Some commentary on the British election

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As the late Rabbi Lionel Blue said: ‘Jews are like everybody else but more so.’ This is especially true in politics, where radical movements that are subversive to western values inevitably come for the Jews first. [Nonsense.  Jews have been the backbone of the left, including the radical left, in Western societies throughout the twentieth century into the present. And “Western values” are interpreted by Jews as having nothing to do with preserving the historical Western peoples. What we are seeing here is a return of Jews to the Labour Party because Corbyn is long gone and Starmer with his Jewish wife are entirely kosher.]

A question that has been foremost in the minds of many British voters over the past six weeks has been whether Labour – and Sir Keir Starmer – have changed. Just five years ago, it was a party of cranks, extremists, bigots and anti-Semites [i.e., critics of Israel]. Just five years ago, Sir Keir appeared to do his utmost to put their hempy chieftain in No. 10. Could the country trust him and his party now? … [I’m omitting how Starmer waffled on Corbyn like a typical Western unprincipled politician.]

The years since 2015 have been painful for the Jews, particularly those on the left, who suffered the ignominy of having their political home reject them in the most vicious of ways.

After Corbyn’s defenestration, Jewish progressives felt a powerful desire to take Sir Keir at his word and return to the fold. But something held many of them back. To wish for Labour to have changed was all very well, but to allow that to cloud one’s judgment could lead to even greater ruination.

This uncertainty was evident as recently as two weeks ago, when despite a huge swing of 50 points to Labour, enough members of the community remained unconvinced enough to deprive Sir Keir of a majority in our polling. A week later, however, the matter seemed settled. Labour was kosher again.

Partly, this was due to the determined efforts of Sir Keir himself in ‘rooting out’ anti-Semitism from the party. Partly it was due to the way in which he steered Labour carefully but insistently back towards the centre; when parties veer to the radical fringes, it is never good for the Jews. [The Jews learned that their leadership in radical leftist movements

But it was also due to the Labour rank-and-file, who matched Sir Keir’s efforts with more quotidian goodwill gestures of their own. Sackman, a barrister specialising in environment-related cases who has been vice-chair of the Jewish Labour Movement for more than eight years, was an excellent choice of candidate for Finchley. She and her team worked hard to rebuild bridges. Last night, their efforts were rewarded.

The cumulative effect of a party’s culture can be a powerful thing, for bad as well as for good. God knows we have seen both from Labour over the last decade.

It would be a mistake to suggest that all the difficult questions about Sir Keir’s support for Corbyn have been adequately addressed

As the sun rises over a Labour Britain, I think of Dame Louise Ellman, the veteran MP for Liverpool Riverside, who was viciously hounded out of the party during the Corbyn years. I discussed the matter with her at some length a couple of months ago. At one point, she told me, local party members launched a project to ‘dehumanise’ her. Nobody used her name, referring to her instead as ‘the MP’. Nobody made eye contact with her. Whenever she entered a room, people walked out.

This was all because of her very reasonable lack of antipathy for Israel, her ancestral homeland. When brought to life with anecdotes like this, such blatant anti-Semitism makes the skin crawl. Dame Louise had more reason than anyone to stay away from Labour for the rest of her life; but in 2021, she rejoined it. ‘I am confident that, under the leadership of Keir Starmer, the party is once again led by a man of principle in whom the British people and Britain’s Jews can have trust’, she said at the time.

She wasn’t the only one. Last year, Luciana Berger – who had also suffered torrents of abuse at the hands of Corbynistas – also returned. If these brave women could show forgiveness and confidence in the new regime, the stage was set for other left-wing Jews to follow suit.

It would be a mistake to suggest that all the difficult questions about Sir Keir’s support for Corbyn have been adequately addressed. In politics, some things will never be fully understood. It is certain, however, that the majority of British Jews, particularly those inclined to the left, believe in Labour again. They have Sir Keir to thank for that.

The acid test would be to see what happens if a political party begins to oppose Israel. We already know what is happening in the U.K. as a result of the Labour Party’s criticism of Israel under Jeremy Corbyn. Jews, who had been important funders of Labour (Jews as 0.5% of the population donated fully one-third of Labour’s budget as recently as 2015), have substantially withdrawn their financial support. Of course, Labour may receive some donations from pro-BDS-type Jews, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the donations that appear to be contingent on support for Israel. (Incidentally, this is an excellent reason to prioritize the study of the Israel Lobby over pro-BDS Jews.) I suspect that if the Democrats in the U.S. become as critical of Israel as Labour is now, Jewish financial contributions will dry up—even from Jews who appear to have other priorities at this time.

… But the real story at this election was elsewhere.

The striking Tory collapse was most dramatic in the most strongly pro-Brexit areas of the country where the party was completely smashed apart not by Labour or the Lib Dems but Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

As I’ve warned for months and months, in this Substack, the Reform revolt has now hit Rishi Sunak and the Tories much harder than the Tories ever expected.

While the Tory vote collapsed by 12 points in less strongly pro-Brexit seats, it collapsed, remarkably, by nearly 30 points in the most staunchly pro-Brexit areas.

In precisely those parts of the country that are filled with working-class, non-graduate, older, hardworking, and deeply patriotic people who have watched the evolution of the Tories since Brexit with a combination of shock, anger, and horror.

In these places, a massive chunk of the Tory electorate decamped en masse to Farage and Reform, with Farage essentially inheriting the post-Brexit realignment that Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak completely squandered.

In these areas, then, Farage has just picked up where he left off.

After all, it was Farage and the UK Independence Party, not the Tories, that first began cultivating these areas during the 2010-2015 parliament, when David Cameron mocked the Faragists as an assortment of ‘fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists’.

It was then Farage, far more so than Boris Johnson, who then cultivated them further during the Brexit referendum, campaigning deep in the Labour heartlands, while much of the political establishment did not have any idea what was coming.

And it was then Farage and the Brexit Party, in 2019, which returned to these areas while much of the elite class was deriding their voters as thickoes, Gammons, and racists and trying to force them to vote again at a second referendum.

And now Farage and Reform, nearly ten years on from Brexit, have become the main beneficiary of all this, once again outflanking a Tory elite class that has consistently underestimated, ignored, or mocked the larger part of its post-Brexit coalition.

Labour’s vote, meanwhile, especially in England, has remained static.

As I’ve also been writing for months, and as the result of the election confirms, there really is no mass public enthusiasm for Keir Starmer and the Labour Party.

Yes, Labour now has an enormous majority.

But it is one that rests on just 35% of the national vote, lower than what Jeremy Corbyn attracted in 2017 and lower than anything Tony Blair achieved.

At the start of the election I said this would become the ‘None of the Above’ election and that is what’s happened, with millions of voters rejecting Labour and the Tories.

Turnout has slumped to the second lowest level since the 1880s, while the combined share of the vote for the two big parties has crashed to the lowest level since the modern two-party system began.

I discussed and successfully forecast much of this during our online Zoom Town Hall meeting with our paying subscribers the night before the general election.

In fact, no governing party has ever won a majority on a share of the vote as low as what Keir Starmer and the Labour Party just won.

Keir Starmer and his new Ministers might tell themselves they won back the working-class and ordinary people but, actually, their support in England remained static.

It barely moved at all.

This is one of the most important — yet so far neglected — aspects of the result.

Sir Keir’s massive majority owes more to the sheer scale of this Tory collapse than to any eruption of mass public enthusiasm for the Labour Party.

Labour’s share of the vote in England stayed as flat as a pancake, only increasing by 0.6 per cent, while it actually declined in Wales.

It was only in Scotland where Labour surged, which was, again, something I’ve been warning about for a long time.

In England, the big story was that Reform’s share of the vote increased by 13 points, inflicting enormous losses on the Tories in hundreds of seats.

Here’s just one statistic to consider.

Support for Reform was greater than the margin of defeat for the Tories in nearly 180 seats, underlining just how much damage Farage & Co. caused Conservatives.

While winning five seats, 4 million votes, and finishing second in around 100 seats (I predicted 1-3 seats, 5 million votes, and lots of second places), Reform not only cost the Tories seats but is now embedded as the opposition in lots of Labour heartlands.

“We are coming for Labour now”, said Farage, yesterday, pointing to this two-flank strategy. Keep hitting Tories in the south; open a second flank on Labour in the north.Reform’s second places (on right). Guardian data team

So, why did this happen?

Because, as I’ve written for the last three years, on this Substack, the Conservative Party no longer really knows what it is anymore.

It is completely lost.

It does not know who has been voting for it since the Brexit referendum, or why.

The Tories are critically ill, gripped by a full-blown identity crisis — no longer sure who they are, what they believe, or what they are meant to say.

Steadily but surely, ever since 2019, the Tories angered and alienated its core voters by doing the very opposite of what they said they would do.

They failed to control our borders.

They failed to lower legal immigration.

They failed to cut taxes and the size of the state.

They failed to take on woke, exposing our children to ideas with no basis in science.

And they failed to level-up the left behind regions.

That is why so many voters jumped ship to Farage, who after eight attempts now has a seat in the House of Commons, or simply stayed at home, refusing to vote at all.

The Tory coalition, as I said it would back in January, completely imploded under the weight of this betrayal, apathy, and widespread disillusionment.

And if you look at what Tory-to-Reform switchers want it is crystal clear, because I have asked them, surveying more than 3,000 of them for this Substack.

They want to stop the small boat invasion, which is making a mockery of our claim to be a self-governing, sovereign nation which can control its own borders.

And they want to dramatically lower legal mass immigration.

These are perfectly reasonable requests, and they are ones the Tories will now have to engage with if they are to stand any chance at rebuilding their coalition and surviving as a viable political party in the future.

Because remember this, too, the pro-Brexit, anti-immigration chunk of the new Tory electorate is MUCH bigger than the anti-Brexit, pro-immigration elite minority chunk that will now dominate the debate about where the Tories should go next.

What we will now hear, endlessly, from the likes of William Hague, Rory Stewart, George Osborne and other members of the Tory elite class is that the party must now “return to the centre”.

What they mean by “centre” is a place that only reflects the values, tastes, and priorities of elites like them but which, as we have shown for years, alienates and angers a much bigger part of the new, post-Brexit Tory electorate.

If you think the Tories can return to being a viable party by targeting the cities, university towns, and affluent parts of the commuter belt that were just taken over by Labour and the Liberal Democrats and have been trending leftwards for the last decade then good luck to you. That is the path to political extinction.

No. The only way forward for the Tories, if they are to survive, and there is no guarantee they will, is to re-engage fully with all those voters in non-London England.

To completely reinvent the party —its message, philosophy, ideology — so they can appeal to the large majority of voters in this country who desperately want an end to mass immigration, mass taxation and regulation, mass woke, and mass chaos.

Because if they don’t then Nigel Farage certainly will.

And make no mistake.

For the Tories— this really is a battle for political survival.

Because with Nigel Farage and Reform now ensconced in Westminster, with millions of voters looking for something different, the few Tories who remain in parliament are going to have to get their act together — and fast.

This means coming up with a credible, compelling, and clear response to voters’ sincerely held concerns over mass immigration and the borders.

It means coming up with a far more resonant and appealing brand of Conservatism that is more in tune with ordinary working people.

And, most of all, it means treating their voters with the respect and recognition they deserve.

Because if the Tories do not do these things, then they will soon find themselves not just on life support but heading to the morgue.