Boris the Victor

Since the House Judiciary Committee forwarded articles of impeachment against Trump to the full House, and since his impeachment is as foregone a conclusion ad is acquittal in the Senate is, I won't talk about that today.  Instead, let's look at Boris Johnson, the prime minister of the United Kingdom.

His Conservative Party's smashing victory over Labour in parliamentary elections on December 12 revealed two things; the Brits are united against socialism but divided by nationalism.  Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn may have taken a stand against British withdrawal from the European Union, but he took a bigger stand for greater nationalization of public services, and his staunch socialist stance led to a crushing defeat.  The British public couldn't see how spending so much money and ceding so much private enterprise to London under a Labour government was going to improve life in Britain. But with the relative success of the Scottish National Party in the elections, a growing nationalism may fracture the Anglo-Scottish union that has survived for over three hundred years, with strong devotion to the nation over the British state possibly setting England asunder from Scotland as well as the other way around.  Scottish nationalism is particularly potent, given the country's efforts to regain its independence (though, ironically, the formal 1707 union of England and Scotland was made possible in part by the Scottish House of Stuart succeeding to the English throne a century before that) and find a way to stay in the European Union.  

As for Corbyn's loss, it certainly sends a signal to the Democratic Party in the United States not to nominate someone too liberal to oppose Trump.  American liberals may not heed the warning, however, because Corbyn had problems that Americans can't relate to.  He called for renationalizing passenger rail transport, while Amtrak is already nationalized (and it may even be in better shape than British Rail, if you can believe that!), and he advocated strengthening the single-payer National Health Service, while candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are still trying to simply establish such a thing here. Also, Corbyn was accused of anti-Semitism, something no one in the Democratic Party has to worry about.  Corbyn's program was far more radical than what Warren and Sanders are proposing, but the Brits, being used to some forms of socialism and government services (the BBC, for example) that are anathema to Americans, found Labour proposing socialism too far left for even continental Western Europe, never mind Britain.  In short,Warren and Sanders are not the leftists that Corbyn is.  But they're still too leftist for many American, and as I said before, the purpose of getting rid of Trump is not to replace reactionary conservatism with socialism (Trump isn't even a reactionary, he's not enlightened enough to be called that!) but to replace Trumpism with what came before it and worry about going left later.  If Democrats go for a sweeping agenda to get rid of Trump that's even remotely like the one the Labour came up with to get rid of Johnson, they'll be in big trouble for 2020.

Johnson will now be able to being the Brexit process on January 31, 2020.  It will be a long process; by the time Britain is finally out of the European Union, the U.S. will have gotten out of everything else already.