I

A new dawn in the last of Europe’s Habsburg-like messy conglomerates, the kind of thing that used to be called an Empire but is now reduced to a mere Kingdom. A cold new dawn it is, as Macdara will report.

A few things have happened. The Conservative collapse was not at all as dramatic as promised: they ended up a mere 10% behind their Labour siblings. Add in the farcical but ugly Reform party and we see that the Radical Right held up very well. The Liberal Right is now in power: one third of the votes has given Labour two-thirds of the seats, undermining claims from regime media that the party has procured a landslide victory.

Look at the map and you can see it almost looks like a multi-party democracy (an American on a recent podcast asked why the US cannot have a multi-party democracy “like the UK”, the best example of English-language parochialism your correspondent has come across in some time). Something else is going on beyond the Conservative-Labour Establishment Party. Even with a theatrically and deliberately undemocratic voting system, the Liberal Democrats (runt third party of the Establishment, of course), Reform and the Greens have had their best ever performances. The Lib Dems received more than 70 seats from just over 12% of the vote share; Reform managed only 5 seats from a higher vote share (over 14%). This injustice will fuel the continued grievances of the Far Right. We see also that Corbyn was returned with huge support, and that four other anti-genocide Independents have been returned elsewhere. 

The Labour Party managed less of a vote share, and many less votes in absolute terms, than it had under Corbyn. Starmer’s share of the vote in his constituency was down 17.4%, as almost one-fifth of voters chose a Leftist (and Jewish) anti-genocide campaigner instead. The Labour Party has stagnated, it has stayed rotting in place, as everyone else has moved around it. They will pretend that this is an extraordinary result, a mandate for their programme of not changing anything beyond the stony faces around the cabinet table. This approach will be disastrous.

II

In Scotland, Labour have been loaned votes by Independence supporters wanting to kick the useless SNP and the criminal Conservatives at the same time. The Labour Party is incapable of any mode other than arrogant Loyalism and will easily alienate these people: let us expect a resurgence in SNP support, hopefully with an explicit programme of the Left. The SNP’s vote share was well down, but they were less than 6% behind Labour’s support in Scotland, and less than 4% lower than Labour’s support across Britain. Watch how this showing—extraordinary for a party that has been in power in Edinburgh for 17 years—will be seen as auguring not only the end of the party, but the end of the Independence Movement. As usual, the loyalist parties collaborated to ensure that whichever was the stronger party in any given constituency would receive the backing of the others. 

In Wales, the pattern described in the previous section is abundantly clear: a 4% decrease in Labour support, 18% decrease for the Conservatives and 11.5% increase for Reform has given Labour 27 out of 32 seats. Plaid Cymru’s support has increased by 5% to 15%, giving them four seats and ensuring that Welsh voices will actually be heard in London, or would be heard, if anyone actually consented to hearing the voices of Celtic deviationists.

But the reader can sense where this is going: as ever, Macdara’s attention is pulled to the north of Ireland. As usual, there was no desire on the part of the Metropolitan Media to engage with a place where none of the English parties even stand for election (not quite true, Macdara admits: the Conservatives did stand, and received 553 votes in the entire Occupied Territories). Regarding the big exit poll that the London media pooled together to commission, it must have been too much trouble to send anyone over there to find out about the 18 seats up for grabs, for instead the reader could find the derisory message below (to which we might respond that there is a reason for this…).

Sinn Féin consolidated its seat share, are clearly coming for the SDLP in Foyle, and were within 200 votes of taking East Derry from the DUP.  The movement on the Settler Supremacist side is interesting: some have deserted the DUP to go for the more respectable extremists of the UUP, some have gone instead for the even wilder extremists of the TUV. Alliance lost one seat and gained another; this is a party, recall, whose supporters favour reunification, although it is non-aligned, and is therefore counted as a unionist party by Partionists who want to build a desperate case for the inviolability of the Glorious Union. In fact the Alliance and SDLP vote shares were down; the Irish Times podcast featured the paper’s Northern correspondent in automatic mode referring to the rise of Alliance, before realising that this was no longer true and correcting herself. The host insistently referred to East Londonderry, presumably to correct her reference to the near-DUP loss of East Derry. These are the kinds of mistakes that one makes when one has been up all night, perhaps they will show her some leniency, and we can look forward to her and her colleagues finding a way to crow about the strength of the middle ground in Occupation politics as soon as they can find an angle (which will not take long).

III

Starmer is a known liar and crook: he has already accepted gifts from multiple oligarchs. This is a man who apparently feels that accepting £18k of clothes (including £2.5k of glasses) is acceptable behaviour. Of the tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of tickets to pop and sporting events, Starmer has claimed that he needed VIP treatment for security reasons. It is out of the question that he would have taken either of the two ethical options available: not to attend such events, or to purchase VIP treatment at his own expense.

Odd decisions and announcements have already started. Why has Hilary Benn, a man with no known Irish connections or expertise, been appointed Imperial Proconsul to the Occupation? The CEO of Snappy Snaps has been made an aristocrat in order to be a minister for prisons! What, is he going to sponsor a prison? Open a Snappy Snaps inside each one? The new Foreign Secretary is already talking about what we can expect on Palestine: “All of us want to see an immediate ceasefire, and I will do all I can diplomatically to support Joe Biden in bringing about that ceasefire”, which in the first place is not a description of his party’s policy, which has in fact been to support the settler colonists in their genocide, and secondly evinces a total lack of independent political agency. And that is without reflecting on the fact that Butcher Biden will not be in the White House for much longer.

Do not let it be said that this election represents England departing from the swerve towards the Right that we have seen wherever the Liberal Right has failed. In fact England led the way in this regard, and has been governed by an increasingly radical Right for almost a decade and a half; the Labour Party have assumed power now by on the one hand adopting an agenda of the Right, and on the other hand, because the vote of the Far Right has split. This is an interlude in Late Capitalism with an important structural purpose: the Liberal Right must come to power once more in order to fail completely, thereby preparing the electorate for its slide into Fascism, or whatever this new phase of authoritarian, violent and corrupt Capitalism will be known as; one could say permitting the electorate to slide into this state. It seems likely that this will be accomplished in the space of a single parliamentary term. The lack of hope—a lack that no longer even seems surprising, as it used to—the unwillingness to tax the rich sufficiently to raise the money required to bring about change: the Labour party will fulfil its purpose excellently. It is ready.

In short, England has called out for Democracy as the last thing it does before the Liberal Right fails and passes the country (with whichever of its Celtic Colonies remain stuck to it at that point) to the extremists that best represent the great harm that this country has done unto the world, and which will be visited first upon the most vulnerable people in the country—all the usual victims—but which will affect many more besides, including those currently looking out at this grey new morning and preferring not to step out into it.