OPINION:
Our cousins across the Atlantic have just replaced a nominally Conservative government with the British equivalent of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Keir Starmer met with King Charles III on Friday to accept the position of prime minister after winning an election that wasn’t even close.
The Labor Party secured 412 seats in the House of Commons — a 63% majority — leaving Conservatives powerless with a paltry 121. Nigel Farage and three Reform UK members won seats they intend to use as a platform to oppose the leftists and form a new conservative majority.
Thanks to the convoluted structure of parliamentary elections, Mr. Starmer achieved his blowout victory with fewer votes than Conservatives and Reform received combined. Polling data from YouGov confirms the public wasn’t exactly embracing Labor. Nearly half of voters told pollsters they had an unfavorable view of the party, with 48% of Labor voters saying their motivation was “to get the Tories out.”
Who can blame them? Had Conservatives stayed in power, voters would still get “net zero,” a plan that replaces affordable energy sources with expensive and inefficient alternatives that masquerade as green. It’s the same idea the left pushes here in the United States; it’s just pushed with less vigor.
Thanks to Conservative inaction, immigration also tripled in the past several years. Instead of focusing on fighting crime in the streets, British police officers spend their time attending diversity training seminars and arresting anyone making “offensive” comments on X.
London recorded 989 arrests between 2021 and 2023 under a law allowing anyone to be thrown in jail for making naughty comments online. Of those arrested, 47 were charged with “Persistently making use of public communication network to cause annoyance, inconvenience or anxiety.”
Mr. Starmer will be more straightforward about his intentions. He was formerly a member of the “editorial collective” for Socialist Alternatives, a Marxist journal. Mr. Starmer, who is 61, was still writing articles for Socialist Lawyer when he was 45.
But Mr. Starmer did trade some of his past anti-monarchical views for a title and a profitable seat at the table at the G7. He heads a party whose promise is to make Britain a clean energy superpower — not with a Green New Deal but with a “Green Prosperity Plan.” As the Labor manifesto states, “We will shape markets, and use public investment to crowd in private funding” to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2030.
It’s a crony capitalist proposal to accelerate the already excessive taxpayer funding of bird-killing windmills. Vast swaths of formerly pristine countryside will also be blighted with solar panels that will occasionally generate electricity on the gloomy island, where the sun shines an average of 15% of the day. The only ones to benefit from the program will be the middlemen working with the Chinese factories that produce the turbine blades and photovoltaic cells.
On both sides of the Atlantic, conservatives often feel compelled by the incessant drumbeat from Hollywood leftists and corporate-owned media outlets to go along with futile endeavors of this sort. The Tories gave in and went hard “moderate” on this and every issue to avoid criticism.
In the end, the Conservative Party was captured by the agendas made fashionable by the BBC and the Guardian newspaper. The lesson for U.S. conservatives is how swiftly the voters recognized and punished the insincerity.
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