After Tory landslide, Trump sees 'harbinger'

FPI / December 13, 2019

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party on Thursday won a sizable majority in the British parliament and now says Brexit will become reality at the end of January.

The Tories won 365 seats in the House of Commons compared to 203 for the Labour Party.

The results gave the Conservatives "a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done," Johnson said.

“I hope you enjoy a celebration tonight,” he said in a message to party members. “You powered this campaign. We couldn't have done it without you.”

In Washington, President Donald Trump told reporters: "I want to congratulate Boris Johnson on a terrific victory. I think that might be a harbinger of what’s to come in our country. It was last time."

Trump said he expected Johnson's victory would benefit the U.S. if the two sides are able to negotiate a bilateral trade deal once Brexit is completed.

Johnson has promised to “get Brexit done” by Jan. 31.

Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill and a former Conservative MP, said the result is a “political watershed.”

"This election is an extraordinary result and proves that this type of Toryism is extremely popular,” Soames told the BBC.

“This result gives Boris all the clout he needs for phase two of Brexit,” said a senior Conservative strategist.

Washington Examiner political reporter Rob Crilly noted that “All across the north, Labour’s vaunted ‘red wall’ appeared to be crumbling as blue-collar voters ditched tradition to vote for a party led by a man educated at the country’s most exclusive school and who likes to quote Latin. Seat after seat registered double-digit swings from Labour to Conservative.”

Labour suffered its biggest loss since 1935. The crushing defeat prompted immediate calls for party leader Jeremy Corbyn to step aside.

Corbyn’s hard-left leadership, failed “to tackle anti-Semitism among the party's members, and apparent sympathy for terrorist groups proved unpopular with much of his party’s traditional support,” Crilly wrote.

A leaked internal memo had advised Labour candidates to blame Brexit for the defeat and promise to spend more time listening to Labour supporters from working-class communities.

“The defeat is overwhelmingly down to one issue — the divisions in the country over Brexit, and the Tory campaign, echoed by most of the media, to persuade people that Boris Johnson can ‘get Brexit done,’ ” it said.

Washington Times columnist Ralph Z. Hallow noted that the election result in Great Britain is “great news for Michael Bloomberg and, for different reasons, Donald Trump and champions of nationalism everywhere.”

“Bloomberg is happy because if the Labor Party had done well, with its promise to nationalize major private sectors in England, Scotland and Wales, it would have dampened the billionaire ex-New York mayor’s claim that he’s the one who can save the Democratic Party from the oblivion that the nomination of Taxahontas or Bernie the Red would invite,” Hallow wrote.

“Back here in Trumpland, Nanny State Mike, believe it or not, is running as the moderate, sane alternative to the left-of-left wing of what was the party of Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton.”

The UK results, Hallow noted, “mean Brexit — Britain exiting the European Union — will happen quickly, after years of delay by those Conservative Party members in Parliament who wanted to remain in the union. The EU started out as a common market but as was inevitable, has become a one-government über alles monstrosity in Brussels.”

Britons voted to leave “in large part because the union rendered England borderless, unable to stem the tide of radicalized or unskilled migrants flowing into the other 28 EU members,” Hallow wrote.

During the campaign, Johnson had vowed to “bear down” on immigration, particularly the influx of unskilled workers “who have no job to come to.” Johnson promised to institute a system that uses points to determine who gets a visa.

“A Trumpian notion if there ever was one,” Hallow wrote.

Johnson, Hallow noted, “has treated Trump like an ideological-philosophical pal, and the president has reciprocated.”

British consumers, Hallow wrote, “will feel an early pinch in some of their favorite imports. But Britain will, by and large, have its economic independence back and will make its own rules regarding what to make, how to make it and how to market it.”

Free Press International