The collapse of the French government in the National Assembly this week and the very extensive demonstrations in Britain against over-indulgence of immigrants and increasing crime rates that are widely blamed on permissive immigration and inadequate police enforcement, are among indications that Western Europe is starting to move politically in the same direction as the United States, though so far without a populist leader as formidable as President Trump.
There has been steadily increasing concern in the United Kingdom that successive governments that have failed and been rejected by the voters have maintained the fiction of economic growth by admitting greater numbers of immigrants than housing conditions and the social safety net could accommodate. They have responded to the resulting rising complaints from people of modest income at their cost of living increases, which exceed the mediocre economic growth rates in Western Europe, by accusing demonstrators and angry dissenters, usually falsely, of racism.
In Britain, the governing Labour Party of Keir Starmer is torn between the party’s traditional leftist ideology and the anger from its working class supporters at what they feel is the betrayal of the historic foundation of that party, compounded by an extreme and oppressive pursuit of those who allegedly utter, even in private traffic on the internet, incitements to racial disparagement.
Never before in the history of the great office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, going back to Sir Robert Walpole in 1721, have there been five failed and rejected Prime Minister in ten years. David Cameron correctly resigned after being rejected in the Brexit vote, Theresa May attempted to convince the country that she was leaving Europe by remaining in it. Boris Johnson had a strong mandate and effected the exit from Europe but completely squandered his political capital with a series of squalid betrayals of the public trust with no hint of pecuniary corruption. Liz Truss produced a brilliant budget and attempted to tack to the Right and revive the spirit and the ideology of Margaret Thatcher. She was taken down by the cowards and ninnies of the Conservative Parliamentary party; the same shameful moral and intellectual weakness which struck down Margaret Thatcher herself. Rishi Sunak was a Red Tory without the least concept of how to restore the credibility of his ostensibly conservative party.
Starmer’s Labour Party won an immense parliamentary victory last year, even though it only gained approximately two percentage points on what it had earned in being badly defeated by Boris Johnson four years before. This more dramatic result was much less a vote of confidence for Labour than the current distribution of Members of Parliament would indicate as its huge harvest of MPs was caused by the Conservative vote being savagely devoured by Nigel Farage’s Reform Party on the Right and the soft-left Liberal Democrats, whose support always rises when the public is dissatisfied with both the Conservatives and Labour.
In these circumstances, the Conservatives, with their sixth leader in 11 years, have been slow to learn the lessons of the unprecedented failure of five rejected leaders of their party, and are waffling unconvincingly, somewhat to the Right of their rejected leaders of the last decade.
If the Conservatives do not find a position that moves far enough to crack down on illegal immigration and deport those who are in the country illegally, promise believably to reduce crime, and resurrect a concept of internet use and public discourse that adopts a more permissive demarcation between freedom of speech and hate speech, they will be overwhelmed by Farage’s Reformers. This was what happened to Gladstone and Lloyd George’s Liberals at the hands of the Labour Party of Ramsay Macdonald, and to the Bush-McCain-Romney Republicans as Donald Trump took over the Republicans. Starmer can hang on almost three years and is unlikely to be dumped by his own MPs, as May, Johnson, and Truss (and Thatcher, one of Britain’s greatest prime ministers) were. But polls already indicate he is facing a terrible debacle if he cannot effect a drastic change in the current standing of the parties. His chief response to date has been to ban the sale to minors of soft drinks that might excite them.
In France, it is always more complicated, as the Socialists are the only significant party that existed under the same name 20 years ago. Generally, the far Left is ten per cent of the voters; the middle Left, 20 per cent, the centre is 30 per cent, the moderate Right is 20 per cent, the far Right is five per cent, and the remaining 15 per cent floats around unpredictably.
The current polls indicate that an election now would bring in the National Rally (RN), formally the Le Pens’ Front National, on the final round of both the presidential legislative elections. The attempt to bar Marine Le Pen as a candidate for spurious political reasons by abuse of the prosecution function in the manner recently seen in the United States will backfire, as it did in the United States. Le Pen and her chief supporters are well house-trained now and will govern more effectively than President Macron has managed for the last several years.
Trump is now furnishing an encouraging example for those who would follow him in Europe. He has ended illegal immigration, reduced the number of illegal immigrants in the country by well over one million, ended the green and regulatory terror, cut taxes, strengthened the armed forces, shaped up the Western Alliance, destroyed the Iranian military, and his tariffs have reduced the federal deficit by 40 per cent and the trade deficit by 50 per cent, all at the expense of foreigners. America is barely ready for his flamboyant public personality, and certainly, Europe isn’t ready for it. But the European populist leaders are now well accustomed to their countrymen, and the example of Poland, which has been much less indulgent of Islamic protesters and unassimilable immigration has enjoyed a reduction of crime while it has skyrocketed in France and Britain.
To adapt one of the most notoriously false political utterances of the 1920’s, we are probably seeing the near-future and it will probably work, but probably not with the present leaders in Europe, except in Germany and Italy and a few other countries.
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