Conservative Party in UK Suffers Huge Losses at the Hands of Labour

The British elections are over and the Conservative Party has taken a major beating from the Labour Party.  Prime Minister Theresa May, in an effort to dominate the election due to very good polling numbers of late, opted to take a very strange course of action by calling the elections three years earlier than schedule.  The rule is unusual and very unlike anything we’re used to in this country, but leave it to the British to do something absolutely weird in their political realm.

Theresa May is the leader of the Conservative Party.  Now, before you begin to get depressed, understand that May is the equivalent in this country of John McCain.  She obediently walks the meek gray line between the Left and the Right…an Establishmentariat in Parliament, through and through, to be sure.  So, it’s not exactly the same as what we have here in this country.

That being said, there has been quite a schism forming in this country’s Conservative sect of the Republican Party that mimics the British counterpart.  The George Wills and the Bill Kristols of the faux-Conservatives have fallen from grace in the eyes of true Conservatives in that they no longer care for the caviar being served at the soirees of their constituencies.  Since getting a taste of the Establishment caviar, they’ve gone all in and they’re not going to dip their toes in the waters of discontent like the rest of us.  They will remain on their lofty perches of mild distaste in order to stay above the fracas occurring below them, down in the trenches where the real Conservative warriors are doing battle.

So, here we have the Conservative Party (think Bill Kristol crossed with Lindsay Graham…I apologize in advance for that mental picture) and the Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn.  The Labour Party is the equivalent of the modern-day Democrat Party and Corbyn is Joe Biden, except a little younger.

Before the election, the Conservative Party held a 330-232 edge in Parliament.  That’s a huge majority and many (now clearly known as unreliable) polls found Theresa May’s party to be polling very high in opinion and there was a very good chance that, should the election be held now, they stood to gain an even more significant majority.  May, in a very odd call, decided that the elections SHOULD be held now.  So, she changed the elections so that they could be held THREE YEARS EARLY.

Sounds bizarre to us here in America, but that’s exactly what they did.  The results were spectacularly lackluster.

May’s Conservative Party lost a huge amount of seats and the Labour Party gained big.  The current balance of power now stands at 318-262.  Now, while the Conservative Party still holds a majority, it no longer holds a plurality, meaning that their powers are not locked in.  They cannot push things through without some sort of compromise.  With 650 Members of Parliament (MPs) total, the absolute majority would require 326 members.  Obviously, the Conservative Party fell short of that goal.

Look at it like this:  When the Democrats held Congress in Obama’s first term and they wanted to force through the Unaffordable Care Act, they did.  Easy peasy.  There was absolutely no way that the Republicans would have been able to stop them.  So the monstrosity known as Obamacare became reality.  That was the situation in which the Conservative Party in the UK found itself, up until yesterday.  It had the ability to push through legislation that didn’t have any hope of being halted.  Now, the tables have turned.

As can be seen by the election map above, the Conservative Party in blue and the DUP in orange and purple make up the allied parties in the majority.  The red is the Labour Party and the Yellow is the third largest, the Scottish National Party (SNP).  As you see, the Labour Party makes up the very dense inner city areas, much like the Democrat Party in the U.S., its powers concentrated in regions of high unemployment, poverty, crime, and taxes.  The SNP can be viewed to England as colonial America was to the British Crown.  They rally for independence from Britain and fight conscription into British armed forces, seeking Gaelic as their national language.  Not unlike early Americans looking for their independence from King George III, the SNP hopes someday to achieve the same results.

With this election disaster, the Conservative Party ended up losing many of its heavy-hitters in Parliament.  Young upstarts, particularly in the northern regions of Great Britain, ended up gaining seats.  Ruth Davidson, a lesbian candidate who appeared destined for a loss in the SNP-dominated region (who is literally the spitting image of Rosie O’Donnell) was parading around victoriously with her wife in tow after having won her battle.  The tables have turned for the Scottish National Party as well.

Even the DUP, whom Mrs May must now rely on to keep her in Downing Street, said it would be ‘difficult’ for her to cling on.

Meanwhile, it is not yet clear what price the party will extract in return for propping her up as premier.

The only thing saving Mrs May from utter disaster overnight was the Tory performance in Scotland. The party’s leader north of the border, Ruth Davidson, inspired a 12-seat surge that ousted the SNP’s former First Minister Alex Salmond in Gordon and Westminster leader Angus Robertson in Moray.

The Conservatives wound up with 318 MPs, Labour 262, the SNP 35 and the Lib Dems 14.

Some members of the Conservative Party were more concerned with assigning blame than with finding ways to keep making headway toward better governance.  One member literally threw “cost-cutting measures” under the bus, I presume, for fear that he might be next in losing his political position.  Sort of how in this country the Republicans run for cover whenever the words, “government shutdown” are uttered.

But there was also concern about the dysfunctional nature of the campaign.

Right-winger Philip Davies said it was time to ‘accept people are tired of austerity’. But he also attacked the campaign, saying: ‘I think it’s fair to say we made a bit of a pig’s ear of the national campaign really, to be honest.

‘The manifesto wasn’t very good, particularly in terms of social care. Dropping a policy on people a few weeks before an election that seemed to come out of thin air was clearly a bad mistake.’ 

Some of the good news is that, if Prime Minister May can reshuffle her cabinet and realign some of the Parliament Member office appointees, while cobbling together a loose allied coalition with the Northern Irish constituencies of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), she may be able to hold on loosely to power until the next election.

The bad news is that Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party, who is demanding that May step down and allow him to lead the country, now has some momentum to reestablish a foothold in the upcoming referendum vote on Britain exiting the European Union.  If the next vote comes with the same results as this election, Britain may be looking at a complete reversal of fortunes as it would be forced to remain under the thumb of the EU and its poor performance and money-draining capabilities.

Nigel Farage today warned Britain is ‘staring down the barrel’ of a second Brexit referendum if Jeremy Corbyn pulls off an unlikely election victory.

The former Ukip leader claimed the mission of getting Britain out of the EU could prove to be ‘unfinished business’.

Mr Farage told the BBC he was reluctant to return to the political front lines but that he was prepared to do so if needed to defend Brexit. 

Ukip’s vote evaporated tonight as the results emerged but split between Labour and the Tories in defiance of expectations it would flood to Mrs May.  

Brexit talks are due to begin in Brussels in just 10 days time.

If Labour do seize power, they plan to scrap all the work done on Mrs May’s Brexit mission and push for a softer deal on quitting the EU. 

We’ll see where it goes from here, but British politics is sure to bring to the table anything but mundane politics-as-usual.

Source:  The Daily Mail