Red Wave 2022: UK Bellwether Says Door Open For Nationalist GOP Landslide

It may be time to get long political volatility again.

MSN: Voters flock to PM Johnson's party as Labour loses northeast bastion

Voters in an opposition stronghold turned en masse to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservatives, boosting his parliamentary majority on Friday despite a high COVID-19 death toll, last year's record economic slump and cronyism charges.

Conservative Jill Mortimer beat Labour's candidate in Thursday's ballot by 15,529 votes to 8,589 to take the parliamentary seat for Hartlepool, a victory once unthinkable in a northeastern English port town that for decades backed Britain's main opposition party. ...Election analysts said it was the biggest swing of votes to the governing party at a by-election since World War Two.

The victory is not a total surprise. While Laboour did win a majority in 2017, in the prior election Labour won by a pluralty. The Conservative and Brexit Party candidates combined for a majority. Thus, this result is more of a confirmation that the ongoing realignment of what was formerly called the "white working class" is solidifying. What's also fascinating is that the Labour Party hasn't been focused on governing, but on hunting down the "anti-semites" in the Labour Party itself.

Jacobin: The Labour Antisemitism Report Has Always Been a Politically Motivated Travesty

The same media outlets enabled a concerted effort to redefine “antisemitism” so that it no longer had much to do with prejudice against Jewish people and chiefly concerned attitudes toward Israel. In a final twist, they denounced anyone who questioned this rickety construct as an “antisemitism denier.” With these empirical and conceptual protocols in place, the “Labour antisemitism” narrative was a perpetual-motion device, capable of generating its own fuel for as long as Corbyn’s opponents deemed it necessary. The principal shortcoming of the Corbyn leadership in this respect was its failure to defend itself robustly, instead of offering unwarranted concessions that bought days or weeks of peace at the expense of months or years of pain. But we will search in vain for any acknowledgment of that in the EHRC report.

From earlier this year, The Guardian: Antisemitism in the Labour party was real and it must never be allowed to return

Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, permission was given for antisemitism to spread from the fringes to the mainstream. The report specifically outlines a failure of leadership, and yet Corbyn simply could not bring himself to offer a genuine apology today. Keir Starmer made the right decision in suspending him from the party, following his shameful reaction. Corbyn’s persistent denial really left Starmer with no choice but to take this action. In doing so he has created an opportunity for the party to now move forward.

For those of us who were the targets of the relentless abuse, it was a dreadful, lonely and frightening period of our lives. In my nearly 60 years of membership of the Labour party I have lived through many ups and downs, but none as debilitating and horrible as the time spent battling antisemitism within the party. The torrent of abuse was gruesome, especially after each time I openly challenged the racism in my party. People often tie together my Jewish identity with the fact that I am a woman. So I am regularly accused of being a Zionist pig, a Tory hag, a racist shill or being a dizzy old bint who should be executed by Hezbollah.

The use of anti-semitism as a political cudgel, the reclassificaton of political opposition as anti-semitism, sure sounds an awful lot like classifying political opponents as white supremacists and insurrectionists, don't you think? What happens if the independent voters see through this lie amid economic stagnation and rising inflation? Perhaps demonizing "white working class" voters will produce an even bigger electoral backlash in the U.S. next year.

We know there was fraud in the 2000 eletion because Republicans gained in the House, but lost the White House and Senate, an odd situation. Looking to 2022, the opposition party usually adds seats in off-year elections. The baseline scenario is the GOP takes back the House and Senate given the slim Democrat majorities. Given the 2020 aftermath, it's likely the GOP would do better than baseline. Moreover, the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom and Australia continue to exibit similar political trends. It's not a huge assumption to think there is a warning for the U.S. Brexit was a signal that polls were off and Trump's candidacy was mre serious than assumed. A core Labour seat, held by Labour since it was created in 1974, swung to the other party. A similar result in the U.S. would see GOP candidates win in deep blue states such as Massachusetts, California and New York. Could it happen? It did in 1994.

The question for 2022 is whether nationalist candidates sweep the GOP primaries or if the GOPe fools enough conservatives into voting for the same old candidates. If the latter, then the GOP will likely win big, but sputter politically as the wider public and their own base rejects them. If instead the GOP moves in a geniunely new direction towards a more intelligent, coherent platform that taps into the spirit of the 2016 Trump campaign, it's possible a major political realignment is underway. The ejection of Liz Cheney from leadership, a key opponent of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and who voted for Trump's impeachment based on the January 6 blood libel, opens the door to a GOP shift.