Our English correspondent Ivan Winters analyzes the historic victory by Prime Minister Boris “BoJo” Johnson and the Tories in last week’s general election.
The 2019 General Election
by Ivan Winters
I find Boris Johnson does not fit in the conventional stereotypes of British politicians — the last politician you could say that about was Margaret Thatcher.
Looking at the opinion polling it appeared that Boris would win either a majority of a few seats in the HoC or even another hung Parliament. Most reporters and politicians could not see how he could achieve a significant majority with that polling and his very limited range of messages. But it went down well with the voters compared to Jeremy Corbyn, who every day has a new load of promises to yet another voter focus group, all costing billions without explaining how it could all be financed.
Boris’s messages weren’t aimed at focus groups or the pollsters’ socio-economic blocs. They were aimed at ordinary voters in Tory-voting and Labour-voting constituencies. The Tory Party put substantial campaigning resources into taking his message to ‘safe’ Labour seats (like Trump in 2016). They aren’t ‘safe’ Labour seats anymore. Corbyn took them for granted and insulted the intelligence of their voters by calling them ‘stupid’ for voting Brexit in 2016. They are Tory seats now.
Boris achieved his majority not by fighting what the pollsters call a limited number of seats — the ‘key marginals’. He won Labour seats in the North of England — former ‘Redwall’ seats. One of those seats had voted Labour since 1918!
Boris has a record of doing this. London normally votes for Labour candidates, but of course Boris was elected for two terms as a Conservative Mayor and was regarded as a very competent Mayor.
While Boris was smashing Labour’s Redwall seats in England, Labour had a further problem in the former Labour stronghold of Scotland. In 2010 41 out of Scotland’s 59 MPs were Labour. Following the latest gains by the Scottish Nationalists, Labour have just 1 MP in Scotland.
Boris has spent the weekend making a speaking tour of the former Labour heartlands of the North East of England. He has thanked the former Labour voters in that region for ‘lending’ him their votes, and explained what he hopes his government will be able to do for them. He started the speaking tour in Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s old Constituency. Blair once won a majority of 25,000 in Sedgefield — it went Tory by 4,500 votes on Thursday night.
Previous posts by Ivan Winters:
| 2013 | Jan | 4 | A Systemic Failure of Public Responsibility | |||
| 2014 | Sep | 25 | What’s the Real Story in Ukraine? | |||
| 2018 | Dec | 30 | A Gallic Sense of Priorities |
The UK knows only first past the post voting. There is no preferential voting let alone proportional representation.
The 32.1% of the vote for Corbyn gained only 202 seats, and he gained more votes than Blair, Brown and Miliband in past elections for fewer seats than they obtained.
Go figure.
I checked the seat of Rotherham (should prick ears up here). Labour won, but if either 1. the Brexit Party hadn’t stood or 2. there had been proportional representation, the Conservatives (assuming they’d have absorbed the BP’s vote) would have waltzed in.
Many of the victims of the Rotherham sex grooming were not from the Rotherham Parliamentary Constituency but from the neighbouring Rother Valley Constituency. Tories won Rother Valley.
More interestingly the Tories also won the ‘Islamic Republic of Dewsbury’. That includes that well integrated ward of Saviletown where the last census showed that of just over 4000 adults in the ward just 48 listed as ‘White British’ !!
Thank you for that clarification. We in the US might not have dug that deep. I’m a chief election judge in my state so I would have picked up on that kind of thing here but I wouldn’t know where to start in the UK.
“You talk in’ to me!”
Boris reminds me of Nick Griffin. Both are ungainly and have the curious ability to make a good suit look like a tea towel.
It’s not about winning or losing seemingly. It’s how you look while
you are playing.
We had a referendum a few years ago, and asked the British people, what do you want? First past the post (status quo) or proportional representation? The status quo won. Damned Democracy!!! The people just wont do as you command them!
First past the post is odd, but it prevents the multiple party parliaments that many European countries have, and the endless deal making that goes on to get enough of a majority to form a government.
Tories got around 13.5 million votes.
Labour about 10.5 million
Liberal (un)democrats around 3 million.
Others about 1 million
So you could argue that the ‘left’ got 50% of the vote and so did the ‘right’.
Britain is probably split down the middle, as so many countries are.
Not quite. The vast majority of immigrants vote left – and wqithout them the left wouldn’t get a sniff.
A fair point although things have changed in recent years. If by immigrant you mean Muslim you are correct. Many Chinese, Japanese, Malays, Hindus and Sikhs are well integrated, often successfull businessmen, with strong values of law & order. They vote Tory.
Some of the richer and better educated Muslims are also starting to vote Tory. Corbyn’s anti business rantings horrified them. They were also impressed that BoJo’s senior leadership team had two Asians in it, Pritti Patel as Home Sec and Sajid Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer. All Corbyn had in his top team was the ghastly incompetent Dianne Abbott as Shadow Home Sec (she is West Indian). She wasn’t in his top team for her competence (she is a media disaster area) or her ethnicity, she was in because she is Corbyn’s ex-girlfriend !!
You first para is interesting, Ivan. As a “liberal” (UK style), I detested Margaret Thatcher, though some of her reforms were needed. However I do respect her as a conviction politician; what you saw was what you got.
BoJo is a total opportunist, I believe, wanting power for its own sake rather than because he believes in anything, other than being an ideological Conservative. He was a disaster as London Mayor, but then so were some of his Labour predecessors (Livingstone) and successors (Khan).
I didn’t see Boris undermining the Police ! Crime figures have soared under Sadiq Khan.
Many of the infrastructure projects that are running late under Khan were started by Boris. Other essential infrastructure projects such as upgrades to the London Underground are being delayed because of lack of revenue. Khan was elected with a promise of 4 years no increases in fares. So no essential upgrades because of his gesture politics.
London is often closed down on weekends because of demonstrations that Khan has permitted. Result reduced revenue for West End shops, tourists not enjoying coming to London and the wives/families of foreign executives of major companies that invest in London feeling unsafe to go on the streets.
The London Olympics was regarded as a major success.
How is this a ‘disaster’ as Mayor.
My writing career began in 2013 when the friend who knew most about Islam told me that British MPs were simply ignorant, and if the true nature of Islam was made clear to them then they would bring about an end to the Islamization of the UK. I told him he was wrong, and that the elite know the nature of Islam but are either cowardly or are engineering the Islamization of the West. The friend refused to talk to me again, claiming my views were “a conspiracy theory”. If someone like him could be so knowledgeable and yet so naive, I knew I would have to set about demonstrating that the elite are careful to conceal what they know to be true.
Easy Meat was my first attempt at using a contemporary social problem to prove that the elite knew what was going on and permitted it to continue. There was documentary evidence going back to the 1990s showing that charities, police, local government and MPs knew about the gangs and their ethnicity (that evidence can now be dated back to the 1970s). The history of the Islamic trade in sex slaves (particularly white females) had been enshrined by artists across Europe in the century leading up to the 1960s.
Mohammed’s Koran was where I set about proving that the concept of “the Religion of Peace” was a Grand Lie, a lie unknown before 9/11 and the Republican POTUS Bush Jr. espoused this lie. All Islamic scholarship in the West up to the end of the twentieth century acknowledged the political violence inherent in Islam.
The final 4th edition of Mohammed’s Koran was ready for publication just before the election. It contains multiple quotes from BoJo showing that as long ago as 2004 he was publicly evincing his knowledge about the true nature of Islam. Here are two of the quotations included in the book:
“Islam… is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers”.
“Remember what it says in the Holy Koran… ‘slay the unbelievers wherever you can find them… besiege them, and lie in ambush for them everywhere… We will perform jihad against the Kuffar, the unbelievers'”.
The latter quotation is now on the front cover of Mohammed’s Koran. The UK has a leader who 15 years ago demonstrated he knew the true nature of Islam (sufficient to summarize Koran 9:5 as the pivotal verse in explaining Islamic terrorism against unbelievers). But Johnson would never have been allowed to be leader of The “Conservative” Party if he hadn’t recanted since and subsequently declared Islam to be “a Religion of Peace”. In the weeks before the election the Leftist British media poured over Johnson’s past statements to try to denigrate him, but strangely they were careful to omit his truth-telling on the nature of Islam. Surveys already showed that of those Brits with an opinion on Islam the majority are opposed to Islam.
Boris Johnson typifies the problem in the West. The elite know the true nature of Islam and what Islamization means in terms of a violent future for the people of the West. But these politicians, academics and the media lie to the public. By the time politicians who speak the truth are in power it will be because the violence is endemic.