Although polls leading up to the 2019 election showed that the gap between the Conservative Party and the Labour Party was narrowing, the Brits gave a resounding win to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, echoing the legendary victories of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and 1983. The election provides Johnson a rock-solid mandate for hard Brexit, positioning the U.K. between a rock and a hard place.
Brexit Referendum
Boris Johnson
The General Election to Parliament was widely perceived as an unofficial referendum on Brexit. Johnson replaced the weak Prime Minister Theresa May, who managed to botch the deal with the E.U. by throwing away a superior negotiation position. He was chosen as the leader of the Conservative Party to fix the problems that May had created. The massive victory of this controversial figure can, therefore, only be reasonably interpreted as a mandate for his hard Brexit position, which means the willingness to exit the E.U. without a deal.
The British people have sent a resounding message to both the British political class and the E.U. leadership: Don’t you dare sabotage this Brexit.
Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party unofficially embraced the conservatives by only focusing their election campaign on Labour strongholds. The word on the street was to vote tactically. Don’t split the Brexit vote. Give the Tories the mandate they need.
Communism Referendum
But the election was more than Brexit. It was also about the Marxist anti-Semitic takeover of Labour, spearheaded by Jeremy Corbyn. Labour experienced the most humiliating defeat in modern history, losing decades-old strongholds to the Tories.
Leftists have tried to blame this on the issue of Brexit. That undoubtedly played a role, but Corbyn’s radical socialism was likely an even more significant contributor to the disastrous election results. People on the ground talking to ordinary voters reported the same thing from all over the country: They had voted Labour their entire lives but couldn’t in good conscience vote for Corbyn.
Some stayed at home, some crossed over to the Tories, some went to the Brexit Party, and among the Remainers, some went to the Liberal Democrats, and to the Scottish National Party (SNP) in Scotland.
Of interest was the lack of voting patterns among social classes. The support for the conservatives was roughly the same in the working class, middle class, and upper class. A comparison of the 1983 election with 2019 shows that the Labour support has dwindled and thinned out in the traditional working-class strongholds in the North.
There was, however, a distinct demographic pattern. Labour garnered most of its support from two groups: young people (age 18-34), who have been indoctrinated in communism in the universities, and Muslims.
Scotland
SNP ended up with 48 out of 58 Scottish seats in Parliament. Over the past 20 years, Scottish nationalism has been steadily rising, and this culminated in the most spectacular divergence in the 2019 election. The split has been blamed on Brexit, but it started long before anyone dreamed of leaving the E.U.
Nationalism is on the rise everywhere in Europe, including in Scotland. While most nationalists are E.U. skeptics, the SNP is the oddball, wanting to exit the U.K. but not the E.U.
One of Johnson’s most crucial quagmires is how to prevent Scotland from breaking away. He might have to offer them a high degree of autonomy, including giving them full control over the North Sea oil reserves.
Hard Brexit
But most important of all is how Johnson will handle the Brexit negotiations. If he has guts, like Margaret Thatcher, he will threaten to blockade the Gibraltar Strait or the English Channel and collect taxes on all E.U. traffic unless the Europeans give him a reasonable deal.
Johnson is known for his big mouth. Now he has the chance to show if he also has the resolve it takes to secure the future of the British Isles.
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