Silver linings in election aftermath

By TruePublica Editor: There was, without any doubt, plenty of doom and gloom in the aftermath of last week’s election result –  but as with Yin, there’s some Yang. Yes Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and new Tory party member Tommy Robinson will be gloating and yes the probability of Britain leaving the EU is now all but certain – but there are new balancing forces to be created from the fallout.

 

It shouldn’t be understated that the DUP are irrelevant again. It was supported by the UDA – a violent loyalist paramilitary group, which is still active today. When the Tories got into bed with them under Theresa May’s hung parliament, it murdered a man in broad daylight in Northern Ireland the same week – he was shot dead in a Sainsbury’s car park in front of horrified shoppers and his three-year-old son. The DUP’s fall of the share vote was similar to Corbyn’s, they lost 20 per cent of the seats and deputy DUP leader Nigel Dodds lost his seat.

The size of the Tory majority now means Boris Johnson has more backing for swinging back towards the centre a bit. This means not having to depend on a clutch of right-wing fundamentalists in the form of the ERG. It also means that Jacob Rees-Mogg will as irrelevant as he was before Brexit gave him a stage.

Also likely to disappear into the background will be Nigel Farage because Brexit will be done. He might pop up whining that Brexit won’t be hard enough but no-one will take any notice. The BBC will probably not feature him on its flagship political programme ‘Question Time.’

In addition, UKIP has been completely neutered. Out of the entire electorate, just 22, 818 people voted for them. About 30 million voted in total. The Green Party got 865,000 votes and only one seat – so UKIP is history. It’s likely that the right-wing element of this now lifeless single-issue party will disperse as a result.

Corbynism is over. The project to move to the hard left failed dramatically so there is only one direction if Labour are to become more electable.

The LibDems have demonstrated with their humiliation that something radical needs to change to make them look anything like a political opposition. With just 11 seats and its leader thrown out of her own, a far more credible plan and leader need to be forthcoming.

Millions of young people are now fully engaged in politics, and many actually registered to vote. That in itself means something next time around. Because of this, the pro-European ‘Rejoin’ movement will emerge and engage in the battle for Britain’s future quite soon.

And don’t forget – political leaders and entire political parties can be brought down almost overnight by a scandal here and there and the Tories have become a sewer of malfeasance. It stinks at every turn and every corner. And make no mistake there are more shocks to come. With links to Russian oligarchs, stolen data, outright lies, corruption, power-playing, backstabbing and cover-ups – this government is going to need a propaganda machine Britain has not seen since the War to combat wave after wave of accusations, finger-pointing and evidence of their unscrupulous venality.

Also, don’t forget that the Tories have already laid the footings of failure with austerity. The effort required to fix it will not come from the Tories who inflicted class-war policies on the vulnerable. And the next reshuffle from Boris Johnson won’t be anything else but retaining power. The political revolution they are promising is not about what is best for the country – only about how to keep control of the hub of power.

In the meantime, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, leaving the EU at the end of January would “not be the end, not even the beginning of the end, but may just be the end of the beginning” of what will turn out to be years of trade and social talks with the EU and other countries around the world we already have trade deals with as members of the EU. There’s a long way to go.

 

 

 

---