Within days of Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party winning a “stonking” majority, as the British say, in the December 12 U.K. elections, the successful candidates were sworn in as members of parliament (MPs). There is no two-month gap like in the U.S. Congress. Johnson himself had to win reelection in his London-area seat to maintain his eligibility to serve as prime minister.
Johnson’s effective campaign slogan was “get Brexit done.”
This outcome could be a precursor to Donald Trump’s reelection in 2020 as well as give further encouragement to populist movements across Europe (although the Conservatives are hardly populists).
It was a big rebound for the Conservatives from May 2019 local elections when they got clobbered in a protest vote over then Prime Minister Theresa May’s failure to implement Brexit. Later that month, the Brexit Party newly founded by Nigel Farage defeated all the establishment parties in the European parliamentary elections for similar reasons.
Wasting little time, MPs on December 20 voted by 358 to 234 in favor of Johnson’s “oven-ready” withdrawal agreement, which requires Britain to at long last leave the European Union on January 31, which will then cue a one-year transition period.
The terms of the political divorce have yet to be finalized.
Remainers in parliament, the House of Commons, voted no.
The previous Remain-dominated parliament blocked Brexit for three-plus years, thus betraying the will of the people who voted to leave the EU in the June 2016 referendum..
Although the charismatic and verbose Johnson has a reputation of being disorganized, his inner circle is putting forth an ambitious legislative agenda, which includes photo ID to vote, which is predictably triggered the leftists.
Boris Derangement Syndrome
Blue-check Twitter Remaniacs/Remoaners in and out of the media and opposition Labor Party officials and supporters have also predictably accused Johnson (plus those who voted Conservative) as being racist, sexist, and all the other “ists.” This after years of fear mongering that Brexit would result in Y2K 2.0.
These accusations seem a manifestation of Boris Derangement Syndrome (BDS). It’s the same playbook those suffering with Trump Derangement Syndrome use.
Not an outsider by any means, however, Johnson is a Big Government Conservative who, as mayor of London for eight years, governed in a pretty liberal manner.
Breitbart London columnist James Delingpole observed the following in the run-up to the election:
“Trump understands that the MSM is almost entirely toxic, hostile and counterproductive — and that therefore the best way to deal with it is to bypass it altogether, apart from occasionally goading it, usually via his personal Twitter account…British conservatives like Boris still worry far, far too much about courting the good opinion of the legacy media and far too little about the needs and desires of real people in the world beyond the metropolitan elite bubble which the legacy media mainly represents. ”
Even though Johnson has distanced himself from President Trump because of media pressure, the POTUS has vowed to fast-track a trade deal with the U.K., and the two men are set to meet in the near future to get things going.
BRINO or a Clean-Break Brexit?
Many have insisted that the Boris Johnson withdrawal agreement and the accompanying political declaration constitute a watered-down version of Brexit, not much different than predecessor Theresa May’s failed deal.
Johnson has insisted, however, that his plan will indeed allow the U.K. to break free from EU institutional control. Time will tell.
A One-Year Divorce
According to anti-Brexit pundit Andrew Sullivan, the opportunistic Boris Johnson has a history of broken promises as he advanced his career.
Writing in The Atlantic on December 20, Tom McTague suggests that a Brexit in Name Only 2.0, however, may not be on the horizon after all:
“In the immediate aftermath of last week’s seismic general election, many commentators and analysts speculated that regardless of Johnson’s hard-line Brexit rhetoric, the outcome of his emphatic victory might actually be a ‘softer’ departure from the European Union. Such was the scale of his victory, the argument went, that Johnson was now liberated from his party’s most euroskeptic wing. This meant that he was freer to negotiate a close future relationship with the EU, in which Britain would remain largely aligned with the regulatory standards set in Brussels in return for good market access. In other words, the economic turbulence of Brexit would be limited. Ultimately, these commentators argued, Johnson is a man of no real principle who will quickly turn on his more ideological colleagues once it becomes clear that he will be politically damaged by the economic impact of a ‘hard’ break with Brussels.
“Don’t hold your breath. While Johnson may yet prove his critics right and accept close economic alignment with the EU, doing so would undermine everything he has argued for and prioritized as a politician (and indeed, written about as a journalist). If his words and actions are taken at face value (admittedly a big if), last week’s general-election victory is unlikely to be the end of Britain’s Brexit drama. It will be only the beginning….
“The problem is that the transition period, which runs until the end of 2020, is not long enough for much to be agreed on at all. Basically, unless the United Kingdom requests an extension to this period, something Johnson has categorically said he will not do, both sides have less than a year to agree on a trade deal, avoiding the imposition of tariffs, quotas, checks, and controls… Taken to its logical conclusion, and given the limited amount of time to reach an agreement, Johnson’s philosophy suggests that there will be only the thinnest of trade deals between the U.K. and the EU—or indeed, no agreement at all.”
Some arrogant, ungrateful Conservatives are still complaining that the Brexit Party cost Johnson’s roster of additional seats. Just the opposite is the case. BXP Leader Nigel Farage’s decision to stand down in 317 Conservative (a.k.a. Tory) constituencies plus winning a huge chunk of the Labor Leave vote elsewhere actually helped the Tories gain their majority.
The former UKIP leader and member of the mostly ceremonial European parliament where he heads the 29-member BXP delegation, Farage is perhaps the most influential politician never to have been elected to Commons. The June 23, 2016, Brexit referendum never would have happened without Farage championing it.
Even Farage seems cautiously optimistic that Johnson will follow through on his pledge.
Tactical Voting for the Tories
Moreover, many voters held their nose on December 12 and voted Tory on a tactical basis to prevent Labor from winning enough seats to install the Marxist anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister.
Labor (or Labour) has a power base that is concentrated among limousine liberals — a.k.a. champagne socialists or luxury Marxists — in London similar to how U.S. Democrats have become a coastal party funded by progressive elites in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and among Manhattan hedge funds, plus forced union dues.
Reflecting on Labor’s landslide loss in Unherd, Grame Archer made this observation about how finger-pointing Labor has become totally disconnected from its working-calls roots:
“The Labour Party (not “The Left”) is history. Even when Blair reduced the Conservatives to their heartlands in the 1990s, the party still had heartlands. Labour, in 2019, doesn’t. It’s a collective noun for student Marxists, trades union hard-men, and spiteful anti-Semites. That’s not a political party: it’s a pathogen. A pathogen with nowhere to replicate…Neither will intellectual renewal come from the fourth estate for ‘moderate’ Labour (the scare quotes around ‘moderate’ are apposite, because I’m unclear how MPs who willingly empowered a hard-Left, terrorist-succouring leadership, and wanted you to vote it into power, could label themselves thus). The columnist cheerleaders of ‘moderate’ Labour, social democracy, whatever – they’ll keep coughing up their pro-EU yawn pieces, laced with their Boris hatred, until economic reality catches up with their increasingly un-read newspapers…”
In the U.K., it is a crime, believe it or not, for consumers to avoid paying their BBC license fee — a haul that constitutes a massive 75 percent of the broadcaster’s revenue.
The BBC have devolved into a left-wing, pro-EU propaganda outlet should not be funded by the taxpayer in any capacity. The Johnson administration has floated the idea of de-criminalizing the fee (and hopefully, at some point, eliminating it altogether).
Delingpole suggests that the U.K. Tories are slow learners about opposition party media which is just as bad, if not worse, than in our country.
“And I think their failure to learn the lesson from Donald Trump is a major part of it. In Britain, as in the U.S. , the mainstream media is the implacable enemy of free markets, free speech, fiscal responsibility, limited government, controlled immigration, sensible policies on energy and the environment, or anything else that smacks remotely of conservative values. Therefore, it needs either to kept at a distance or better still ignored altogether.”
The U.K. Deep State
Along these lines, former MP Douglas Carswell on December 17 recommended “bursting the blob” (the U.S. equivalent of draining the swamp) perhaps through more direct referenda like Brexit:
“The Brahmin class has morphed into what we would today call the Remain establishment. Their hold over public institutions has become entrenched. Judicial activism has formalized their ability to intervene in public policymaking…in academia, public broadcasting and much of the public sector, the Brahmin class’s outlook and assumptions have become a kind of creed. Unless one subscribes to it, it’s impossible to join the caste. Diverge from it and you can be expelled altogether.
“If Conservatives last week defeated Marx, as personified by Comrade Corbyn and John McDonnell, their next battle must be against Gramsci — as personified by the army of Guardianista quangocrats whose long march through our institutions currenlty means that we get a left-wing agenda in almost every sphere of public policymaking irrespective of who we elect…A far-reaching shake-up of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the state who is long overdue. Making those who preside over public administration more directly accountable is the key.”
In a separate Breitbart London column, Delingpole made these observations about BDS and TDS:
“Suffice to say that one of the surest signs that Boris Johnson’s victory is a very good thing and not a bad thing is the effect it has had on the forces of the regressive left… Some of [Johnson’s] policies…will be effective; others…will be a complete waste of space…What matters far more than politics, though, is the surrounding culture. It’s here, I believe, that we are going to experience the most important benefits of the Boris Johnson revolution. Boris is an optimist, a patriot, a lover of the good things in life — wine, women, song, fast cars, Greek epic poetry…He has no time for the puritanism of the left, nor for the narrow reductivism of identity politics, nor for constraints on freedom of speech…Boris Johnson is going to have the same effect on Britain as Donald Trump has on the U.S. They’re different people, with different styles, but they’re both going to make their countries great again.”
[Featured image credit: U.K. government, Wikimedia Commons, Open Government Licence v3.0]
