So what happened in the recent UK elections and why?

Tony J at Balloon-Juice has the scoop:

6. Tony Jay MAY 11, 2021 AT 7:18 AM

Further Tales from the Akannawatch,
or the Nounfall of Dumbanbored

“ANYTHING YOU CAN DO, WE CAN DO LATER
WE CAN DO EVERYTHING SHITTER THAN YOU”

A Max Bialystock Production

Back in the Swinging Sixties, when The Beatles were exporting their cheeky/cheery brand of mop-topped, head-wobbling, non-segregated, joy-pop to US shores, the people who got paid on a sliding scale of obnoxiousness to sneer at such things complained that all the Fab Four were really doing was repackaging American rock ‘n blues n’ bubblegum music into tight-fitting drainpipes and selling it back to source. The Beatles, being 1960’s Scousers and therefore composed of 75% dry snarctastic wit, 20% love for American music and 5% German STDs, just drawled “Cool insight, chum, have a cuppa and listen to Ringo’s latest poem”, then went forth to become Bigger Than Jeebus and do for the world’s dope dealers what The Stones would do for no-contest paternity suit lawyers. Of course, it wasn’t very long at all before the people who got paid to sneer at the people who sneered at other people (cue the duelling banjo implication music) pointed out that the musical styles the Beatles were reinventing had originally come to American shores with immigrants from Europe, slaves from Africa and wherever the hell Little Richard’s pomade-stylist came from (Welsh Polynesia?) so really, weren’t they just describing the great ouroboros of everything that powers global culture? People take things in, filter them through their cultural intestines and, hopefully, produce new takes on old standards that are just as genuine as the “back when music had real singers and you knew a lutist by the seam of his hose” classics we remember Grandad formation-dancing to.

[...]

Take a few minutes, grab a drink and a comfy chair and sit back and enjoy.

Cheers,
Scott.

(I'm not wading through all that, soz; the writer's sheer love of self and hatred of brevity, as evidenced in the quoted para, was enough for me)

Also, Johnson has (stopped clock, whatever) ridden the wave of one of the most successful, well-executed, and effective vaccination programmes in the world.

Labour has two problems: the perennial one, which is that there's no factionalism like left-wing factionalism, and the tactical, right-now one, which is that Starmer just doesn't have many sticks with which to beat Johnson and his government.

UK Politics* is dead simple. The electorate is, by and large, either just a bit to the left or the right of the centre. Johnson's mad-bastard shotgun approach (e.g. banning gay conversion therapy whilst at the same time demanding photo ID at elections) covers quite a lot of that.

If Labour lurches to the left, there's a whole bunch of centrists (whom the real Labour supporters despise, with bells on), who'll fuck off to the Tories, the Lib Dems, or whoever. If Labour moves to the right, then again, they shed voters, as their left-wing cohort defects to the Greens, or the Lib Dems, or whatever.

The only Labour Leader to figure it out in the past 30 years was Blair. He ran the party like a dictatorship, and didn't give a tuppenny fuck what the vocal but ultimately irrelevant left-wing of the party thought. Can Starmer do it? Fuck knows. There's plenty in the party** who'd rather let the country be run by the Tories forever than lose the internal factional argument.

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