The Conservative Party in the UK has suffered a disastrous election result, unlike any in its very long history.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak left No.10 and resigned in defeat, A new Labour government has been ushered in with a huge majority. Many well-known Conservative dignitaries and cabinet members embarrassingly lost their own constituencies, including former Prime Minister’s, Deputy Leaders, and Party Heads.
In the UK, a political party needs 326 seats to win, a milestone Labour now commands with a majority of more than 170 forming the next parliament. This scale of victory is similar to that exhibited by Tony Blair back in 1997. The low turnout of 59% is in part to blame but the causes go much deeper.
Because of its strange electoral system, Britain can see large discrepancies between the share of seats won by a party and its share of the popular vote.
Here are the actual 2024 election results demonstrating that effect.
Labour with just 33.8% of the vote, took 412 seats, gaining 214 seats over the last election in 2019.
Liberal Democrats have now 71 seats with 12.2% of the vote, a gain of 63 seats.
The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) now has 9 seats, which is a loss of 37, down from 48, all in Scotland.
The Greens had 6.8% of the vote and have 7 seats.
The Reform Party with 14.3% of the votes, got only 5 seats.
You will say, something is wrong with this math. It doesn’t seem right or fair. Yes, but it is the British first past the post system of democracy and it is certainly not proportional.
Will the nation stand for it any longer? The whole system has been seriously called into question.
Labour, under boring Keir Starmer, who ran a Ming vase campaign, slid into the driver’s seat as a left wing socialist, big government, high tax, globalist, woke, immigrant favorable party and could remain in power for a decade. The result is that a less great Britain by the day falls out of the prevailing world trend toward right of center conservative nationalist parties coming to power from Italy, France, Argentina and India to the US (with Trump), Hungary and most of Europe.
Britain is an outlier.
Truthfully, the United Kingdom is pretty much a myth nowadays with Northern Ireland perennially beset with its own breed of sectarianism and Scotland wanting more devolution, if not outright independence. The empire is a relic of the past and today’s Britain is a middle power, at best. Coming to terms with this history has proven difficult even for Anglophiles. The so-called Special Relationship with the United States is less and less important and will sadly never be what it was with Ronnie and Maggie.
So, when did Britain go into decline?
The statistics showing less than great Britain’s sharp decline are too many to list but consider these.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 confirmed Britain’s formal decline as a global or superpower, and the handover of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997 symbolized for many the end of the British Empire, though fourteen overseas territories that are remnants of the empire remain under the Crown. That number has gone down nearly every year as even the Commonwealth becomes a shadow of its former self.
The British economy for years has seen meager growth, only 0.1% in 2023.
The country ranks 20th in the world in the corruption index, worse than in past years. Nothing works, the trains, NHS, or the border.
As the sixth-largest national economy in the world, the UK measured by nominal gross domestic product (GDP), ninth largest by purchasing power parity (PPP), and twenty-first by nominal GDP per capita, constituting 3.1% of nominal world GDP. The United Kingdom constitutes 2.3% of world GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP). All these numbers are in decline.
Perhaps most compelling, 7 in 10 Britons themselves, when surveyed see their country in decline. Oink as they say, the next thing you know, the full British breakfast, complete with rashers and black pudding will be off the table. Should we ask about the monarchy and Spare Harry?
Parts of Britain want to leave, the Irish question remains and the Scottish rebellion hardly disappeared.
The SNP loss in Scotland is most monumental however, as they are seen as corrupt and in power for too long. Scottish Labour swept the entire country and, in fact, that is what made the Labour landslide possible.
Looking behind the real numbers however shows that what has been called a massive tidal wave is really about as shallow as a pond. Labour has weak leadership, lacking in charisma, a tendency to tax far too much, and tries to nationalize everything. Even the BBC, a media entity, is a government agency.
The real question falling out of this election is the present state of British conservatism. Does it have a future?
Staying in power for 14 years, over five different Prime Minister’s, with little to show for it, led to their complete defeat. Many people just wanted a “change”, which was the theme of the Labour platform.
There is however little difference between liberal leaning conservatives and their democratic socialist rivals on fiscal policy, health, immigration, defense, or the economy. The uniparty approach to governing failed.
All this allowed Nigel Farage, the cleverest British politician of this lifetime, to commence a new party, called Reform, and to storm the land to amazing result based on a right of center platform of popular sovereignty, national conservatism, and anti-immigration.
He will have to be taken as a real player now that he sits as the MP for Clacton on Sea and has a vibrant following, huge soial media following, other members of parliament joining with him, and is a better, more forceful opposition to Labour than the feeble and divided, leaderless Conservative Party.
Face it, the Tories are coming apart at the seams and cannot stich up their poor performance or divisions. They may be like Humpy Dumpty who could not be put back together again. One wing is still in love with posh pro EU David Cameron and his ilk, and the other wings can’t agree on much. All they produce is infighting and backstabbing.
The best thing for them to do, and maybe the only hope to put the “Great” back into Britain, is to elect a leader on the right like Suella Braverman, an articulate black, young woman, to marry up with Nigel’s Reform Party, making him co-leader.
Anything less is sure to fail and further the decline of whatever remains of Great Britain or is it, Little England.
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch a former Oxford professor, was to be Trump’s nominee as Ambassador to the European Union. His remarks on BBC about the “EU needing taming like the former Soviet Union” caused a firestorm in Brussels. He is the only American to have been made persona non grata by the European Union for his so-called malevolent views and redefinition of trans Atlanticism. His book, Trump’s World co-authored with Felipe Cuello, was a best seller.