt.
Unlike in the U.S., the U.K., the transition occurs essentially immediately, and there is no separation between what we would consider the executive and legislative branches of government.
That is to say, various members of parliament simultaneously serve as government ministers, or agency heads in U.S. terms, in the prime minister’s cabinet.
In Britain, only the ruling party, i.e., the party (or coalition) that manages to win at least 326 seats in 650-member Commons and selects the prime minister, is considered “the government.”
Labor now has 412 seats.
Broken Promises
The Tories threw away their majority from the 2019 election by governing like RINOs and failing miserably to fulfill campaign promises.
Many voters felt they were being governed by a globalist Uniparty, and that a mere change in management would make little difference on the ground.
In the aftermath of the election, Suella Braverman, one of the few high-level Conservatives who attempted to respect the will of the voters in her tenure as Home Secretary (similar to Homeland Security secretary), had this to say on GB News:
“We didn’t deliver on our promises, and we were not a conservative party. We said we wanted to lower immigration; we categorically did not do that. We said we wanted to lower taxation; we raised taxes. We said we were the party of common sense, and yet children were mutilated in our schools and in our [National Health Service] on our watch. That’s why we failed…unfortunately, as I’ve set out over the months, the prime minister didn’t support me on the plan to lower migration, which is why immigration soared…We promised time and time again to lower immigration. We didn’t do it. We promised time and time again to stop the boats. We didn’t do it. And that’s on us. And so I think that that’s why we failed…”
The subtext here is that Braverman might be positioning herself to run for the Tory leadership or even switch to Reform.
In the election itself, turnout was down, and evidently some voters switched to Labor as a protest vote.
The U.K. uses paper ballots, and it uses a kind of a quaint but dignified and perhaps unifying procedure in which all of the candidates in each constituency appears on stage together in the location as the results are publicly announced. The country does allow mail-in ballots, though.
As phony and inept as ex-Prime Minister Sunak and his team turned out to be, Labor under Keir Starmer could be a lot worse, at least judging by the far leftists that he has appointed to his cabinet.
Woke Agenda Incoming
As one initiative, Starmer apparently plans to give early release thousand of convicts.
While a small percentage of them may have been overcharged by prosecutors, this type of agenda-drive decision-making is highly likely to create more victims of violent crime.
Making matters worse, the Labor Party is riddled with corruption and anti-Semitism and seems inclined to engage in lawfare against its political opponents.
Although to their discredit, the Conservatives never fully implemented Brexit, Labor seems intent on walking back whatever national sovereignty measures that actually have been enforced.
U.K. elections are multi-party affairs, which no runoffs, so Labor achieved its landslide with just 34 percent of the overall vote, and with narrow wins in many constituencies, meaning that 64 percent of the overall electorate voted for another party.
Reform finished second in nearly 100 constituencies, however, which is an impressive, if not astounding, result for a start-up organization as a first step to potentially emerging as the primary opposition party in place of the collapsing Tories.
Farage has promised to establish the full-scale political infrastructure to compete in the next scheduled parliamentary election in 2029.
Before then, vacancies could prompt special elections. Plus a variety of local elections and whatnot will occur, during which Reform will make its presence felt.
Political turmoil, which is hardly unknown in Britain, could also result in a national election much sooner than 2029, if Labor lapses into disarray.
According to the New York Post, however, Labor could enact a law postponing the 2029 vote, which maybe wouldn’t be a surprise since the left seldom is okay with giving up power. They have also floated the idea of lowering the voting age to 16.
Like their Democrat counterparts here, they might also try other ways to “expand” the electorate.
Proportional Representation Possibility
Apart from the 400-plus seats won by Labor with about 10 million total votes to Reforms approximately four million, the so-called Liberal Democrats — analogous to Labor Light — received fewer votes than Reform, but wound up winning 65 more MPs than Reform.
Part of that is presumably from targeting winnable seats, but Farage and Reform have vowed to push for proportional representation.
This is a mechanism that is in effect in various other parliamentary democracies in which seats are allocated, at least in part, based on each party’s overall vote percentage.
Labor previously supported PR, but that was then, this is now.
As alluded to above, Farage’s plan to expand the populist base should be taken seriously given his track record and leadership skills.
As the leader of UKIP, he led his party to a 2014 victory in the European Elections, which essentially pressured globalist then-PM David Cameron to go forward with the Brexit referendum, in which British voters decided to leave the European Union.
Farage’s party’s victory in the 2019 European Parliament elections led to Tory Prime Minister Theresa May — who only grudgingly took minimal steps to actually implement Brexit as it was intended — stepping down and Johnson succeeding her.
And it was Farage’s unilateral decision to stand down candidates in the-then Brexit Party that allowed Boris Johnson to win a landslide in December 2019 for the Conservatives.
Although voters approved Brexit on June 23, 2016, the formal separation from the European Union dragged on after a lot of political drama, until January 31, 2020, under Johnson.
Deal with the Devil?
In France, globalist, center-left President Emanuel Macron cooked up a deal with the socialists and his establishment party to prevent Marine Le Pen’s National Rally from winning round two of the French parliamentary elections on Sunday.
Regardless of your opinion of Le Pen, the media’s definition of “far right” now seems to describe anyone who favors an orderly society with secure borders and within which law-abiding citizens enjoy the maximum personal freedom and prosperity.
Although no party gained a majority, in addition to the negative impact on everyday French citizens, the first-place socialists will probably make Macron’s life miserable.
And to the extent that any establishment conservatives went along with this collusion, exactly what have they conserved in France lately?
