Month: May 2005

The (hippie) Guardian’s summary of the British election:

Labour should be very humble and grateful that so many voters have been prepared to stick with them to the extent that they have. But the electorate has changed the momentum of British politics overnight. This has been a powerful blow to a political movement which until now has had no real experience of defeat to be treated in this way, losing seats to Tories, Liberal Democrats and, as a remarkable result in Blaenau Gwent showed, to independents. The politics of the ensuing days and weeks will focus on the future of Mr Blair after his superhuman majorities have now been cut down to something more like politics as normal. Yet the prime minister’s future is not, in the end, likely to be as contentious or crucial a question as whether Labour itself can regroup and recreate itself in time for the next general election.

HT Norm Geras.

This is the end for Tory leader Michael Howard.

Jeremy Paxman’s election-night interview of George Galloway is hilarious:

JP: We’re joined now from his count in Bethnal Green and Bow by George Galloway. Mr Galloway, are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?
GG: What a preposterous question. I know it’s very late in the night, but wouldn’t you be better starting by congratulating me for one of the most sensational election results in modern history?
JP: Are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?
GG: I’m not – Jeremy – move on to your next question.
JP: You’re not answering that one?
GG: No because I don’t believe that people get elected because of the colour of their skin. I believe people get elected because of their record and because of their policies. So move on to your next question.
JP: Are you proud –
GG: Because I’ve got a lot of people who want to speak to me.
JP: – You –
GG: If you ask that question again, I’m going, I warn you now.
JP: Don’t try and threaten me Mr Galloway, please.

Vintage Paxman. He once asked a question 17 times to a politician who tried to dodge it the way Saddam’s former employee Galloway did this one. He makes Tim Russert look like Larry King.

HT Iain Murray.

Jonathan Freedland, writing in The Guardian, puts the British election in context:

Lost among the long faces of Labour was this fact: a party which had never won two full terms in government yesterday won a third. That is not to be dismissed. There was a time, back in the 1980s, when such a feat seemed to be the remotest fantasy.

Even the midnight rumours of a Labour majority of 50, later revised, would once have thrilled, rather than crushed, the party’s supporters. In 1974, for example, that kind of margin would have felt like a landslide. And, lest we forget, Margaret Thatcher started a revolution in 1979 with a majority of just 44.

A sober view would say yesterday was no disaster, merely a sign that, as David Blunkett declared, “normal politics has returned” – that the rhythms of the 1960s and 1970s have been restored.

Nonetheless, many of your Labourites do have long faces today, and the usual pack of Communists want Tony Blair’s head. This seems a strange reaction to winning a third consecutive election for the first time in your party’s history.

Breaking news from hippie Guardian election blog:

Just announced by the BBC: Labour is expected to win tonight, but with a greatly reduced majority of 66 seats. It’ll be a good night for the Conservatives, who should gain 44 seats, but the Liberal Democrats will be disappointed if they only gain the predicted two seats.

An excellent outcome, if you can believe these pesky exit polls. Since both Tories and Blair were pro-liberation of Iraq, this election was not the endorsement of fascism the Liberal Democrats were hoping to achieve.

UPDATE: Iain Murray is following the results closely, Samizdata not so much.

Murray says a margin of less than 80 seats is trouble for Blair (he would have to step down before the next election), and less than 50 is pretty much the immediate end of his leadership. Blair’s heir apparent, Gordon Brown, strikes me as weak.

I’m Richard Bennett and I approve this message:

At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the Republican Party really prepared to disown such modern intellectuals as it can claim, in favor of a shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity?

Perhaps one could phrase the same question in two further ways. At the last election, the GOP succeeded in increasing its vote among American Jews by an estimated five percentage points. Does it propose to welcome these new adherents or sympathizers by yelling in the tones of that great Democrat bigmouth William Jennings Bryan? By insisting that evolution is “only a theory”? By demanding biblical literalism and by proclaiming that the Messiah has already shown himself? If so, it will deserve the punishment for hubris that is already coming its way. (The punishment, in other words, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson believed had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. How can it be that such grotesque characters, calling down divine revenge on the workers in the World Trade Center, are allowed a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, among patriotic Republicans?)

Then again, hundreds of thousands of young Americans are now patrolling and guarding hazardous frontiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is there a single thinking person who does not hope that secular forces arise in both countries, and who does not realize that the success of our cause depends on a wall of separation, in Islamic society, between church and state? How can we maintain this cause abroad and subvert it at home? It’s hardly too much to say that the servicemen and -women, of all faiths and of none, who fight so bravely against jihad, are being stabbed in the back by the sunshine soldiers of the “crusading” right. What is one to feel but rage and contempt when one reads of Arabic-language translators, and even Purple Heart-winning frontline fighters, being dismissed from the service because their homosexuality is accounted a sin?

Thus far, the clericalist bigots have been probing and finding only mush. A large tranche of the once-secular liberal left has disqualified itself by making excuses for jihad and treating Osama bin Laden as if he were advocating liberation theology. The need of the hour is for some senior members of the party of Lincoln to disown and condemn the creeping and creepy movement to impose orthodoxy on a free and pluralist and secular Republic.

No more mixing religion and politics, please. Voting your moral values is fine, but following the literal text of the Bible is delusional.

H/T Pajama Media czar Roger Simon.

UPDATE: See also James Taranto’s defense of the Religious Right, in many ways a better-reasoned piece than Hitchen’s amusing broadside. Taranto argues that the courts have imposed specific policies on the country, such as legalizing abortion, that are actually the province of the legislative branch. Like good citizens are supposed to do, the Religious Right has organized and elected politicians who represent their values, with a long-term goal of removing “activist” judges and returning policy prerogatives to the branch of government that actually owns them under our system.

It’s hard to argue with that.