July 6, 2024
Not since Samson brought down the temple has there been such a disaster as this week’s British election. In American terms it was a perfect case of ‘throw the bums out.’
Good show. Healthy democracies need to be purged and renovated. Britain’s Tories (Conservatives) were in power for 14 long years. Far too long. They lurched from scandal to incompetency to sheer buffoonery.
I have always been a passionate Anglophone. I almost went to Cambridge and King’s College London. The nicest thing my father ever did was to take me to visit majestic Warrick Castle. I admire the British for being superb soldiers, valiant mariners and brilliant talkers. After all, they command what has become the world’s language. But they are not always great political leaders.
Ousted prime minister Rishi Sunak was a decent fellow with great family wealth. But he was no politician. In an unbelievable gaff, he turned his back on D-Day veterans at the Normandy Celebrations, which have become a semi-religious event to the western nations. He should have invited Vladimir Putin since it was Russia/the Soviet Union that really won World War II.
Then there was the transcendentally stupid plan to ship third world migrants from Britain back to – of all places – Rwanda! Who thought up this hare-brained scheme? Monty Python or Benny Hill? Or the lugubrious conservative Reese-Mogg.
Why on earth did the Conservatives appoint a prime minister of Indian background, and then a confused Chancellor of the Exchequer from Africa? They must have known that many Brits are wary of foreigners. We saw this in Britain’s foolish, disastrous exit from EU membership. The chief proponent of this foolish gambit was Nigel Farage who won a parliamentary seat.
Britons have had enough Third Worlders. They are tired of trying to provoke war with Russia. At least Farage got it right when he had the courage to say that that the US and NATO forced Russia into the Ukraine War.
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party is no longer the old hard left party. His party is a collection of trendy-lefties and petit bourgeois voters. They were not graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, but smart enough to see that the Tories were confused and inept. The tidal wave of Labour votes across central and northern Britain could set a leftward trend for many years to come.
Starmer will not have to fight with the mighty Rothschilds to see who will really run the Conservative Party. The Rothschilds managed to purge Labour of its ardent left-wingers, led by Jeremy Corbin, by mounting a noisy campaign alleging the party was packed by anti-Semites.
In reality, many hard leftists were critical of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, not anti-Semites. But in the UK, with its narrow-minded press, criticism of Israel’s human rights violations is always countered by bogus claims that the critics are anti-Semites. Press baron Rupert Murdoch led the attacks on Labor’s left and supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
I’m sure Starmer will do a better job than the bumbling Sunak. We have not seen a really strong Labour leader since the odious but clever Tony Blair, a creature of the Murdoch press empire.
Today’s Brits have lost their warlike panache. But it will return. Over my bed hangs the magnificent ‘Scotland forever – Charge of the Scots Grey’s’ at Waterloo., by Lady Jane Butler. I still thrill at the memory of the storming of the Alma, Rorke’s Drift, the Thin Red Line at Balaclava (which I’ve reverently visited,), Sir Richard Grenville’s ‘Revenge’ taking on most of the Spanish Fleet. This is the true Briton, not the recent bunch of clowns at Westminster. Sir Keir, make England proud again!
Copyright. Eric S. Margolis
New York and Toronto
This post is in: Great Britain
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