The Labour Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, won the British general election held yesterday on July 4, 2024.
Selected passages from the linked article by Melanie Phillips (incidentally, a model of clear explanation):
Labour’s enormous overall majority of 170 seats means that it can broadly do whatever it wants because it faces a fractured and weak opposition.
However, the country did not express any enthusiasm for Labour. The party achieved less than one third of the popular vote — the lowest of any governing party in modern history, and even less than the 40 per cent secured by the hard-left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. Yesterday’s Labour share of the vote had hardly changed from the last general election in 2019.
The country remains wary and suspicious of Labour and the new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. What voters were determined to do was get rid of the Conservative party, whose share of the popular vote accordingly imploded. Some 11 Cabinet ministers were swept away along with swathes of other former MPs, leaving a pitiably small rump of Tories in parliament to face the jubilant and crowded Labour benches. The Conservative party — previously known as Britain’s “natural party of government” — is now in the wilderness for the forseeable future.
[Sir Keir Starmer] inherits an appalling epidemic of Jew-hatred, which will undoubtedly worry him greatly — not least because he has Jewish family members, and because he is a decent man. However, dealing properly with antisemitism will mean acknowledging the symbiotic link between the Palestinian cause and Jew-hatred — which, as a man of the left, he has never done — and standing up to both the Muslim community and the far left, constituencies which are represented within his own party.
Buoyed by the success of the “Gaza” election campaigns and by the refusal of the authorities to stop the pro-Hamas intimidation and disorder on the streets, Islamic sectarianism is now likely to increase. A Muslim bloc has emerged which is likely to demand not just policies hostile to Israel but measures to adapt aspects of British society to Islamic requirements.
Starmer will be less hostile towards Israel than the far-left or the Muslim bloc are demanding; but since his instincts remain those of the radical human rights lawyer he originally was, he is unlikely to stop the demonisation of Israel that oozes from every pore of the liberal establishment (including the Foreign Office) and which is fuelling the harassment of Britain’s Jews.
Moreover, while he will be economically cautious he’ll let rip on the “culture wars”. The result will be more transgender abuses of children and women and more demonisation of white people and British “colonialism”. He’s also likely to outlaw “Islamophobia” — which could have an even greater chilling effect on necessary discussion of Muslim antisemitism or Islamic terrorism than is currently the case.
Starmer is also committed to an insane acceleration of the already ruinous [“climate change”] Net Zero target, and to developing “ever closer” ties with the EU which will further stifle the entrepreneurial freedoms that Brexit enabled but the Tory government never delivered.
Meanwhile Nigel Farage, who has now achieved what he set out to do in pulverising the Conservative party, will be moving onto the next part of his agenda — taking the fight to the Labour government in order to bring about the reconfiguration of British politics, by reconnecting it with the British mainstream and recovering the true centre ground, that he has long envisaged.
Farage — the true and only begetter of Brexit — is the most consequential politician of the post-Thatcher period. He has his own flaws. His free market principles line him up with the wing of the Tory party that disappeared inside its economic tunnel vision. And his tendency towards international isolationism and indifference towards defence are alarming.
But he speaks for millions by his promotion of the independence of the nation within borders that are properly policed and with immigration kept to manageable levels, and his defence of a culture based on its own history and traditions enshrining fairness, social order and a grounding in reality that people can recognise as a shared national endeavour and that they can call home.
Comment:
The Muslim population of Britain is growing – and will grow faster while there is a Labour government. The native population is shrinking. It will surely not be long before there is a Muslim-majority government.