June 8th 2017: the aftermath

I won’t bother using the excuse of BBC bias and I won’t try to shoe-horn my opinion into a BBC-related op ed., but I will explore a fraction of the issues that have arisen from both parties’ dire election campaigns and the immediate aftermath, and the boundless ramifications therein.

We knew Labour’s perceived ‘win’ would allow people like Owen Jones to be even more insufferable than usual.

In fact he was being insufferable in the snippet of Dateline I caught this morning; so there you are, an unforced U-turn by me just seconds into the game. I have resorted to the BBC after all, but not necessarily its bias.   Owen went into a diatribe about the Conservatives’ coalition with the DUP. 

“A Conservative party that has been humiliated and now faces huge division, is now going to be held over the barrel by the most extreme party on the House of Commons, the DUP, which let’s be very clear, when we talk about social conservatism and those sorts of euphemisms, is anti LGBT rights, anti women, they are climate change deniers…”

“Led by a woman” interjected Irishman Brian O’Connell.

“they oppose a woman’s right to choose and they are backed by loyalist terrorists. They are now gonna be the most - you know, have huge influence over…” continued the boy.

“You say backed by them - they have no formal link..” interrupted Shaun Ley “We need to be clear about that”

“They were enthusiastically supported by loyalists that’s just an objective fact and you can see the loyalist murals all over Belfast….” […]

Janet Daley to Owen:

“From your point of view as a Corbyn supporter I wouldn’t go on too much about links with terrorists, and I also wouldn’t go on too much about prejudice, social prejudices. The people who write - who refer to me as the Zionist Jew Janet Daley online whenever I attack Corbyn are not a particularly attractive picture either, so I would be very careful about - I mean there is left wing bigotry and there is right wing bigotry…”

In the spilt second before he turned his head away sharply as if to escape, Owen’s face was a little picture.

Being insufferable

If you saw Guido’s pre-election compilation of non-Corbynite Labour MPs saying that Jeremy Corbyn was unelectable you’ll probably be wondering how quickly they'll return to the fold with a bundle of self-serving excuses for riding back into office on the shoulders of a mountain of lies. 

As for the youth vote, if that was really responsible for the ‘win’ that wasn’t, you have to wonder at the gullibility of the dupes who were so easily bribed with all those undeliverable promises while the memory of the Lib Dems' undelivered and undeliverable free tuition fees pledge is still so fresh, as is the near terminal effect it has had on the Lib Dems.

The Conservatives - perhaps in an effort to distance themselves from the Cameron era - forgot to use the economy at all in their campaign. A catastrophic error, both positively (with regard to potentially Brexit related unrestricted trading) and negatively (in respect of the Labour Party’s Venezuela-Type economic model) not to mention their un-costed manifesto. Now that Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill have fallen on their swords, we get a chance to see where they think they went wrong.

 I regret the decision not to include in the manifesto a ceiling as well as a floor

Not a very convincing debriefing if you ask me. I’ve lifted some comments that I think illustrate a fraction of the mountain of problems this country is currently having to deal with.

The first is from Conservative Home, and the rest are from my favourite btl location, Harry’s Place.

“The manifesto and campaign was a car crash: you used the manifesto to attack your own free market wing, had no retail policies, assumed hitting pensioners would win votes of the young, said nothing about how you would positively use powers repatriated from Brexit for good of country, brought back old Conservative stereotypes with nonsense like the fox hunting vote, and then spent the campaign ignoring growth economics. Add to that the u-turns, the refusal to debate etc, and the slogan "strong and stable" looked so divorced from reality to be laughable. That the Cons still got such a high vote share merely serves to show how much the fundamentals were in your favor.”

*******

“It is seriously worrying how many people either don't know or don't care about Corbyn's support for the IRA, Hamas, and Hezbollah, his association with anti-Semites, his work for Iranian TV, his support for the Castro regime, and his Stalinist advisors.”

*******

“I find it worrying that *anybody at all* will vote for the Labour Party and its Magic Money Tree and Free Stuff For Groups We Like. And the Tories are hardly any better, with their snouts in the trough. Who can the hard-pressed English taxpayer vote for? 

Still, we can hope that people who voted to punish Mrs May's hubris -because Corbyn couldn't possibly get in!- will think twice next time.

*******

“The worse election campaign I have ever witnessed. A conservative manifesto without costings allowing the stupid left to call it uncosted compared to their fantasy figures. To rake over old coals like fox hunting. To conjure up images of the nasty party by abandoning free shool meals allowing the weasel to sell his for the many not the few rubbish. To target the main demographic that will back you. She had the white working class vote. Then she decided to target their homes if they have home help is unbelievable. Then she backtracked making her strong and stable theme look pathetic.


The old saved us again but the demographics are moving towards the left and fantasy economics.

*******

The causes of this result are a lot deeper than (if I may so) old-fashioned arguments about good or bad election campaigns.
To my mind, the occupants-in-waiting of No 10 and No 11 both having been apologists for terrorism for decades, and having been disowned by 80% of their own parliamentary party, is enough to rule their party out of contention, full stop. There was absolutely nothing Theresa May could have done in her manifesto or in her TV appearances that, to me, was worse than that.
Yet 12.8 million people either don't care or are prepared to dismiss it all as smears and "Project Fear".
The Scottish independence referendum, Brexit, Trump, and this - something is fundamentally changing and it's not just the effects of a bad manifesto.

*******

And last but not least, from our friend Sarah AB:

I was amused that the left were suddenly so protective of inherited wealth. (I realize the policy was unrefined and would have hit middling people most but ... )