Labour Victory Means No More BoJo & Co. in Britain; No Q&A Today
Welcome back to Lucid, and a big hello to new subscribers! A reminder that there is no Q&A today. Since it is the first week of the month, we will gather on Sunday, July 7, 8-9pmET (the other three weeks of the month we meet on Fridays, 1-2pmET, to allow multiple time zones to join). If you can’t make these sessions, I send out a video of my remarks and initial conversation with a guest if we have one.
On Sunday we’ll speak with Prof. Andre Pagliarini, a Brazilian historian based in the U.S. He’ll talk about dictatorship and its legacies (Brazil lived under a military junta from 1964 to 1985), Bolsonaro’s ties to MAGA (you can read Prof. Pagliarini’s New York Times op-ed on Bolsonaro here), and how he sees our situation.
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“When it came it felt like a welcome relief, like being let out of a madhouse or being allowed to stop torturing yourself,” Bill Emmott, former editor of the Economist, wrote in May of the news that Britain would have elections in July. Now that relief is tangible for those who felt despair at 14 years of negligent governance by a series of Conservative fake populists, as I call them.
Fake populists are politicians and parties that claim to represent the nation but in reality are arrogant elitists beholden to special interests and, as in Hungary and other nations, thoroughly corrupt as well.
2016’s Brexit was the ultimate act of self-harm. The propaganda campaign that induced so many to vote for a measure they would later regret mixed anti-immigrant fear-mongering and scapegoating with imperial nostalgia. Make Britain Great Again by withdrawing from profitable trade networks and mind-expanding educational and cultural exchanges was the irrational message that resonated with so many.
In a devastating essay, Gary Younge examined the consequences: schools that have had to close and communities that are shrinking due to low birth rates and Brexit-caused emigration. A crumbling public infrastructure, visible not just in the sorry state of roads but in the number of bankrupt municipal governments –including Nottingham, Britain’s 9th largest city— because of insufficient funds coming from the government.
Things got so bad that Britain came on the radar of United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty. A 2023 report found that 29% of British children were living in poverty. UN Envoy Olivier De Schutter charged that Britain was in “in violation of international law” for grossly insufficient levels of welfare assistance to Britons of all ages.
This is the context for the mass defection from the Tories to Labour and to other parties, including the Greens. And the disgust many in Britain felt for the behavior of Conservative politicians, from former prime minister Boris Johnson to the Putin promotor Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform UK party.
Enter the smooth talking Rishi Sunak, who was supposed to cover up these messes but made things worse due to the scandal regarding his wife, Akshata Murty, the multimillionaire daughter of one of India’s richest men. She had been claiming non-domicile status to lower her tax bill. A classic fake populist move.
It’s a measure of just how extreme our politics are here in the US that Sunak looks like a decent fellow for accepting the results of the election rather than contesting them. Note, too, how quickly the transition of power occurs in Britain, making it hard to plan a coup or insurrection. Labour head Keir Starmer, Britain’s next prime minister, has already moved into 10 Downing Street
In the meantime, BoJo, as he’s known, has a new memoir coming out in October. The cover of “Unleashed” speaks volumes about how fake populists peddle their lies and then retreat in the face of the dire consequences of their policies. The faceless image denotes the lack of character, but the hair that grabbed the attention of the media and distracted from his corruption and incompetence is intact.
Ruth's piece on Labour's landslide victory in the UK's elections should be read as a warning. Brexit was their rubicon they should not have crossed. Now that people have lived with bankruptcies, crumbling infrastructure, empty grocery store shelves and rotting food in fields, defections, and more for almost a decade, British people finally suffered enough consequences to reject what amounted to fascist populism in Britain.
If we could read the same article about the United States in ten years, I doubt Americans will even get to vote to change our government. Christo-fascist Republicans have created Project 2025 as our rubicon we should not cross. And just like the UK before Brexit, Americans are entrenched in their silos instead of educating themselves about what these policies and this government will do to them. So in addition to a decimated economy, crumbling infrastructure, flooded cities, food shortages and more, I expect to see a spike in incarcerations and executions as the "if you resist, we will kill you" Republican Party torches our lives.
Or Americans could come together and vote against this in November.
Thank you Ruth!
WE need to do the same with TFG/MAGA in November. Vote Blue in November; vote like lives depend on it (they do!)!