Morgan to Biden: The lesson of UK elections is -- get woke, go broke

That might be one of the lessons, possibly, but not the most obvious. The Tories’ commanding wins in England show the narrow attraction of wokery, writes Piers Morgan today in an open letter to Joe Biden. Labour tried running on a platform of sneering political condescension and ended up paying a big price for it, Morgan argues:

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But it’s why liberal parties around the world have been losing their grip on power, because most people in the real world, away from the shrieking echo chambers of social media, increasingly loathe the woke and cancel culture mentality.

And it’s also why Joe Biden should be very, very careful which way he takes his Democrat party in the next three years if he wants to stand any chance of re-election in 2024.

To understand the danger, Biden need look no further than to what’s happening to the equivalent of the Democratic Party in his closest ally, Britain.

The Labour Party, which dominated for a decade from 1997-2007 under three-term winner Tony Blair, is currently disintegrating to the point where many members fear it’s making itself permanently unelectable.

The situation is so bad that Labour’s current leader Sir Keir Starmer is already facing calls to quit after being in the job for just a year, following a disastrous performance in last week’s UK local elections, the nearest equivalent to the US mid-terms.

Labour’s capitulation was so bad it even lost control of the northern town of Hartlepool, a place it has held since it was formed in 1974.

There’s certainly a correlation between Labour’s wokery and their massive losses. Is that causative, however? One might be more inclined to chalk that up to Boris Johnson’s delivery on Brexit, and the superior response in the UK on COVID-19 vaccinations. The two are clearly related, with the latter being the first real fruit of London’s independence from Brussels on trade and other policies. Labour’s lament over Brexit probably sold just as poorly as their wokery. Those two issues matter a lot more to ordinary voters than rhetorical claptrap.

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Furthermore, there’s better data for the Brexit argument. First, the Tories only did well in England, where nationalist passions ran hottest. Labour managed to do well enough in Wales to keep control of the devolved government there, in a small surprise. Labour nearly doubled up Conservatives, winning 30 Senedd seats to the Tories’ 16.

But Tories face disaster in Scotland, where the pro-independence party SNP put together a coalition government that plans to press for another referendum on Scexit, so to speak. Johnson called for a summit of all devolved-government leaders in an attempt to head off such a move:

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Sunday invited the leaders of the U.K.’s devolved nations for crisis talks on the union after Scotland’s pro-independence party won its fourth straight parliamentary election.

Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, said the election results proved that a second independence vote for Scotland was “the will of the country” and that any London politician who stood in the way would be “picking a fight with the democratic wishes of the Scottish people.” …

Johnson congratulated Sturgeon on her re-election, but told the leaders of the devolved governments in a letter that the U.K. was “best served when we work together.” The letter invited the leaders to a summit to discuss plans to recover from the coronavirus pandemic and work out how the four nations can work together to overcome “shared challenges.”

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SNP isn’t paying a price for progressive wokeness in Scotland, it seems. However, Tories are paying a price for Brexit, which the Scots opposed in significant numbers all along. Even before the referendum on Brexit, Scots warned that taking them out of the EU would likely create a demand to revisit independence despite the losing vote on that referendum a couple of years previously.

Morgan’s likely correct about wokery being political poison. For better and worse, though, the results of this election appear driven by Brexit — and that’s not going to be good news for unionists or Conservatives.

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