Thursday open thread—BRITAIN ERECTS!

Today we take a break from existential matters in the US to focus on existential matters in the United Kingdom, but with a bit of distance and a jocular eye.

As this post goes live, the UK will be hours into its general election. Polls have shown the Conservative Party with a lead throughout the five-week campaign, but one which has kept getting smaller. On Tuesday, YouGov issued its final prediction: where on Nov. 27 it forecast a Conservative majority of 68, now the forecast majority is down to 28, with a hung parliament—where no party commands a majority—a distinct possibility. As the piece in The Times states:

The polling model that accurately predicted the election outcome two years ago suggests that the Conservatives are on course to win 339 seats, Labour 231, the Liberal Democrats 15 and the Scottish National Party 41.

Although that would give Mr Johnson a majority of 28, the poll’s range of possible outcomes stretches from 367 Tory seats to only 311. “Based on the model we cannot rule out a hung parliament,” Anthony Wells, YouGov’s director of political research, said.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the stereotype of a toff who supposedly relaxes after a day's campaigning with quadratic equations and a spot of Pre-Socratic philosophy. But his opponent in Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is so toxic that an election which should see the Tories cashiered may end up with him holding a slim majority. Or, the British people will give both parties an "up yours" and return a hung parliament, which is basically back to the status quo ante bellum. Johnson is a prevaricating Islamophobe, and Corbyn is a Maoist antisemite. We may be in the shit here, but at least there's a clear choice between Democrats and Republicans. I can only offer my condolences to our British readers.

This Christmastime election may make things no clearer than when it kicked off in November, and may in fact muddy the waters even more. The only one chortling is Vladimir Putin. Operation Chaos began with the Brexit debacle. While we in the US are clawing our way out of our disaster, the British are still no closer to undoing Putin's attack.

Of course, what Brexit has highlighted, like Putin's attack on the US has, is how fractured our countries are along issues of race. Brexit was fought on a plank of "taking back our borders". Chauvinism, bigotry, and racism played huge roles in the slim majority in favor of exiting the EU. After the referendum, hate crimes soared in the UK, just as they did in the US after Trump's installation. These are weaknesses which foreign actors exploit, because for all our faults we are still open societies, and subject to these insidious attacks.

Settle in kids. And, as always, Monty Python is completely accurate.

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