THE COLUMN: Good-Bye to All That

Hell-bent on committing political suicide, Britain's Conservative Party, known as the Tories, has called a snap election for the Fourth of July, in all likelihood cementing its legacy of utter failure since Boris Johnson won them a smashing victory in 2019. What at the time appeared to be a realignment of traditional constituencies, many of them voting Tory for the first time in generations, may well turn out to be the last flicker of the Old Blighty flame as the party hands far-left Labour a governing mandate under Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition. God save the King.

Not since the British voting public sent Winston Churchill packing right after the end of World War II has there been such a momentous election. Americans still puzzle over why Churchill got the sack in 1945, in part because Churchill's reputation has always been extravagantly overrated in the U.S.

From May 1940 to May 1945, Britain had been governed by a coalition government, with Conservative MP Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. Churchill had proved himself to be a popular leader during the Second World War, so he was confident that the Conservatives would win this election based on his wartime success.

Instead, in one of the biggest electoral swings of the twentieth century, the Labour Party won the general election decisively, winning 393 seats, while the second-placed Conservatives only secured 197. With an emphasis on social reform, the Labour Party’s manifesto was strongly influenced by the Beveridge Report and included a commitment to full employment, affordable housing, and social security and health care for all.

What have I done?

One should think there's a lesson here somewhere, but clearly the elevation of relentless mediocrities like David Cameron, Theresa May, Johnson, Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak proves otherwise. Churchill's leadership was not an unmixed blessing for the U.K., and his military instincts were downright bad, from the disaster at Gallipoli in the First World War to his "soft underbelly" strategy in the Second, which resulted in Anzio and a bloody stalemate on the Italian peninsula; additionally, he wound up presiding over the dissolution of the British Empire and hastening the birth of "Little England."

Today, that England has gotten even littler. Until recently, the British Isles were being governed by an Indian (Sunak), a Pakistani Muslim (Humza Yousaf, first minister of Scotland), a Zambian (Vaughan Gething, first minister of Wales) and another Indian (Leo Varadkar, Taoiseach of Ireland). Some view this as a triumph of "diversity," while others point to it as the result of culturally alien immigration run amok, thus triggering spurious charges of "racism."

Indeed, the elephant in the room is "immigration," which has become the central issue in European political life since Britain's last Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, made it a cornerstone of their electoral strategy.

Between 1997 and 2010, net annual immigration quadrupled, and the UK population was boosted by more than 2.2 million immigrants, more than twice the population of Birmingham. In Labour’s last term in government, 2005-2010, net migration reached on average 247,000 a year. The dramatic changes have left British politics ruptured. Immigration remains the No 1 issue on the doorstep, according to pollsters – a stream that feeds into the well of mistrust in politics.

Despite the Tories' promise to address the issue of economic migration, the situation has only gotten worse in the decade since that article in The Guardian was published, and their repeated failure (despite the Brexit victory) to do so has left them on the edge of political purdah. A Labour government, which now seems inevitable, will most certainly continue Blair's social policies, even though they couldn't save Blair or his successor Brown but -- like Attlee when he unhorsed Winston -- will focus on the Socialization of Britain, maintaining the repressive anti-speech ukases already in place as it pursues a globalist agenda that features more immigration from non-Western countries.

Who, me?

Blair's malignant blunder was intensified by the actions of Angela Merkel, raised and educated in communist East Germany, who as chancellor unleashed the Europe-wide flood in 2015 during her self-made refugee crisis by allowing upwards of one million non-Western "refugees" from predominantly Muslim lands to settle in Germany and take advantage of its welfare state, on the soft-headed grounds that they were fleeing war and persecution or, failing that test, they just wanted a "better life."

One notes that America is now following the same standard: Joe Biden -- the desiccated, perverse Emperor Tiberius of the U.S.A. -- has thrown open the borders in a Blair-like attempt to change the electorate and stave off the challenge of a recrudescent Donald Trump, his predecessor. Since Bill Clinton deposed the wretched George H.W. Bush, semi-dynastic politics has become a way of life in the Land of the Free, with a Clinton or Bush on primary or general-election ballots from 1992 to 2016, now superseded by Obama, Biden, and Trump.

The principal architect of the Tories' demolition is Johnson. Born in New York City with some notable Turkish ancestry, BoJo is the very model of a modern Briton: witty, quippy, raffish, well-read, part-foreign, and an absolute toff who panicked at the arrival of Covid and abandoned all pretenses of governing as a conservative from that moment on. He flouted his own Covid strictures and threw himself headlong into the economic stupidity of "climate change," from which Britain has yet to emerge and certainly will not under Starmer. Johnson could debate, but he couldn't lead. Just as the two Bushes squandered the post-Cold War legacy of Ronald Reagan, so did Johnson and the Tory ragamuffins who flanked him put paid to the accomplishments of Margaret Thatcher.

As Harold Wilson, another Labour prime minister, once said, a week is a long time in politics, but so also can just a few years vanish in the blink of an eye: just ask Boris Johnson. With his victory in World War II, Churchill was shown the door by an unsentimental electorate. Now, 80 years later, his entire party may be about to get the boot, and it only need look in the mirror to understand why.