Labour’s Love Lost

Britain’s Labour Party went full-blown lunatic left last week, even by British standards, and we can’t help wondering what that portends for America.

All of Fleet Street’s reports about the party’s leadership election assure us that Labour won’t be leading Great Britain any time soon, which means the formerly special relationship between our countries won’t have an anti-American Prime Minister complicating the situation with our current anti-British administration, which would be further complicated by the Prime Minister being peculiarly anti-British and the administration being oddly anti-American, so we’ll cross our fingers and hopefully take their word for it. Still, these things that happen in Great Britain tend to spill over across the pond. Margaret Thatcher’s brilliant record-setting run as Prime Minister presaged Ronald Reagan’s consequential election to the presidency, Tony Blair’s “third way” between Thatcher’s undeniable successes and Labour’s preferences was soon followed by President Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy of getting back to Democratic basics without too much fiddling around with Reagan’s undeniable successes. Given this past history, and the current sentiments of the analogous Democratic Party here in the rebellious United States, the possibilities are frightening at worst and complicated at best.

Newly-eleccted Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who ran away in a five-man race with 59.5 percent of the vote, is so far to the left that even the senior officials of the Labour Party, which at last check was already slightly to the left of the Democratic Party, are refusing to serve in his shadow cabinet. Corbyn is endorsed by the Sinn Fein Party and happy to talk to the Irish Republican Army terrorists it represents, but insists on principle that he won’t talk with the conservative-by-British-standards Sun newspaper. He’s avid for the right of self-determination for Palestinians and Venezuelans but not for the people of Northern Ireland or the Falkland Islands. His victory speech was festooned with signs welcoming the supposedly sympathetic but suspiciously young and male and unmarried and non-Syrian “refugees” of the Syrian civil war, yet he’s been rather inclined to sympathize with the Assad regime who crossing-a-red-line chemical attacks have been forcing the exodus from that country. He’s comfortable with Iran having nuclear weapons, but would prefer that Great Britain give up its own nuclear arsenal, wants to re-open coal mines while preaching against fossil fuels, hopes to nationalize the financial and energy sectors along the same consistent lines, and generally rambled on to a point that event the most robustly pro-Labour of the Fleet Street sheets was alarmed.

Of course it can’t happen here, to borrow from the title of an old Sinclair Lewis novel about the inevitable American fascism. Except that all of a sudden the self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has jumped to a huge lead — or a yuge one, as the equally scary billionaire populist Donald Trump would have it — over the oh-so-establishment and supposedly inevitable former First Lady and New York Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is liberal enough to scare the bejesus out of us conservatives but apparently not quite enough to satisfy the more up-to-date liberals, and thus a similar far-left lurch for the Democrats seems quite plausible. Given the tenor of the conservations we have with the attractive yet liberal young women we encounter around the local hipster dives, and given that liberal young men tend to follow where the attractive liberal women go, a Sanders insurgency seems inevitable. The senior officials of the Democratic Party might decline to go along and go down with the Clinton ship, but those attractive young women at the local hipsters dives don’t seem to know or care who they are. Nor we do expect that the young liberal men hanging on their every word will care.

Sanders’ unexpected front-runner status is largely attributable to the Grand Central Station-sized pile of baggage Clinton brings to the presidential nomination race, while Corbyn’s victory can only be attributed to the collective craziness of what’s left of Labour’s true believers, so there’s some hope so there’s hope that the Democrats will escape Labour’s fate. The only hopes are Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden, though, or maybe that O’Malley guy who languishes in the one percent range as penance for instituting effective police policies in Baltimore and hopes to make up for it by welcoming a few hundred thousand of those Syrian “refugees,” and here in as in Great Britain we have to conclude that least one of the two traditional major parties is badly broken.

Or perhaps both. The Tories, God love ’em, wouldn’t stand a chance in any American state’s Republican primary, even California, and they haven’t shown any courage against creeping socialism since those well-remembered days of Thatcher, and we’re not entirely convinced by Fleet Street that they couldn’t blow an upcoming election to Corbyn’s Labour if the United Kingdom Independence Party and other tougher–on-national-sovereignty parties split the sensible vote. The same scenario could play out here, with a billionaire populist enjoying a yuge — sorry, we meant say “huge”, but Trump fever has  infected even us –and thus  causing a wave of defections from the senior officials of the party and thereby handing a victory to the collective craziness of the American left.

Great Britain is another country, though, and the Fleet Street press, which is usually more reliable than their American counterparts, assures that it won’t happen there and probably won’t happen here. We’ll keep our fingers crossed. We note that Corbyn wears a beard, as does second-place Republican challenger Dr. Ben Carson, who otherwise is not at all like Corbyn, but we won’t even guess what that portends.

— Bud Norman