Frank Augstein/Thanassis Stavrakis/AP Photo
Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson, left, and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn outside their polling places, December 12, 2019, as voting was under way in the U.K.’s general election
Yesterday’s election in Britain was Trump’s biggest international win since 2016 and the left’s biggest defeat this decade.
Boris Johnson won his election as a national populist in the manner of Donald Trump. He promised to bring hope to the forgotten white working-class communities of old industrial England.
Trump called him a “Britain Trump” when Johnson became prime minister in July. While Trump focused on immigrants from south of the U.S., Johnson focused on the need to stop, or slow down, the immigrants from Europe.
At his victory rally on the day after the election, Johnson spoke under a giant banner proclaiming “The People’s Government.” Like Trump and other nationalist populists in Europe, Johnson now fuses himself with “the people” and in their name can do what he wants.
Like Trump’s, his character has may flaws—a serial liar, unfaithful to colleagues and to every woman he’s met. But these moral failings are waved away by an electorate that just wanted some leadership after three dismal years of Theresa May.
What voters did not like was the 40-year-old state socialism of Jeremy Corbyn. I have been a candidate in six U.K. parliamentary elections and worked in others as a party activist.
Never had I experienced such contempt—hate is almost the word—as I did on the doorstep for Jeremy Corbyn in different constituencies where I went to work for Labour candidates.
Every Labour MP reported the same, especially from core white working-class voters. They saw Corbyn as unpatriotic; disrespectful of the queen; and too often photographed with militant groups that used violence that killed British people, like the IRA or Hamas. He was seen as anti-NATO, anti-European, anti-American—not just hostile to Trump but to America over many decades.
The chief rabbi of Britain made a dramatic mid-election intervention that commanded the news for 48 hours when he said Corbyn was anti-Semitic and a danger to British Jews. An endless list of left-liberal Jewish writers and journalists denounced Corbyn and said they could not vote Labour.
Corbyn’s failure to stamp down hard on expressions of anti-Semitism among lower-ranking Labour Party members or elected officials was inexplicable. In the middle of the campaign, he was asked four times in a key BBC interview to apologize to Jews for the hate they felt was emanating from some quarters of the Labour Party. Corbyn could not bring himself to find some words to defuse the problem.
For the left worldwide, Corbyn incarnated nearly all the dreams and hopes of the 1968 generation that went into politics in the 1970s and 1980s. His manifesto pledged massive state ownership of industries; workers sitting on the boards of companies; a big hike in the minimum wage; and free, publicly financed broadband, as well as new hospitals, schools, and nursing homes.
The manifesto looked back to 1945 and the great nationalizations of the postwar Labour government. But that is 70-year-old history and did not break through to voters.
Corbyn’s Labour had more in common with European hard-left parties like Die Linke in Germany, Podemos in Spain, and Syriza in Greece.
His statist socialism could not integrate the modern European Union into his thinking, and ever since the Brexit plebiscite in June 2016 he has failed to find positive words about the European Union.
For the 500,000 young voters, mainly new graduates, who joined Labour since he became leader in 2015, this appeal to mid-century socialism was bold, and they chanted his name as a Corbyn cult of personality grew in strength.
But it did not cut through to voters. For parties like the German Social Democrats, who have elected a new, further left leadership, the Corbyn defeat is a warning that just assuming that an unfair economic system guarantees a left vote is far from safe.
If English nationalism won the election, in Scotland and Northern Ireland, Scottish and Irish nationalism based on a rejection of England also triumphed. All but one Labour MP in Scotland lost their seats, while in Ireland, for the first time ever, there are more Catholic nationalist MPs, oriented toward Dublin, than unionist Protestant MPs loyal to London and British supremacy.
Johnson has opened a new constitutional moment in Britain, and it is now possible that a future King Charles or King William will be king of England and Ireland only.
The hard anti-EU Tory MPs elected to represent the forgotten white working-class communities of deindustrialized England will find it very hard to deliver new jobs, new investment, new homes, or new health care to their constituents.
There is now a subterranean fight inside the Tory party between the classic Thatcher-era deregulating and privatizing liberals and finance capitalism of the City of London, and the most protectionist, state interventionist nationalist economic theoreticians.
That is just one of the many circles Johnson will have to square. His main problem, however, remains Europe and Brexit. He can get his Withdrawal Bill through Parliament in January, but that short technical measure, which means the U.K. ceases formally to be a signatory to the EU treaties, is not Brexit. For all of next year, Britain will be a de facto part of the EU, obeying its laws and rules, including open borders for immigrants from Europe and a hefty membership fee.
But Johnson has promised that by the end of the year he can renegotiate a completely new treaty between the U.K. and the EU 27 member states governing trade and other economic relations.
This is pie in the sky. The EU and Canada took seven years to negotiate a very limited free-trade agreement covering mainly goods and agricultural products.
The U.K. makes its money from selling services—banking, pension funds, insurance, currency clearing, investment funds—from London to 27 EU markets. U.K. professional services like lawyers, management consultants, TV shows, university education, creative industries, and architectural and other services can operate freely at the moment.
This is the sector of the U.K. economy that makes money. But if Johnson seeks to tell the EU he won’t accept their rules anymore, then that trade will be badly hit.
He keeps boasting of wonderful new trade deals with non-EU countries like the United States. But U.S. officials have said the only U.S.-U.K. trade deal possible means opening Britain’s nationalized health care sector to much more expensive U.S. drugs and other U.S. medical products.
American meat and other food exporters will only get the U.S. Senate to agree to a trade deal with Johnson’s England if Britain reduces its European level of much higher food-quality standards.
So as Johnson shapes Britain to become a Trump colony, how long before there is social anger? As he presides over the possible breakup of the United Kingdom and its four constituent nations, will this be acceptable?
Labour meanwhile has to pick up the pieces and start over. In 1951, Labour went into opposition for 13 years before returning to power. After 1979 and Margaret Thatcher’s win, it took the party 18 years to regain power. Now it looks as if the 2020s will be Labour’s lost decade.
Or Corbyn’s defeat may be something more terminal, and Labour may either split or decline as other socialist parties in mainland Europe have while 20th-century social democracy slowly disappears.
