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.

Anarchy In the U.K. (Again)

Brexit is coming.  An the United Kingdom is completely unprepared for it.

The British Parliament has been trying to find a deal that would allow the U.K. to leave the European Union with some sort of financial or economic ties with that bloc, and every effort to come up with a deal that would spare the British people an abrupt transition to being left on its own has failed. The U.K. is scheduled to leave the European Union this coming Friday (April 12) and Tory Prime Minister Theresa May is scrambling to get a deal working with . . . the Labour opposition. Led by a guy some of called a Marxist.  Yeah, that'll work out fine.

Many of the British people who support Brexit pine for an imperial past, a strain that has persisted  long after the Empire was dismantled.  People saw that strain fifty years ago when the British sent troops to put down a pro-independence faction in one of their remaining colonies . . . the West Indian island of Anguilla.  It was obvious when Margaret Thatcher allied herself so closely to Ronald Reagan and dragged her heels negotiating the fate of Hong Kong with China.  And of course, there was the Falklands War.  Britain is still a global power in terms of its influence and multilateral activity, but it's going to end up being a global pretender, the way things are going with a backward scheme like Brexit.

The only consolation I get from watching the Brexit controversy is that there's at least one national government out in the world as screwed up as the American government.    

May In June

After denying that she would seek an early election in Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May is now doing just that, calling Parliament to stand for a vote in June in an effort to shore up public support for her Conservative (Tory) Party.

May wants a larger majority in the House of Commons for the Tories to strengthen Britain's position going into negotiations with the European Union over British withdrawal from that body.   She doesn't have a solid mandate with the current Tory caucus, and she hopes that she can put Labour aside for awhile, as that party is spectacularly weak despite - or even because of - underfunded social programs and the socialistic Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party.

Right now, the only thing that's stopping May from getting that solid Conservative majority she wants is the party of the Liberal Democrats, a left-of-center group that opposes a hard, clean break from the European Union and demanding a "Brexit" strategy that will produce "a Britain that is open, tolerant and united."  They can do it, too; they forced the formation of a coalition government in 2010 after the Conservatives failed to gain a majority in Parliament, which involved a lot of compromising to get anything done.

As for May, the shock was not that she broke her promise to avoid another election until 2020 but that she broke it so soon.

European politics are about to get even more interesting.