At Jacobin, a comprehensive analysis of Labour's implosion in the UK election.

The Brexit referendum in 2016 needn't have taken place under the terms by which David Cameron minted the vote, but once it did, the verdict was regarded as binding by a majority of United Kingdom residents. Subsequently the UK's withdrawal from the European Union might have been negotiated in a number of ways -- by either Labour or the Conservatives (Tories).

I've underlined the key passage in this excerpt, which makes the preceding point very clear.

As for the recent election, Labour was split in half by Remainers who were only slightly less appalled with the party's working class base than wealthy London bankers. The Tories succeeded in closing their ranks because Nigel Farage's one-issue Brexit Party saw it could achieve its chief aim by losing, and campaigned accordingly, meaning that finally, Farage triumphed even if he isn't part of the new government.

In short, Jeremy Corbyn's political decapitation means that the "Tony Blair Light" version of centrist Labour can again seize control, differing from the Tories ... how, exactly?

The Obsessive Remainers Have Scored a Massive Own Goal, by Daniel Finn (Jacobin)

For the last three years, second-referendum campaigners heaped blame on Jeremy Corbyn for his alleged role in “facilitating” Brexit. Yet their determined efforts to torpedo his leadership destroyed any chance of a compromise solution — and made the hardest of hard Brexits inevitable.

... LABOUR'S POLICY

The position set out in Labour’s 2017 manifesto could be summarized as follows: we accept the result of the referendum; it’s not the result we wanted, but people have voted to leave the European Union and we can’t ignore that choice. That doesn’t mean we’re going to give the Tory government a blank check to negotiate any kind of withdrawal deal they like. There are several possible routes out of the EU, some of which would be far more damaging than others. We won’t support a deal that will destroy people’s jobs and living standards, or one that will prepare the ground for a bonfire of social rights and protections.

This was in no way a distinctly “Corbynite” position. Leading figures on the Labour right gave it their firm support in the run-up to the 2017 election: from Tom Watson and Yvette Cooper to Chuka Umunna and Wes Streeting.

The thinking behind it was simple. On grounds of principle, it would have been extremely dubious for politicians to reject the outcome of the referendum altogether. All the major British parties agreed to hold it in the first place, and there were no conditions for a quorum or a supermajority attached before the vote. The turnout was reasonably high, and those who took part voted to leave the EU by a small but decisive margin. Trying to overturn a democratic vote without having made any attempt to honor it would set an ugly precedent for the future.

It might still have been necessary to do so if all possible versions of Brexit were bound to be disastrous, but that simply wasn’t the case. Norway has never belonged to the EU, and there’s no reason to think its citizens are worse off than their neighbors in Sweden or Denmark. A so-called “soft-Brexit” deal would have been a perfectly acceptable framework for Labour to carry out domestic social reforms: a step sideways, not a step backward.

There was also a pragmatic case for Labour’s Brexit platform that could not be ignored or wished away. The Leave/Remain divide cut through the heart of the party’s electoral base. Two-thirds of Labour’s 2015 electorate voted Remain, the rest broke for Leave, but the “Labour Leavers” weren’t spread evenly around the country. Roughly two-thirds of Labour-held constituencies had a pro-Brexit majority in 2016: if all the Labour Leave voters defected to the Conservatives — or just stayed at home on polling day — the party could end up losing dozens of seats. It would be much easier for the Conservatives to win a general election on a hard-line pro-Brexit platform than it would be for Labour to see them off with a clear-cut anti-Brexit stance ...

UK election 2019: Is the scene set for a return to Scottish independence?

Thursday's UK election brought a huge majority to the Tories amid Labour's cataclysmic defeat, which makes Brexit a prospective fact after three and a half years of political gridlock. Brexit will be a long, drawn-out process, but now it will happen.

Interestingly, leaving the European Union might set into motion the dissolution of the United Kingdom.

It isn't easy to explain the election's implications for perpetually fragile Northern Ireland, although it should suffice to use the word "destabilizing" -- to say the least.

DUP and Sinn Féin under pressure to restore power sharing, by Rory Carroll (The Guardian)

DUP loses big name as voters punish parties for Northern Ireland’s political dysfunction

... Boris Johnson’s election victory, which has liberated him from dependence on DUP votes in Westminster, has added to the sense of urgency. He is expected to push through a Brexit deal that will create checks and inspections on trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

Mike Nesbitt, a former leader of the Ulster Unionist party, told the BBC the election’s great irony was that for decades, unionists had feared Irish nationalism as the main threat to the union. “Then more recently it was Scottish nationalists, but it’s actually English nationalism which is posing the existential threat to the future of the union,” he said.

Lots of eggshells and tightropes in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile in Scotland, things have become very interesting. The previous Scottish independence referendum in 2014 didn't favor detachment. It might a second time, given a general pro-EU opinion.

Scottish independence vote a 'democratic right', says Sturgeon, by Severin Carrell and Libby Brooks (The Guardian)

Boris Johnson rejects first minister’s call as his spokesman says result of 2014 vote ‘should be respected’

Nicola Sturgeon is to publish a blueprint next week for a new Scottish independence referendum but Boris Johnson has rejected any moves towards a fresh vote.

The first minister said the Scottish National party’s “overwhelming” election victory in Scotland, where it won 47 of the country’s 59 Westminster seats with 1.2m votes, gave her a clear and undeniable mandate to hold one.

Sturgeon said she would publish the “detailed democratic case” for the transfer of the legal powers from Johnson’s new Conservative government, which has to authorise the Scottish parliament to stage any referendum that changes the UK’s constitutional structures.

“This isn’t about asking Boris Johnson or any other Westminster politician for permission. This is instead an assertion of the democratic right of the people of Scotland to determine our own future,” she said in a short victory speech in Edinburgh, where she declined to take questions.

snip

Sturgeon said the scale of the victory proved again that a large majority of Scots wanted to remain in the EU, three years after the country voted against Brexit by 62% to 38%. The election was a “watershed moment”, she said.

“Westminster has ignored the people of Scotland for more than three years. Last night, the people of Scotland said enough,” Sturgeon said. “It’s time for Boris Johnson to start listening. I accept, regretfully, that he has a mandate for Brexit in England but he has no mandate whatsoever to take Scotland out of the EU.”

She made a direct appeal to EU citizens – a group expected to be given a vote in any independence referendum, saying the SNP would protect and champion their interests. “I will fight with everything I have to protect your right to call Scotland your home.”

In Britain's elections, as in American ones: We'll awake "to find one of these horrors in charge."

Photo credit: The Economist article.

I was asked, "How is Donald Trump viewed throughout your travels?"

To be honest, it didn't come up.

There were instances of anti-Trump in graffiti-rich Ljubljana, and a couple of folks in Slovenia mentioned Melania Trump, born in 1970 during Yugoslav times in the Slovenian city of Novo Mesto (near the border with Croatia). She grew up in a town called Sevnica and began her modeling career prior to Slovenia's independence in 1991.

It's worth noting that had Melanija Knavs grown up in any of the other communist countries in east-central Europe where the orthodoxy was more rigid than Yugoslavia's relatively less restrictive Titoist variety, she probably wouldn't have had a head start in the late 1980s. Interestingly, her father was a member of Slovenia's atheistic League of Communists, but had his children secretly baptized Catholic.

In short, I find the institution of "First Lady" very strange, and Melania far more interesting than Donald, but to each their own.

Meanwhile in Great Britain, a dismal election campaign is about to conclude, and The Economist is flustered. The Liberal Democrats won't win, and yet consider the possibilities for lesser parties in a parliamentary system to influence the outcome, an option we're denied by the American fixation with a two-party system that exists nowhere in any statutory or constitutional sense.

That's why I detest the two-party system more than any single representative of it, including Trump -- and yes, I'd almost surely vote Labour.

Our election endorsement: Britain’s nightmare before Christmas ... A divided country faces an election that will tear it still further apart (The Economist)

British voters keep being called to the polls—and each time the options before them are worse. Labour and the Conservatives, once parties of the centre-left and -right, have steadily grown further apart in the three elections of the past four years. Next week voters face their starkest choice yet, between Boris Johnson, whose Tories promise a hard Brexit, and Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Party plans to “rewrite the rules of the economy” along radical socialist lines. Mr Johnson runs the most unpopular new government on record; Mr Corbyn is the most unpopular leader of the opposition. On Friday the 13th, unlucky Britons will wake to find one of these horrors in charge ...

#FreeDistrict3: Is a two-party political duopoly "fit for the purpose of representing and reconciling the diversity of opinions in a modern and complex country?"

This article is about the Conservative and Labour parties in Great Britain, but the parallels with Republicans and Democrats in America are obvious. Particularly at the grassroots level, why are parties even necessary?

#FreeDistrict3 

Why the sickly ugly sisters of our politics deserve to suffer the splits, by Andrew Rawnsley (The Guardian)

Once broad churches, both the Tory and Labour parties have become increasingly sectarian. Breakaways will be the result

If they did not exist, would we invent them? Given the chance to start from scratch, would Britain regard the Conservative and Labour parties, the two old and ugly sisters of our politics, as the best we can do? Are they fit for the purpose of representing and reconciling the diversity of opinions in a modern and complex country? And for offering it a choice of decent governments? A growing number of us have been saying not and for a long time.

Even before Brexit split both parties and scrambled voter allegiances, much of the electorate was expressing its dissatisfaction with the big two. The Tories have not won a solid parliamentary majority since 1987. The last Labour leader who was not called Tony Blair to secure a healthy Commons majority was Harold Wilson in 1966.

The number of voters who enthusiastically identify as red or blue has been in long-term decline. Party membership has also been shrivelling. The Tories, who once boasted that they were a million strong, bump along at around 100,000. Labour enjoyed a trend-defying surge in its membership during the Ohhh Jeremy Corbyn phase of his leadership, but that is going downhill as the magical uncle turns out not to be so wondrous after all.

It is true that the big two can still gather up a lot of votes. After decades of decline in their combined vote share, it blipped up at the last election. But I don’t think that truly indicated renewed enthusiasm for either of them. It was a false positive induced by an electoral system that compels many voters to make a forced choice between the unappetising and the inedible. It doesn’t mean that these nose-holding voters like what’s put before them. The current choice on offer is so disdained that, when pollsters ask who would make best prime minister, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are regularly beaten into second and third place by Neither. More than half of the electorate say their views are not properly represented by the existing political parties.

Many politicians can’t stand the parties they represent. Some actively and publicly rage about what has become of them. I cannot recall a period in my lifetime when so many MPs have expressed so much disgust and despair with the state of their own parties. For every Tory who expresses agony about what Brexit has done to the party they used to love, there is a Labour MP voicing anguish about what Corbynism has done to the party that they have spent a lifetime serving ...

David Graeber, Two: "Despair Fatigue: How hopelessness grew boring."

From The Baffler.

Looking for American parallels in Brexit?

Dig a bit deeper, and keep Bernie Sanders in mind as you read this long but rewarding essay.

Thanks again to Bluegill for this and the previous post.

Despair Fatigue: How hopelessness grew boring, by David Graeber (The Baffler)

Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness?

There is reason to believe something like that is beginning to happen in Great Britain. Call it despair fatigue.

For nearly half a century, British culture, particularly on the left, has made an art out of despair. This is the land where “No Future for You” became the motto of a generation, and then another generation, and then another. From the crumbling of its empire, to the crumbling of its industrial cities, to the current crumbling of its welfare state, the country seemed to be exploring every possible permutation of despair: despair as rage, despair as resignation, despair as humor, despair as pride or secret pleasure. It’s almost as if it’s finally run out.

On the surface, and from a distance, Britain looks like it’s experiencing one of the stranger paroxysms of masochistic self-destruction in world history. Since the Conservative victory of 2010, first in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and now on its own, the British government has set out to systematically unravel much of what makes life good and decent in the country. Conservative leaders started by trashing the United Kingdom’s once proud university system, while eyeing the greatest source of national pride and dignity, the universal health guarantees of the National Health Service. All of this is being done in the name of an economic doctrine—austerity, the imperative need for fiscal discipline—that no one genuinely believes in and whose results pretty much everyone deplores (including prime minister David Cameron, who in private has denounced the decline of his local public services), in response to an existential crisis that does not exist.

How did this happen? It appears that the entire political class has become trapped in the bizarrely successful narrative that swept the Tories into power after the crash of 2008 and still sustains them long after its consequences have run beyond any sort of humanity or common sense.

"'Gay, dyslexic ex-alcoholic' Ivan Massow launches London mayor campaign."

It may appear to be just another crazy story from the big city, and one absent relevance to li'l ol' Nawbany, but there's a crucial aspect of Ivan Massow's candidacy.

He's a Tory ... meaning he's a conservative.

Verily, we're not in 'Bama any more ...

'Gay, dyslexic ex-alcoholic' Ivan Massow launches London mayor campaign, by Aisha Gani (The Guardian)

The Tory-supporting businessman Ivan Massow has launched his bid to become the next mayor of London with a candid YouTube video in which he introduces himself as “gay, ex-alcoholic and dyslexic”.

Massow, 47, said the 70-second pop art-style animated video gave an “honest warts-and-all” portrayal of him.

His voiceover begins: “I’m Ivan and I want to be your mayor of London.” He adds: “I’m gay, I’m an ex-alcoholic, I’m dyslexic, I’m adopted, I’m an activist, I’m a businessman, I’m a disruptor, I’m a doer. I’m not your typical ‘politician’ politician” – at which point the cartoon turns grey.

He says he is “someone who takes the tube, someone who hates sitting in traffic, someone who hates red tape, someone who hates politics as normal.”

"Garden centre owner's '10% tax for Tory voters' sign goes viral."

You may be aware of last week's election results in the United Kingdom, with the Conservative (Tory) Party scoring a slim majority of seats in Commons, the Liberal Democrats almost disappearing from view, and Labour surrendering Scotland en masse to the Scottish National Party.

Choice. What a concept.

Business owner Matt Woodruff is putting his money where his mouth is, and I love it.

Garden centre owner's '10% tax for Tory voters' sign goes viral ... Matt Woodruff says he stands by anti-Tory views on his shop’s blackboard in Lewes, East Sussex, despite some criticism from customers ... by Jessica Elgot (The Guardian)

The owner of a small garden centre in East Sussex whose anti-Tory blackboard went viral on social media says he has no regrets, despite admitting it could put him out of business.

Matt Woodruff, the owner of Woodruffs Yard in Lewes, said he was moved to vent his political views on his shop’s blackboard after the Conservatives took the local seat that had been occupied by the Lib Dem former Home Office minister Norman Baker.

The sign proposes a “Tory tax” of 10% on any customer who voted Conservative as one of the “‘tough’ decisions I need to make to ‘balance the books’ under your preferred government”.