#GeneralElection2019: Every Country has the Government it Deserves

I don't think I can express how very disappointed I am in the results from last night. I'm not surprised, but I'm still terribly disappointed. Somehow, part of me thought that the British public wouldn't be so easily manipulated, that somehow they'd see through the long, long list of lies from the Conservatives and through the palpable bias of both the privately and publicly-owned media. But they didn't, and now... well the country is pretty fucked.

For the Uninitiated

The UK just had its third general election in 5 years: another attempt by a Conservative government to shore up support in the House so it can do what it wants -- namely Brexit -- without interference from other parties or factions within its own ranks.

• Boris Johnson purged the Conservative party of anyone who would oppose his Brexit plan before calling the election and then ran on a single platform: "get Brexit done".
• The Labour party, headed by Jeremy Corbyn ran on a multi-faceted platform of restoring the services the Conservatives have been destroying over the last decade, starting a "green industrial revolution" and doing a "people's vote" on Brexit.
• The Liberal Democrats ran mostly against Corbyn and said they'd simply revoke Article 50 if they won a majority (the odds of which are in the range of pigs flying).
• The Green party too said they'd revoke, but also had a pretty good Green New Deal in their platform.
• The Brexit Party said they'd do an immediate "Hard Brexit"
• The Scottish Nationalists... well they're separatist socialists. You do the math ;-)

From the start, the Conservatives were expected to win it. Corbyn's popularity was in the toilet, while Johnson's was soaring -- especially in the rural areas. The Lib-dems were generally considered irrelevant and/or a spoiler under FPTP, and the SNP was expected to dominate Scotland. The actual result was a dominating victory for the Conservatives, a historic loss for Labour, and the resignation of leaders from both Labour and the Lib-Dems. The Conservatives now have free reign to do everything they want, including exciting things like shredding the human rights act and undermining the NHS.

The Lie of Getting Brexit Done

If you'd watched any of the debates (to which Johnson bothered to attend), seen any of his scripted interviews, or just listened to his speeches in the House of Commons, you'd be familiar with Johnson's mantra: get Brexit done. For anyone living here, it's a very appealing thought. Everyone: leavers & remainers are tired of Brexit. We all know that there's more pressing issues to deal with (though we disagree on what those issues are), and yet every day, every broadcast, every paper, every social media post is about this one topic.

So when Johnson says "get Brexit done", it resonates with everyone, and it would seem that most Britons were unable to draw the conclusion that this line, like nearly everything that comes out of Johnson's mouth, is a lie.

The Conservatives have won with a dominating victory, and yet no one who knows anything about the realities of Brexit will tell you it's all over on January 31st when the UK executes the withdrawal agreement with the EU. We're still years, possibly even decades away from getting Brexit done.

The withdrawal agreement is simply an agreement on how things will work between the UK and the EU until they can actually leave the single market. In other words, The UK will definitely be in the single market (including the four freedoms) until December 2020, at which point they will have to have a trade deal negotiated or ask for an extension. For perspective, Canada's free trade agreement with the EU started negotiations in 2009, was agreed in 2016, and is still not in force. The UK has a much more complex relationship with the EU, and its population & economy is much larger. Brexit may not be "done" until 2045.

In the mean time, the withdrawal agreement drives a wedge between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK (introducing a customs border in the Irish sea after the transition period), and it's very likely that Scotland will have another (likely, successful) referendum to leave the UK and join the EU as an independent state. By the time Brexit is "done", it might jut be an agreement between England & Wales and the EU.

Complicity of the Media, and the End of the BBC

The Fourth Estate has entirely failed the UK. Too many journalists have been replaced with lazy hacks who do little more than copy/paste what candidates say without bothering to fact-check. Outright lies are published on the front page of papers, or debated as if they have any grounding in reality on evening "news" broadcasts. Audio clips are edited, videos are doctored, and all of it presented to the public by organisations into which so many have invested their trust.

Most appalling of all of these is the BBC. Here's a short list of just some of the terrible shit they did over the last few months to bias the public toward the ruling government:

• Laura Kuennsberg (senior political editor) revealed the results of secret postal votes two days before the election.
• She also falsely accused a member of the public of punching a Tory adviser.
• One of their reporters said "If Johnson wins the majority that he so deserves” live on air.
• They edited Remembrance Day epitaph footage and replaced it with 2016 footage.
• They edited out audience laughter at Boris Johnson during a Question Time special.
• They ran a special Question Time show for young people and stacked the audience with leavers despite 70% of the under 30's wanting to remain.
• They claimed vote Leave was cleared of wrongdoing during the Brexit referendum (they weren't).
• An Investigation into Facebook ads found that the Conservatives lie 88% of the time, while Labour didn't lie at all. The BBC reported that "Ads are 'indecent, dishonest and untruthful'" without citing who was doing the lying.

A lot of this goes back to 2016 when the Conservatives changed the rules around how the BBC's board was appointed. Basically the BBC hasn't been "arms-length" for three years and it's glaringly obvious in their journalism. As a Canadian and strong supporter of the CBC, I think this should be a cautionary tale for any country with a public broadcaster. There must be a firewall between the state and the public broadcaster, because it's a short jump to state broadcaster if you aren't careful.

The Brexit Party Propping up of the Conservatives

When the election was called, there was a chance -- a chance that the Conservatives might lose. The Brexit Party had been hacked together to fight another election and it looked like they might split the otherwise conservative vote in some key constituencies. However, on November 11th, they announced that they would not run any candidates in any constituency won by the Conservatives in the last election, essentially allowing the Conservatives to turn their attention to seats they hadn't yet won. They took an additional 47 seats this time around, while the Brexit party was happy to just take votes from Labour and Lib-Dems in the remaining seats, guaranteeing those Conservative wins.

Corbyn

Perhaps the most upsetting/frustrating part of all of this is how this has played out for Jeremy Corbyn. Here was a man with a history of fighting for civil rights and opposing apartheid & fascism, and the press has routinely been calling him a racist and a fascist. Three Jewish newspapers even ran a joint front-page editorial urging people not to vote for him claiming 87% of Jews thought he was an antisemite and that half of the Jews in the country would strongly consider leaving out of fear if he were to become Prime Minister.

The trigger for all of this? Corbyn, and a number of other Labour MPs have made public statements critical of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. Apparently, saying that you shouldn't open fire on unarmed civilians and children means you hate Jews.

The fact is that Corbyn was the first (of hopefully many) proper left-wing Labour leaders, and the people with money -- the people who own various newspaper chains -- don't like it when political leaders start suggesting that we raise taxes on the rich to take care of the poor. Ever since Corbyn stepped into the leadership role, the party has been tearing itself apart trying to get rid of him and the other actual socialists. Members spent years publicly denouncing Corbyn as "unelectable" rather than working together to remove the Conservatives. You know what makes your party unelectable? Your own members attacking your leader for being unelectable! While the Conservatives were literally falling apart, Labour was too far up its own ass to do anything about it. By the time it came to actually running a campaign, Labour members had already inflicted so much damage, that the media needed only repeat the lies as if they were true.

Corbyn was a socialist leading the socialist party on a progressive, green, socialist platform, and the establishment could not tolerate it. They piled lie upon lie onto the front page until only those actually paying attention could see what was actually going on. The result: a strong majority for a Conservative government headed by a man who has a documented (but curiously little-reported) history of sexist, racist, and homophobic statements.

Conclusion and What it Means for Us

As the saying goes, the turkeys have voted for chirstmas and this country deserves everything it has coming to it. For those living in the UK, we're likely to see more poverty, more cuts to public services, and of course, the 10+ years of Brexit negotiations. For those on the outside, this country won't be an ally in the fight against climate change, likely joining with the US to subvert any progress we might make on it.

For my multicultural family, this means that Britain has demonstrated it doesn't want us here. It's now a question of what kind of work Christina can find elsewhere in the EU and whether I'll be able to find something near there as well. Our future is now up in the air. We're still trying to work out how we're going to deal with this, but I think it's fair to say there's no future for us in this place.