Day of the Dumb II; Britain votes for the Fake Brexit
There’s not much to add to what has already been written hereabouts regarding the general election. Moreover, that its outcome was entirely predictable – so that observing the slick theatre of result-presentation (appreciated like entertainment by the moron) being put through its motions, and drawing to a conclusion already known, was tedious in the extreme – means that there is very little appetite to write much more about it. In short, Boris Johnson can claim, not just a mandate, but a “powerful” one for the dogs dinner that he is about to dish out – and the contemptible British do not have a leg to stand on about it when they won’t like it.
Hopefully the reader has discernment enough so that he was struck, as the author was, with the impression that the presentation of this election in corporate-media has been as if it was a unified show intended to sell the idea of the supposed certainty of “Brexit”. As such, the myth of power to the elbows of those who want to Remain in the EU has had to be sacrificed, and thoroughly demolished. Even so, what the Tories are going to deliver isn’t going to be the Brexit that the concept of the Remain-spoiler device has been so vehemently set against. But that doesn’t matter, and it won’t have registered on the morning of Friday 13th December, when there will no doubt have been a lot of Tory voters feeling smug about what they did the day before. This conceit will be replaced with chagrin before 2020 is out (or, it would be, if being a know-nothing-know-it-all was not a condition that rendered people just as incapable of remorse as the cattle that had just eaten a plastic bag).
In truth, for any human being in possession of a brain, the pan-government concerted effort toward the big Brexit confidence scam should not have been hard to detect – especially when the Government doesn’t make a lot of effort to hide that there is theatrical design behind its broad spectacle. The author was made particularly weary by the scene at John McDonnell’s acceptance speech that afforded him an opportunity to get on his hobby horse about the far-right threat to democracy (a taste of things to come) – because we must never forget that being conned by a lot of shysters is the essence of civilisation.
So, despite great reluctance to do it, there are a number of things to discuss briefly about the 2019 general election. In a previous FBEL piece, it was declared that the article that the reader is currently looking at would be certain to appear the day after Britain had voted for forever-EU undeadness, which is the same thing as the Fake Brexit, but more of an encumbrance in terms of a title. In keeping with this, there is no other option but to proclaim the 12th December the Day of the Dumb II (the first was in 2017), because most people who voted were probably not desirous of the Tory-version Brexit that they are going to get, if they wanted Brexit at all. And yet, when they signed X on that representation of a contract with the Government that is their ballot paper, they agreed to it. As it has been explained here at FBEL before, the British political system sees the executive branch formed by the party who generates most votes for a ticket, but the promise on the ticket does not have to be fulfilled. In fact, the better way to put this is that, as would be normal when contracting with charlatans, the fulfilment of the ticket will be different to what is expected because of the small print that was never read. [Update, 16th December: The ultimate point (that the author was leading up to, and somehow failing to make) is this: it doesn’t matter which ticket one votes for, nor which ticket gets most votes, the crucial aspect of an election is that, in it, all voters contract with Government, and endorse the executive to come, and its policies, whether aware of them or not.]
The dumbest people of all, this time around, of course, are those people who voted for the Brexit Party. Why did they not read FBEL, which could have saved them the bother and heartache, and the ignominy? This is from an article published at the beginning of November:
Ultimately, then, all the people who vote for the Brexit Party in December will essentially be voting for the Tories, and at the same time signalling consent for the Withdrawal Agreement that must be on the agenda for the next parliament. Frankly, if you were thinking of voting for the Brexit Party, dear reader, you would do better not to.
The only people coming out of this charade with credit are the Labour voters who couldn’t vote in the name and cause of Corbyn’s vision for Brexit – whatever that was. A lot of people, who fell for the idea in the previous election that Labour was interested in leaving the EU because of this or that politician’s reputation plus some smoke signals, didn’t fall for it this time. So, there was a disengagement by these people that somewhat facilitated the Tory win – but that is not is not to say that they bear any responsibility.
Previously at FBEL, a concept has been introduced that we could call Fake Brexit epoch normalcy, which is to do with refusal to participate in elections – with such behaviour becoming a default one – and being indicative of a broader dislocation from Government systems of control. The driving force is demonstration, which has never been so plain before than it has with the Government’s handling of Brexit, of the distinct and never ending separation between the interests of the individual of the commonwealth (or “we the people”) and the parliament, the body that should answer to it.
To put it succinctly, the trend of reduced turnout in elections that we have been seeing since 2016 continues. In this election, national turnout was 67.2% – down 1.5% from 2017. This bucks a trend of ever increasing turnout rates to occur every election since 2001. Moreover, this result means that turnout in a general election has begun dipping before it could return to the levels that would consistently occur in all general elections before and including 1997 – and since 1918 (when records began), which saw only 57.2% take part in the election of that year. Turnout in this long intervening period was always above 70% – as this graphic taken from The Telegraph shows.
We should note that an earlier version of the page from whence the graphic comes informed its readership that “the 2017 turnout after all the votes had been counted stood at 68.7 percent, and there is still a chance this year’s ballots could surpass the figure from two years ago.” This is not blind optimism, but expectation management and perception shaping, and would be borne out of how the British Government does not appear to like that people are choosing not to consent with it – and so the subsequent denial of decreasing rates of turnout is something we would naturally expect to see. Indeed, the issue has been covered at FBEL before, where it has been pointed out that it has been desired of the public that it should not “anticipate reduced levels of engagement in upcoming elections” because the notion that such a thing is an option is not to be promulgated.
Therefore, while the corporate-media will be telling the public that Labour’s worst performance in an election since 1935 is due to swings of this or that percentage to the Tories, this is not what happened in real terms. The Tory Party only saw a 1.2 percentage point increase on its 2017 performance, while the Labour share collapsed. The actual number of votes for the Tories increased from 12,379,200 in 2017, to 13,941,086 – but this is not Labour swinging to the Tories. This is the result of the returning to a status quo that the Government has been desirous of for a long time in wanting to be rid of UKIP. The British political system has been reset after suffering an unwanted disturbance, and we can say this because the Brexit Party’s impact was negligible: according to the BBC, Farage’s outfit accumulated 642,323 votes nationwide. This is a far cry even from UKIP’s 2010 performance which caused the coalition government. It is safe to say that the Brexit Party failed in its mission to maintain levels of turnout, and it’s the author’s considered opinion that we won’t be seeing it again. Let’s take our departure from it by giving it this tribute: a lot of stupid people lost a lot of money.
That the Tories are essentially a tree looking taller after its neighbours have had a trim is perhaps best illustrated in some of the seats that were taken from Labour where the turnout was alarmingly (for the Government) low, indicating therefore that this change is not about a surge of engagement. We’ll pick four examples. At Blackpool South, turnout was 56.8%, down from 59.8%. The Tories gained 1189 votes from 2017. At Stoke on Trent Central, turnout was 57.9%, down from 58.3%. The Tories gained 1371 votes. At West Bromwich West, turnout was 53.4%, down from 54.7%. The Tories gained 3090 votes. At Great Grimsby, turnout was 53.9%, down from 58%. The Tories gained 3170 votes.
These particular results, and there must be many more like them there for the finding if the reader wants to look, are particularly pertinent, because they show that there are large swathes of England (at least) that are on the verge of returning a Member of Parliament in a general election with a minority of voters. If things are going to change in Britain, then these are the places where by rights, if people are serious about putting things in order, we should see the start of the movement to delegitimize government as has been discussed here at FBEL (or something akin to it of local invention) – and this is exactly why McDonnell would demonise them. Despite what Johnson may or may not say about faith in politics being restored, the Fake Brexit epoch normalcy is not to be denied away – especially on the brink of what is going to a tremendous disappointment for Tory voters, who will be affected in the same way that Labour voters already have been alienated. Indeed, things do not look likely to improve for that latter demographic because of how their party is set to be driven, if not led by John McDonnell, who has very much been involved (as covered here at FBEL) in the campaign to characterise Brexit voters as a lot of Nazis. He would be talking, of course, about Labour’s traditional white working class base.
