Something amazing is going on over in the United Kingdom right now. I personally cannot recall something this bizarre occurring in a parliamentary democracy, although I guess it has somewhere and at some point. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, has lost the support of his fellow Labour members of parliament. I don’t mean just barely, either.
According to the BBC, Corbyn lost 172-40. Yet, he still tries to hold on. How can this be? Can a man really be this deluded. Even if he somehow does win a leadership election among the full Labour membership, where does he go from there? There’s a good chance that would split the party, although most of the split among elected leaders would probably be against Corbyn. I just don’t get what he’s thinking, although there is a chance that he will end up resigning somehow. Politicians say a lot in the spirit of the “game” only to ignore those past pronouncements when it suits them.
I would advise Jeremy to make this current case one of those times. I don’t see how he can come out on the other side as a legitimate parliamentary leader. Look at how David Cameron mocked him today. Cameron himself has been throughly embarrassed over the last couple weeks, but leave it to Corbyn to always make Dave look better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bcEWwFpwgA
While we’re on the subject of British politics, Nick Cohen had a very interesting blog post in The Spectator…
Now they are wriggling like lawyers trying to dodge the judge. We did not quite promise that, they maintain. You should have looked at the small print. ‘It is said that those who voted Leave were mainly driven by anxieties about immigration,’ intoned Johnson this morning as he prepared to U-turn and accept the conditions full access to EU markets entail. ‘I do not believe that is so.’
This is just incredible. No dictionary on earth has enough insults to describe the frivolity and cynicism of the Tory right. For the left-behind leave voters of working-class England, immigration was why they wanted out.
Keep in mind, Cohen is not a fan of Brexit, Boris Johnson, or UKIP, but his theory on all this seems pretty solid. If Boris and the Conservatives think that people are going to accept some EU-Lite membership where the immigration equation doesn’t change in a positive way, they’re leaving the door open for UKIP and Nigel Farage to clean-up during the next general election.
Well, you can’t say they weren’t warned.
