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Keir Starmer becomes new UK prime minister as Nigel Farage finally elected to Parliament
From LifeSiteNews
By Frank Wright
Britain’s Labour Party has achieved a historic majority of over 150 seats, following a general election with the second lowest voter turnout in almost 140 years, while Nigel Farage’s party took 4 million votes but only 4 seats in Parliament.
Britain has a Labour government with a historic majority of over 150 seats, following exit poll projections of the U.K. general election. Thursday’s July 4 vote saw the second lowest voter turnout since 1885, with only an estimated 60 percent of registered voters taking part.
Former lawyer Sir Keir Starmer is set to become prime minister when announced by King Charles today, having purged his party of left-wingers in a successful move to mimic the electoral success of Tony Blair.
4 seats for 4 million votes
Current projections say the Labour Party won 9.6 million votes and an estimated 412 seats, with the Conservative Party second with 6.6 million votes and 120 parliamentary seats. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK took over 4 million votes, making his insurgent populist party the third force in U.K. politics by the popular vote.
Due to the workings of the British electoral system, however, Reform gained only four seats at the time of writing. This result still sees Nigel Farage finally enter Parliament as the MP for Clacton, having failed to win in previous elections.
Hopes for “zero seats” for a Conservative Party widely acknowledged to have conserved nothing were dashed, yet the Labour landslide – the greatest since 1945 – sees the Tories lose over 250 seats in what could be their worst result since their party was founded in 1830.
Winner takes all
Many constituencies saw Reform overtake the Tory vote. Conservative voters who turned to Reform have cost the Tories an estimated 124 seats in splitting the vote. This follows changes to election boundaries made last year.
The U.K.’s constituency boundaries were changed in 2023 to reflect population growth within them, and to arguably “equalize” the numbers of people voting per MP. The causes and demography of this population growth were not explained in reports, nor did any address the obvious mismatch between Welsh, Scottish, and English constituencies.
While the extreme left-wing Scottish National Party lost 37 seats, the eight it held onto were returned by only 666,000 votes. In Wales, the equally progressive Plaid Cymru won four seats with only 194,000 votes cast for the Welsh “nationalist” party.
As a result of this system, the liberal-globalist Labour Party will enjoy a record majority on a vote share lower than their right-liberal “conservative” and right-populist opponents.
Lower vote share, record low turnout?
The former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn won his seat as an Independent in Islington. In the last election he contested as leader, he won 40 percent of the vote – but narrowly lost to Conservative leader Theresa May in 2017.
The current Labour vote share is expected to be lower than that won by Corbyn, at around 36 percent of votes cast. Yet the overall number of votes is, according to one expert, expected to be one of the lowest in decades.
As the Hindustan Times reported, “Prof. Sir John Curtice, the psephologist who led the team that produced the exit poll, indicated that early results align with expectations of a low voter turnout.”
Speaking to the BBC, Curtice explained: “We may discover we are heading towards one of the lower turnouts of general elections in postwar electoral history.”
Curtice warned that the low turnout he expected was due to voter indifference – to what George Galloway has called the “uniparty” politics of the U.K.
“The Left are globalists now” said Galloway in a March 22 podcast, in which he called for an exit from NATO and condemned the U.K.’s involvement in the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza.
Curtice appeared to agree with the sentiment about establishment politics, concluding there was “not that much difference between Conservative and Labour in much of what they were offering the electorate.”
In recent days, former U.K. Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary David Cameron admitted on camera that the British policy on the Ukraine war was “fixed,” and that no change would come with a Labour victory. The power to change foreign policy is clearly outside that offered to the British by liberal democracy.
Whilst Galloway himself certainly offered a different choice, he lost his Rochdale seat to the Labour candidate. Parliament will be far less interesting due to his absence.
Notable losses
Parliament has lost its champion of the vaccine injured, however, as Andrew Bridgen lost his seat in a four-way race won by Labour. Other absences include former ministers and high profile Tory MPs.
Former Prime Minister Liz Truss lost her seat, as did Zionist Defence Minister and former B’nai B’rith youth leader Grant Shapps. Well known Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg was defeated in Somerset. Many high profile Tories are now out of Parliament, with the former Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker saying “Thank God I’m a free man” on losing his seat in Wycombe.
What the future holds
Labour under Starmer has promised a “mission-driven” government. This mission appears to be strongly globalist in flavor.
Starmer has removed candidates from his party who held strong left-wing and Israel-critical positions. He is widely believed to have moved the party to the “center” to secure a mandate to govern.
The program he has in store does not resemble an abrupt transition to socialism. There is talk of taxing non-state schools, and rumors Starmer will increase income and inheritance tax – to redistribute the wealth of the British to a voter base expanded by over 11 million immigrants since 2011.
A further 6 million are expected in the next 10 years.
The Labour Party under Starmer has a plan to “Change Britain.” This plan is expected to go beyond its 10 headline promises to transfer state power to globalist-aligned NGO-like structures and other bodies independent of Parliament, providing for a permanent continuity of policy. Labour under Starmer has been as fastidious in “purging” anyone who stands for its founding principles, as has the defeated Conservative Party.
The uncertain future of liberal globalism
What is notable about this landslide is that it comes as a result of voter disaffection, with a lower turnout overall, and mounting exasperation with the political settlement of “uniparty” politics.
As Europe – and especially France – risks political instability in its attempts to lock populists out of power, the future for Britain looks less like socialism and more like the last hurrah of business as usual.
Populists are now in Parliament, albeit in a capacity which fails to reflect their level of support across the country. It is their voice which will provide a meaningful opposition to the liberal-globalist agenda, whose power internationally is in terminal decline.
The same can be said of the Labour Party, whose power is purchased in a context of exasperation with establishment politics. This victory is the verdict of a broken system. How long it can prevail against the tide of the times is the question.
Daily Caller
Musk Completely Derails UK Political Establishment, Accuses PM’s Party Of Covering Up Muslim Rape Gangs
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Thomas English
Elon Musk ignited a political firestorm in Britain after accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer of complicity in the “rape of Britain” Friday, reanimating a years-old debate over organized child sexual exploitation by predominately Pakistani men.
Musk has ravaged Starmer and other U.K. officials in a barrage of tweets over the past week, primarily accusing Starmer of inadequately prosecuting rape gangs during his tenure as director of public prosecutions (DPP) from 2008 to 2013. The SpaceX founder also attacked Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips, who he said “deserves to be in prison,” for blocking a government-led inquiry into child sexual exploitation by gangs in Oldham, a northern England town.
“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,” Musk wrote. “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”
The recent flurry of attacks mark the world’s richest man’s latest incursion into international political affairs, with Musk now focusing in particular on the United Kingdom’s decades-long struggle to curb the proliferation of “grooming gangs” primarily comprised of Pakistani-descended men who mainly target native Briton girls for sexual exploitation, The Telegraph reported in an analysis of the persistent issue.
The most infamous cases involving these gangs occurred in northern England towns like Oldham, Telford and Rotherham — the severity of which has been whitewashed for fear of accusations of Islamophobia, according to The Telegraph.
“To protect ‘community relations’, the British state has gone to immense lengths to cover it up,” he wrote. “Reports have been blocked and deliberately kept out of the public eye. Any connection with ethnicity, immigration, or Islam was downplayed … the evidence that British Pakistani men were over-represented among the perpetrators was spiked to avoid uncomfortable truths.”
Musk Starmer and the Labour government with operating a two-tiered justice system, suggesting in a meme Thursday that the prime minister prosecutes “rape and violent crime” with leniency while instead focusing on policing online speech. He also said the Labour Party “opposes a national inquiry on the mass rape of little girls in Britain for one reason only: It will show that they were complicit.”
The prime minister defended his prosecutorial record as DPP in a press conference Monday, saying he “brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang in this particular case” and “changed the whole prosecution approach.” While largely avoiding mentioning Musk by name, Starmer also condemned the spread of what he called “lies and misinformation” from detractors who are “interested in themselves” rather than the victims.
Starmer also defended Phillips in the press conference, insisting she has done “a thousand times more than they’ve even dreamt about when it comes to protecting victims of sexual abuse throughout her entire career.” Phillips blocked a Tory-led motion Thursday to hold a public inquiry into the historic sexual abuse in Oldham because it was for “Oldham council alone” to decide whether one was necessary, according to The Telegraph.
Musk’s attacks are not limited to the Labour Party alone, however. The Tesla CEO also called for Nigel Farage, the architect of Brexit and the leader of the Reform Party, to be replaced as party leader because he “doesn’t have what it takes.”
The comments come hours after Farage referred to Musk as a “friend” in an interview with the BBC’s “Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg” program.
“Well, this is a surprise!” Farage wrote in response to Musk. “Elon is a remarkable individual but on this I am afraid I disagree. My view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I will never sell out my principles.”
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By David Blackmon
Kish characterized Biden’s move as “a petulant act of a Hard Left Establishment out to punish 340 million Americans who rejected their calls to bow to their Climate Religion and its vows of poverty.”
The Biden White House said early Monday that outgoing President Joe Biden has ordered huge swaths of U.S. federal waters off-limits to future leasing and drilling for oil and natural gas. The ban includes the entire offshore Atlantic, offshore Pacific, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the Northern Bering Sea.
All told, the regions impacted by the ban encompass 625 million acres, an area bigger than the states of Texas and Alaska combined. It is also significantly larger in scope than the Louisiana Purchase, which spanned 530 million acres.
“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement. “It is not worth the risks.”
Ironically, the Biden ban includes the Atlantic areas where his administration has spent billions of dollars subsidizing the construction of massive industrial wind power facilities. Those developments are currently the source of rising concerns related to impacts on sea mammals, seabirds and the once-thriving commercial fishing industry. All are concerns the administration has refused to adequately address in any real way.
Dan Kish, senior fellow at the D.C.-based Institute for Energy Research think tank, pointed to the “irony of his proposed windfarms in the same waters he is closing to American oil and gas is they are not going to be built. The electricity they produce is so expensive it is deindustrializing Europe and beginning to topple governments. The only question is whether the governments or the windmills will topple first.”
Kish characterized Biden’s move as “a petulant act of a Hard Left Establishment out to punish 340 million Americans who rejected their calls to bow to their Climate Religion and its vows of poverty.” Kish added that Biden and his White House “couldn’t care less about the national security implications, as witnessed by their feckless record that has lit fires around the world while they try to extinguish our gas stoves at home.”
In an interview with Salem Radio national talk show host Hugh Hewitt Monday, incoming President Donald Trump said he would reverse Biden’s order on his first day in office.
“I see that it has just come across that Biden has banned oil and gas drilling across 625 million acres of U.S. coastal territory,” Trump began, adding: “It’s ridiculous. I’ll un-ban it immediately. I have the right to un-ban it immediately.”
Trump acknowledge that the same climate-alarm groups behind the Biden ban will challenge any attempt to rescind it in court, saying, “They’ll do everything they can to make it as difficult as possible. They talk about a transition — they always say they want to have a smooth transition from party to party. Well, they’re making it really difficult. They’re throwing everything they can in the way.”
Trump concluded by telling Hewitt that Biden’s order amounts to “the worst abuse of power I’ve ever seen.”
The White House invoked the drilling ban under Section 12 of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA). It is a section of that law that previous presidents — including Barack Obama and Trump himself — have used to authorize similar drilling bans.
A reading of that provision makes it clear that Congress intended it to be used solely for reasons of national security and during national emergencies. Unfortunately, for the prospects of a Trump reversal, the law does not include any provision for revoking such bans.
Previous presidential bans have never been challenged all the way up through the Supreme Court, though a challenge by the Trump Justice Department to Obama’s ban in 2017 resulted in the set-aside being upheld by an Obama-appointed district judge in 2019. Trump’s Department of Justice chose not to challenge the decision.
This is clearly a political power move by the Biden White House, another payoff to the Democratic Party’s big climate-alarm funders. Whether Trump and his appointees can come up with an effective strategy to challenge it remains to be seen, but if Trump’s comments to Hewitt are any indication, the incoming president is fully prepared to take on the fight.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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