What Are the Real Lessons of the U.K. Election for 2020? | The New Yorker - 0 views
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“Boris Johnson is winning in a walk,” Joe Biden told the attendees at a fund-raiser in San Francisco on Thursday night, referring to the Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader. “Look what happens when the Labour Party moves so, so far to the left.”
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Several Labour Party veterans whom I spoke with on Friday insisted that the lousy result for Labour came down to Corbyn’s political persona proving anathema to the Party’s traditional working-class base—and there are some opinion-poll data that bear this out.
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for every time Brexit was raised on the doorsteps, the leadership was raised four more—even by those sticking with us. There was visceral anger from lifelong Labour voters who felt they couldn’t vote for the party they had supported all their lives because of ‘that man at the top.’
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As the national-anthem example indicates, Corbyn isn’t a very skilled politician—or, alternatively, he is a man of such high principle that he refuses to trim his positions at all to win votes.
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In 2015, shortly after he took over as Labour’s leader, he refused to sing the national anthem—“God Save the Queen”—during a memorial service for the Battle of Britain, the air war, in 1940, in which the Royal Air Force fought off Hitler’s marauding Luftwaffe.
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Johnson and his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, sensed the intense public frustration and built their entire election campaign around the slogan “Get Brexit Done.”
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Like Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” Johnson’s slogan was simple, catchy, and misleading.
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Voters often say that they support individual policies of progressive and left-wing parties, but history suggests that getting the public to elect such parties to government requires a plausible, persuasive leader and a favorable environment.