The English Council Elections and the Globally Collapsing Left
by Bruce Walker (6/7/09)
While the world is full of other news, the collapse of the Labour Party in Britain is a big story which will shows just how anemic the Left is in the democratic world. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is not an amoral monster. He is rather like the British equivalent of Walter Mondale. Brown has not had a new idea since Clement Atlee. His Labour Party tries to accommodate constituencies the same way that Mayor Daley of Chicago.
Perhaps the nastiest action his government has taken recently was to place conservative radio shock jock Michael Savage on a list of undesirables in the United Kingdom. The minister responsible for that Orwellian action is out of the cabinet now (though more because her husband charged his personal porn purchases as a government expense.)
The Labour Party, in many ways, is the oldest Leftist party in the world. It is certainly one of the most significant. Under the sunny smile and glib words of Tony Blair, Labour did pretty well. But not now. The government of Great Britain is in free fall. The Labour Party has the confidence of practically no one.
Polls for the last several years have shown that if the general election were held today, the Labour Party would be swept from power. It is even conceivable that Labour, after the next election, will be only the third largest party in the House of Commons. The mere fact that Brown has not called a general election, when practically no one believes in his ability to govern, is a disgrace to the parliamentary system.
Another disgrace - a big one - popped up a few weeks before the June 5, 2009 elections. Members of Parliament were caught doing the same sort of personal abuse of the government parliamentary administration that our own House of Representatives was caught doing twenty years ago in the House Banking Scandal. Labour Party members sinned, but so did Conservative MPs and others. How would the British people react?
The results were breathtaking in their scope. The Conservative Party, which already controlled most of the local councils in England and had no where much to go but down, actually gained control of more local councils. The actual number of Conservative Party local council members, which already was greater than Labour, increased dramatically.
Interestingly, the Liberal Party (the third party which, nominally, lies someone on the ideological spectrum between Labour on the Left and Conservative on the Right), did not make any gains at all. The voters of England, who in last year’s local elections had already given Conservatives a big victory, moved even more decisively away from the two other political parties and to the Conservative Party.
It appears that out of the twenty-five local council elections, the Conservative Party won twenty-four, gaining control of six local councils that it did not control before the election. The Liberal Party won a single council election, losing control of one local council. The Labour Party controlled four local councils up for election and it lost control of all four local councils. It is impossible to do worse than Labour did in this election.
What does this mean? Well, it does not mean that the Conservative Party Leader, David Cameron, is not a new Maggie Thatcher. It does mean that a very unhappy British electorate is emphatically deciding that it wants the most conservative of the major political parties in Britain to rule the nation. The Conservative Party and the Labour Party both have sites which explain the differences between the two. In some ways, the Conservative Party looks like the John McCain Party. But the differences between Conservative and Labour are real. Conservatives support, and Labour does not:
· Ending the British equivalent of the marriage tax.
· Increasing parental control over education
· Cutting taxes and regulations, especially on small business.
· Providing police for border enforcement
· Strengthening the militaryThis means movement in economic and security affairs in the direction which we would like. It means that, along with an anticipated electoral victory of conservative parties (CDU/CSU and FDP) in Germany this September (which should give Merkel a working majority in the Bundestag) that the parties of the Left in Europe are in more or less full retreat. Does it mean that the democratic world is suddenly embracing our conservative principles? No, not at all. But does it mean that voters, almost everywhere they can vote, are rejecting the message of the Left? Yes. We are not winning, yet; but they are losing.
Bruce Walker
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