RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273039/first-they-came-tommy%E2%80%A6-bruce-bawer

In recent months, even as a majority of the politicians in Britain’s two major parties have seemed to be doing everything they can to cancel or water down the EU exit for which the British people voted, the same establishment has been striving to stifle, and if possible destroy, the man who, more than anyone else in the country, articulates the rage and fear and hope of the British working class – and of no small number of middle-class Brits as well.

For years, British authorities have harassed, threatened, and imprisoned him, their objective plainly being to scare him into silence. Last summer they engineered an unjustified arrest, rushed him through a mockery of a trial, and shipped him off to prison, obviously hoping he wouldn’t come out alive.

Meanwhile, Britain’s mainstream media have demonized him, all of them singing from the same hymnal. Almost invariably, they prefix his name with the words “far-right.” Of course he is far from the only prominent figure in the Western world to be libeled in this way. You can be a liberal in pretty much every way, but if you are so consistent in your liberalism as to be a critic of the appalling illiberalism of Islam, then you are, in the lexicon of the mainstream media, “far-right.”

He’s also routinely identified as the founder of the English Defense League (EDL). Often this is combined with the term “far-right,” as in “founder of the far-right English Defense League” or “far-right founder of the English Defense League.” Very rarely is it mentioned in the mainstream media that he left the EDL years ago precisely because it was turning into a far-right organization and he didn’t want to have anything more to do with it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/is-realignment-coming-to-british-po

In the U.K., a small group of Labour Members of Parliament joined by an even smaller group of Tory MPs have formed a politically centrist coalition, the Independent Group (TIG). Though the influence of these disgruntled and Europhile MPs is debatable, the fear of more defections may help explain why the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is now backing a second Brexit vote.

But beyond Brexit, it is also possible that TIG will preempt a more significant political realignment. After all, it’s happened before.

In 1981, a group of Labour MPs who were disgruntled by the increasing leftward lurch of their party broke away and formed the Social Democratic party (SDP). The SDP orientated itself as left-of-center, pro-European, and in support of a moderate and mixed economy. In 1983, under the hard-left leadership of Neil Kinnock, the Labour party set out an explicitly socialist party manifesto — in what one Labour MP famously called “the longest suicide note in history.”

That the Labour party’s explicitly socialist policies were unpopular was proven in the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the year that the Conservatives won with a 43-seat majority — which was the largest electoral swing since 1945. Thatcher’s election in 1979 also began 18 years of uninterrupted Conservative rule — the longest party ruling in British history.

Learning the hard way then, by the mid-’90s, the Labour party reoriented along more centrist lines, and at the 1994 Labour party conference, then leader Tony Blair heralded the arrival of “New Labour.” New Labour rejected socialism, conceded the most popular economic policies of Thatcherism — anti-inflation, low taxation, trade-union reforms, and free-market favorability — and added progressive social values and pro-European and anti-Unionist stances (e.g. devolution for Scotland).

Such a profound change in the party was, naturally, accompanied by a profound change in its base. Under Blair, New Labour consciously ceased to be the party of the working class — as it had been historically — and rather tried to appeal to highly educated, middle-class liberals where it saw its future. But from this, disillusionment with hypocrisy and elitism followed. The working class felt disaffected. Some voted Tory instead.