Pamela Horn, Country House Society

At Amazon, Pamela Horn, Country House Society: The Private Lives of England's Upper Class After the First World War.

Robert Tombs, The English and Their History

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Robert Tombs, The English and Their History.

Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII

At Amazon, Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

The Queen's Speech Introducing Boris Johnson's Conservative Government (VIDEO)

At the Guardian U.K., "Queen's speech: PM points to harder Brexit and 10-year rule."

And the Los Angeles Times, "Boris Johnson unveils ambitious agenda for Britain’s Brexit and government reforms":

LONDON —  Prime Minister Boris Johnson signaled an end to Britain’s era of Brexit deadlock Thursday, announcing a packed legislative program intended to take the U.K. out of the European Union on Jan. 31 and overhaul a range of government services, including the cash-starved National Health Service.

The commanding House of Commons majority won by Johnson’s Conservative Party in last week’s general election all but guarantees he will be able to turn those promises into law, although with Brexit casting a shadow over the British economy, there’s a question mark over how he will pay for it all.

In a speech delivered from a golden throne in Parliament by Queen Elizabeth II, Johnson opened the legislative floodgates after three years in which minority Conservative governments tried in vain to win legislators’ backing for their Brexit plans.

“This is the moment to repay the trust of those who sent us here by delivering on the people’s priorities,” Johnson told lawmakers after the speech. “They want to move politics on and move the country on.”

In less than 10 minutes, the monarch rattled through more than two dozen bills the government intends to pass in the coming year. The first will be the EU Withdrawal Agreement Bill, the law needed to make Brexit a reality, which is set to receive its first significant parliamentary vote Friday.

The bill commits Britain to leaving the EU on Jan. 31 and to concluding trade talks with the bloc by the end of 2020. Trade experts and EU officials say striking a free-trade deal within 11 months will be a struggle, but Johnson insists he won’t agree to any more delays. That vow has set off alarm bells among businesses, which fear that means the country will face a “no-deal” Brexit at the start of 2021.

The government also plans to pass several other Brexit-related measures, including a new “points-based” immigration system that will be introduced after Brexit, when EU citizens will lose the automatic right to live and work in the U.K.

There are also plans to overhaul agriculture, fishing, trade and financial services after Brexit in ways that will have a huge — though still largely unknown — effect on the British economy...

After General Election, Britain's Social Democracy on the Way Out

Following-up, "Labour's Stunning Shellacking."

From Matt Seaton, at the New York Review, "The Strange Death of Social-Democratic England":

Margaret Thatcher persuaded many Britons that there was “no such thing as society.” Her heirs in the Conservative Party cast the EU as the new nanny state. Matt Seaton on what’s left of British social democracy: https://t.co/EEmw0s0r2q

— The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) December 13, 2019

The immediate, clear consequence of the UK election of December 12, 2019, is that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has succeeded where Theresa May’s failed in the last general election, in 2017—by winning an emphatic parliamentary majority that can pass the legislation necessary to facilitate Britain’s departure from the European Union. The faint irony of that two-year hiatus and the handover of party leadership from May to Johnson is that the latter’s deal is rather worse—from the Brexiteers’ point of view—than the one May repeatedly failed to get past Parliament. Nevertheless, the 2019 general election will go down as the moment British voters in effect voted a resounding “yes” in a de facto second referendum on Brexit and gave Boris Johnson a mandate to make his deal law and attempt to meet the latest Brexit deadline (January 31, 2020).

Far-reaching though the effects of this punctuation mark in the Brexit story will be, the 2019 general election may change the landscape of British politics and the fabric of its society in even more profound and decisive ways.

Brexit’s compromise over the status of Northern Ireland, half-in and half-out of Europe, is an unstable constitutional non-settlement that risks the fragile peace that’s held there since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, while accelerating the hopes of some for a United Ireland. But the future of the Union faces a still more pressing challenge from renewed calls for a referendum on independence for Scotland, where a large majority of voters favor continued membership in Europe. The specter of “the breakup of Britain” that has long haunted the United Kingdom may materialize at last—just at the moment when English nationalists are celebrating their Brexit victory.

So much for the political landscape; what of the social fabric? A fourth successive defeat for the Labour Party, with its most ambitious anti-austerity program yet, and an outright win for a Conservative Party that has purged its moderates have sharpened dividing lines, squeezed the liberal center, and broken consensus into polarity. A minority of Britons—roughly a third, who will now see themselves as effectively disenfranchised—voted for a radical expansion of the public sector, a great leap forward toward a socialist Britain. But the plurality chose a party that, while promising more spending, has actually recomposed itself around a reanimated Thatcherite vision of exclusionary, anti-egalitarian, moralizing social Darwinism. Some part of the Tory electoral coalition might have more welfare-chauvinist reflexes, but the greater part of it distrusts the state, resents the taxation that pays for it, and would like to shrink both.

What is at stake after this election, then—in a Britain that might soon mean, to all intents and purposes, England & Wales—is the future of what has made it a reasonably civilized country since 1945: social democracy...

Interesting.

Butthurt, but interesting.

Keep reading.

Labour's Stunning Shellacking

It's a realignment. From Toby Young, at Quillette, "Britain’s Labour Party Got Woke — And Now It’s Broke":

“The disappearance of Labour’s traditional base isn’t just the story of this election, but one of the main themes of Britain’s post-war political history.” https://t.co/O0QYq4RFFC

— Quillette (@Quillette) December 15, 2019

The crumbling of the ‘Red Wall’ is the big story of this election and some commentators are describing it as a “one off.” The conventional wisdom is that working class voters have “lent” their votes to the Conservatives and, barring an upset, will give them back next time round. It’s Brexit, supposedly, that has been the game-changer—an excuse leapt on by Corbyn’s outriders in the media, who are loathe to blame Labour’s defeat on their man.

If you look at the working class constituencies that turned blue, most of them voted to leave the European Union in 2016 by a significant margin—Great Grimsby, for instance, an English sea port in Yorkshire, where Leave outpolled Remain by 71.45 to 28.55 per cent. Labour’s problem, according to this analysis, is that it didn’t commit to taking Britain out of the EU during the campaign but instead said it would negotiate a new exit deal and then hold a second referendum in which the public would be able to choose between that deal and Remain. This fudge may have been enough to keep graduates on side, but it alienated working class Leave voters in England’s rust belt.

This analysis doesn’t bear much scrutiny. To begin with, the desertion of Labour by its working class supporters—and its increasing popularity with more affluent, better educated voters—is a long-term trend, not an aberration. The disappearance of Labour’s traditional base isn’t just the story of this election, but one of the main themes of Britain’s post-war political history. At its height, Labour managed to assemble a coalition of university-educated liberals in London and the South and low-income voters in Britain’s industrial heartlands in the Midlands and the North—“between Hampstead and Hull,” as the saying goes. But mass immigration and globalization have driven a wedge between Labour’s middle class and working class supporters, as has Britain’s growing welfare bill and its membership of the European Union.

At the October election in 1974, 49 per cent of skilled workers (C2) and 57 per cent of semi-skilled and unskilled workers (DE) voted Labour; by 2010, those numbers had fallen to 29 per cent and 40 per cent respectively. Among middle class voters (ABC1), support for the Conservatives fell over the same time period from 56 per cent in 1974 to 39 per cent in 2010. In 1974, Labour enjoyed a 23-point lead among skilled working class voters (C2), but by 2010 the Conservatives had overtaken them in this demo to lead by eight points—a pattern repeated in 2017. Among graduates, by contrast, Labour led by 17 points in 2017, up from a two-point lead in 2015. (See this data table compiled by Ipsos MORI, a polling company.)

Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters have talked a good deal about winning back these working class voters, but his policy positions haven’t been designed to appeal to them. I’m not just talking about his ambivalence on Brexit—there’s a widespread feeling among voters who value flag, faith and family that Corbyn isn’t one of them. Before he became Labour leader in 2015, he was an energetic protestor against nearly every armed conflict Britain has been involved in since Suez, including the Falklands War. He’s also called for the abandonment of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, the withdrawal of the UK from NATO and the dismantling of our security services—not to mention declining to sing the National Anthem at a Battle of Britain service in 2015. From the point of view of many working class voters, for whom love of country is still a deeply felt emotion, Corbyn seems to side with the country’s enemies more often than he does with Britain.

Corbyn’s victory in the Labour leadership election was followed by a surge in party membership— from 193,754 at the end of 2014 to 388,103 by the end of 2015. But the activists he appeals to are predominantly middle class. According to internal Party data leaked to the Guardian, a disproportionate number of them are “high status city dwellers” who own their own homes.

A careful analysis of the policies set out in Labour’s latest manifesto reveals that the main beneficiaries of the party’s proposed increase in public expenditure—which the Conservatives costed at an eye-watering £1.2 trillion—would be its middle class supporters.

For instance, the party pledged to cut rail fares by 33 per cent and pay for it by slashing the money spent on roads. But only 11 per cent of Britain’s commuters travel by train compared to 68 per cent who drive—and the former tend to be more affluent than the latter. Corbyn also promised to abolish university tuition fees at a cost of £7.2 billion per annum, a deeply regressive policy which, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, would benefit middle- and high-earning graduates with “very little” upside for those on low incomes.

It’s also worth noting that Corbyn’s interests and appearance—he’s a 70-year-old vegetarian with a fondness for train-drivers’ hats who has spent his life immersed in protest politics—strike many working class voters as “weird,” a word that kept coming up on the doorstep according to my fellow canvasser in Newcastle. He’s also presided over the invasion of his party by virulent anti-Semites and Labour is currently in the midst of an investigation by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission thanks to his failure to deal with this. One of his supporters has already blamed the Jews for Labour’s defeat.

But Corbyn isn’t the main reason C2DE voters have turned away from Labour, any more than Brexit is. Rather, they’ve both exacerbated a trend that’s been underway for at least 45 years, which is the fracturing of the “Hampstead and Hull” coalition and the ebbing away of Labour’s working class support.

Another, related phenomenon that’s been overlooked is that these “topsy turvey” politics are hardly unique to Britain. Left-of-center parties in most parts of the Anglosphere, as well as other Western democracies, have seen the equivalent of their own ‘Red Walls’ collapsing. One of the reasons Scott Morrison’s Liberals confounded expectations to win the Australian election last May was because Bill Shorten’s Labour Party was so unpopular in traditional working class areas like Queensland, and support for socially democratic parties outside the large cities in Scandinavia has cratered over the past 15 years or so.

Thomas Piketty, the French Marxist, wrote a paper about this phenomenon last year entitled ‘Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict’ and it’s the subject of Capital and Ideology, his new book. His hypothesis is that politics in the US, Britain, and France—he confines his analysis to those three countries—is dominated by the struggle between two elite groups: the Brahmin Left and the Merchant Right. He points out that left-wing parties in the US, Britain and France used to rely on ‘nativist’ voters to win elections—low education, low income—but since the 1970s have begun to attract more and more ‘globalist’ voters—high education, high income (with the exception of the top 10 per cent of income earners). The nativists, meanwhile, have drifted to the Right, forming a coalition with the business elite. He crunches the data to show that in the US, from the 1940s to the 1960s, the more educated people were, the more likely they were to vote Republican. Now, the opposite is true, with 70% of voters with masters degrees voting for Hilary in 2016. “The trend is virtually identical in all three countries,” he writes.

In Piketty’s view, the electoral preferences of the post-industrial working class—the precariat—is a kind of false consciousness, often engendered by populist snake-charmers like Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orban. He’s intensely suspicious of the unholy alliance between super-rich “merchants” and the lumpen proletariat, and similar noises have been made about the levels of support Boris has managed to attract...

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

Thirty-Nine "Chinese Nationals' Dead in Truck Container-Trailer in Grays, Essex (VIDEO)

Terrible, terrible awful story.

At the Telegraph U.K., "Detectives focus in on Irish gang after 39 migrants froze to death in lorry."

'Suddenly, banks have been left grudgingly weighing the benefits of a party run by neo-Marxists, radical union leaders and lawmakers with a history of supporting communist regimes...'

You can't be serious?!

You gotta read this piece on Britain's Labor Party, and especially how open Labor is to what's essentially a communist political economy.

At the New York Times, "Jeremy Corbyn or No-Deal Brexit? The U.K. Might Have to Choose":

Why are capitalists warming to the leftist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn? “The Tories are promising the most radical and extreme economic intervention probably in 200 years,” says one analyst. “Any of Labour’s policies pale in significance." https://t.co/JSPBQGPrBK

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) October 6, 2019

LONDON — He is the bane of bankers, a bearded, teetotaling socialist often derided in the British press and in Parliament for his efforts to suppress dissent inside the Labour Party and his radical plans to remake the British economy.

But in the unmitigated chaos of Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, the opposition Labour leader, is trying to remint himself as a safe pair of hands, and an unlikely salve to jittery British markets panicked by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plans for an abrupt split with the European Union.

And, surprisingly, it might be working.

“‘What method of execution would you prefer?’ is basically the question,” said David Willetts, a Conservative former minister who was once an aide to Margaret Thatcher. “Corbyn would in normal circumstances look like an off-the-scale risky gamble. However, Brexit is the single biggest change in Britain’s economic and political relations in 40 years, so Brexit itself is an off-the-scale economic gamble.”

With an early election looming, Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party, once a friend to big business and a refuge for establishment figures of all types, has torched one convention after another, creating dust-ups with Queen Elizabeth II, the Supreme Court and Parliament. The prime minister’s proposed Brexit deal, proffered last week to Brussels, was met with so much dismay that most analysts believe he is fully resigned to Britain leaving the bloc without one.

That has turned Mr. Corbyn — a lifelong rabble-rouser and one of the most left-wing leaders in Labour’s century-long history — into an improbable figure of restraint. He is implacably opposed to a no-deal Brexit and promises a second referendum that could reverse the split altogether...

Keep reading.

Boris Johnson Brexit (VIDEO)

Uber-nationalist Pat Buchanan's on the case, at RCP, "Let Them Howl, Boris!"

Boris Johnson Becomes U.K. Prime Minister, Replacing Theresa May (VIDEO)

At LAT, "Boris Johnson takes over as U.K. prime minister, vows to push Brexit through ‘no ifs, ands or buts’," and "New U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s agenda hints at a snap election."

WATCH: Video Show Iran's Takeover of British Oil Tanker

At the Los Angeles Times, "Iran says it detained British tanker in Strait of Hormuz as a ‘reciprocal’ move."

And at Russia Today, with obligatory caveats:

Tim Bouverie, Appeasement

One of the earliest books I can remember on the appeasement policies of the Western allies before World War II is from Telford Taylor, who was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after the war.

See, Munich: The Price of Peace.

It seems there could be little that's new of this history, but nevertheless British journalist Tim Bouverie is out with a new account. See, at Amazon, Tim Bouverie, Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War.

Every young person should know this history, so even if Bouverie doesn't break much new ground, it's vital for new generations to learn the lessons, so good on him for writing this book.

Britain's Watershed Moment (VIDEO)

Following-up, "Theresa May Resigns (VIDEO)."

Pat Condell is so astonishing spot-on it's ridiculous.

Watch:

Theresa May Resigns (VIDEO)

Well, maybe that #TheresaMayResign hashtag pushed her over the edge.

At the Guardian U.K., "Theresa May announces she will resign on 7 June."

And the full video of her speech is here, "Prime minister Theresa May’s resignation speech in full."

Theresa May Faces Pressure to Resign After Push for Second Referendum on Brexit (VIDEO)

Actually, I can't believe she still leads the government.

The Leader of the House of Commons, Andrea Leadsom, resigned from the cabinet in a harsh blow to the prime minister.

Frankly, May's leadership's been a disaster. I'll be glad when she's ousted.

At the Guardian U.K., "Andrea Leadsom quits over Theresa May's Brexit bill: Leader of house known to be unhappy with some of 10 concessions set out by PM."

And a live blog, "May 'could announce departure date on Friday' – politics live: Prime minister replies after Leadsom quits as leader of the House of Commons."



Also, at the BBC, "Brexit: Theresa May resists calls from MPs to resign."

Belgian Carnival Float Features Puppets of Grinning Jews and Money Bags

Following-up, "Labour Party MP Chris Williamson Warns of 'Dark Forces' Undermining Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn; Theresa May Calls for His Suspension (VIDEO)."

I shouldn't be so optimistic that citizens of democracies will rebuke the hate, if Belgium is any example.

At JTA:

Half a lifetime ago, I lived in Belgium. I have never seen something more shocking and yet, been totally unsurprised. https://t.co/E97MONGaiF

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) March 4, 2019

Labour Party MP Chris Williamson Warns of 'Dark Forces' Undermining Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn; Theresa May Calls for His Suspension (VIDEO)

Background here, "Chris Williamson warned of 'dark forces' undermining Corbyn, as councillor joked about 'Jew process': Exclusive: Shocking recording reveals Cllr Jo Bird joked that 'due process' should be dubbed 'Jew process'."

And at the BBC, Williamson was indeed suspended, "Labour activists backlash over anti-Semitism row."

It's bizarre to me that hatred of Jews has become so mainstream and central to leftist politics, but it is what it is, and the bright side is that such hatred should keep them out of power. It should, that is, as long as the general electorate in democratic societies rebukes exterminationist ideological anti-Semitism.

BREAKING: Prime Minister @theresa_may calls for @DerbyChrisW to be suspended from @UKLabour to show that @jeremycorbyn "actually wants to take action against racism".

She also praised the work of @CST_UK, in response to a question from @JamesCleverly.#LabourAntisemitism #PMQs pic.twitter.com/nNTM6QeX8M

— Jewish Telegraph (@JewishTelegraph) February 27, 2019

Rachel Riley's Powerful Speech to the Holocaust Education Trust Reception (VIDEO)

From David Bernstein, at Instapundit, "WHO WOULD HAVE PREDICTED IN 1945 THAT THE UK’S LABOUR PARTY WOULD BE THE CLOSEST IDEOLOGICAL DESCENDANT OF THE NAZIS IN THE WEST? British t.v. presenter Rachel Riley describes the anti-Semitic abuse she’s encountered since publicly criticizing rampant Jew-hatred in Labour."

Video at the link above.

Also at the Jewish Chronicle, "I thought the horror of the Shoah would mean no more antisemitism. I was wrong: Read Rachel Riley's powerful speech to the Holocaust Education Trust reception in Westminster."

Prince Philip Stokes Debate on Older Drivers

This is really good, at the New York Times (two), and an extra hilarious tweet below:

The crash, involving as it did a famously headstrong and famously old royal, occasioned much discussion about whether Britain should clamp down on older people driving. https://t.co/Uq5BGiv0nw

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) January 18, 2019

Two days after Prince Philip was involved in a car crash that injured two women and sparked a debate on older drivers in Britain, he was photographed driving without a seatbelt https://t.co/E3f7bQCjTh

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) January 20, 2019

Journalists: "Brexit will monopolize the front pages for weeks!"
Prince Phillip: "Hold my beer...” pic.twitter.com/5oIq7oWosK

— Ross Baines Art (@RossBainesArt) January 18, 2019