There are two upcoming elections of national importance to the democracies of the world – in the United Kingdom and Israel.
You know about the second, but the first may come as a surprise. The one in the UK that is in less than a week might be thought to be hardly of national importance. But that would be wrong.
For those who follow UK politics (which has been dubbed as the task of governing the ungovernable), it is a by-election to choose the new member of parliament for Makerfield, a town in Northwest England that is famous for nothing, really.
The by-election there is being used as a device to shoehorn the previous mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, into parliament. If successful, he would seek to displace and replace the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer immediately.
When I say Makerfield is famous for nothing, to give it a bit of context, it is even less known than Pontefract, a small market town in West Yorkshire which any Israeli doing a bit of research would discover is famous for its liquorice – grown and marketed since the 16th century.
To use another comparison, Makerfield is not even as well-known as Tiptree in Essex, the county in which I lived, which is famous for making jam. I have made the point. But for this by-election, Makerfield would have remained as obscure as any other unheard-of Northern town.
But the Labour Party and Great Britain are desperate to remove Sir Keir Starmer, who has become the most unpopular prime minister since records began, and despite winning a landslide victory in the General Election of 2024, 60% to 70% of the electorate view him unfavorably. This can hardly be surprising.
He has changed his mind on important issues no less than 16 times (for example, handing back the Chagos Islands to Mauritius), and it is generally conceded that his economic policies and indeed all other policies are a disaster.
Let’s look at some of his antics:
• He appointed Lord Mandelson to the ambassadorship of the US, despite his being inexorably linked to Jeffrey Epstein and his sex scandals.
• The Labour Welfare cost, the gods of the left-wing, that benefits the unemployed – now exceeds income from tax revenue.
• He has failed to hold an effective rape inquiry to examine child grooming in the Asian community
• He has failed to do anything to stop illegal immigration.
The number of rubber dinghies making their way from Northern France across the English Channel, laden with single young men who cannot wait to start the process of holding out their hands for all the benefits the government is prepared to give them, fills the Brits with horror. And whilst historically Britain had the best navy in the world, which repelled the Spanish Armada in 1588, the British government cannot find a way of using it to stop a rubber dinghy.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister John Healey resigned this week as a protest against the prime minister’s refusal to raise defense spending in line with needs.
Of course, as I have said before, the useless prime minister and his left-wing cronies are only good at one thing: knocking Israel.
Lord Austin, a member of the Upper House, made a speech pointing out that there have been two debates singling out Israel for criticism in just one week, while such debates have outnumbered every other category of British debate in the last two years.
A sinking ship
As for crime in the last two weeks, a Belfast man fought off a Sudanese knifeman with a wooden hurley (sporting stick), while the murder of a young white man on the streets by an Asian guy was prejudiced by the fact that there was the woke assumption that the Asian would be expected to be the victim.
And the situation gets worse as the country reaches a crisis point.
How poor is the Labour government? Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy went on a quiz show, Mastermind, to say he thought Henry VIII was succeeded by Henry VII(!), that Tony Gandolfini was the head of the Godfather gangster group rather than the Sopranos, and that he had not heard of the Purple Heart as an award in the US military.
If Lammy is dumb, Starmer is toast. The knight in shining armor riding to the rescue of the government is Burnham. All he has to do to replace Starmer is win in Friday’s election in Makerfield.
However, if local voters do not vote him in, the prospects are that the prime minister and Labour government will be out by Christmas. In other words, opposition parties should be doing all they can to stop him from winning.
So, what is the way to stop Burnham? If the right-wing parties unite behind a single candidate, Burnham will most likely lose. There are three right-wing parties with much in common: Reform, Restore Britain, and Conservative. All they would have to do is set their egos aside and agree on the candidate.
But as we know only too well, as in Israel, such pacts are incredibly difficult to put in place.
Without such a pact in the UK, if Burnham wins in Makerfield and replaces the prime minister, you get more of the same – but probably worse: more left-wing policies and, despite the referendum to withdraw from Europe, a wish to draw closer to them. Too much spent on welfare, too little to stop immigration.
At the moment, Burnham leads by 10% and will win in Makerfield. Only a united opposition will beat him.
The UK is the Titanic, struck below the waterline by the iceberg, and sinking by virtue of the inadequacies of the captain and crew.
Unless radical steps in this by-election are taken, Labour – with Burnham at the helm – will continue in power.
I am not an expert on Israeli politics, but like most opinionated people, I will now add the word “But…”
Here, too, opposition alliances will be necessary to displace the status quo.
“The government you elect is the government you deserve,” said Thomas Jefferson.
The dangers arise when the people do not get the governments they deserve. Unless opposition parties can sort out the path to power by effective acts of unity, what will happen will merely rearrange the furniture while the ships sink.