tory

Mike Robinson
UK Column
Coercion: the practice of forcing another party to act in an involuntary manner by use of threats or force.

TruePublica
In the decade from 2010 to 2020, a period in which the Conservative government oversaw the Great Recession and managed the slowest recovery from any economic slump on record – it heaped misery on millions in the shape of a failed policy called austerity.

The two major political parties, the Conservatives and Labor, are mere shadows of their former selves. Fresh from a major landslide victory in England, the Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is now a hard-right party. Traditional Tories like Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, and Kenneth Clarke, the grand old man of Conservative Party politics, were expelled as members of the Conservative ranks sitting in the House of Commons as a result of their September 2019 vote against Johnson’s government and their pro-European Union positions.

Caitlin JOHNSTONE
There’s a wildly under-appreciated clip of news footage from Thursday’s general election in the UK that, now that everyone’s had some time to emotionally process the emotional fallout from that depressing night, needs more attention.

TruePublica
Since the Conservative party came to power in 2010, they have been mired in non-stop scandals including accusations of corruption and abuse of office, being funded by dark money donations and more recent very serious accusations of accepting campaign cash from individuals closely associated with a hostile government to influence Brexit. There are more scandals to come – one of them will be the big Brexit Cover-up

The United Kingdom goes to the polls December 12 in a pivotal vote that will decide the future of the country. Like in 2017, the Labour Party, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, is surging towards the ruling Conservative Party in the last weeks of campaigning. But he will not become Prime Minister if the UK’s security services have anything to do with it.

In all the hullabaloo of Brexit and its associated parliamentary infighting, little noticed has been how Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson are attempting to change the very nature of the UK political landscape. Of course, the Brexit angst is making the attempt to leverage a strategic political shift much more visible, and more acute. Yet, actually the changes are not wholly, or even predominantly Brexit related, but reflect underlying tectonic plates clashing.

With Brexit, Britain is facing down a regressive, authoritarian, oligarch-backed far-right political project.
Rachel SHABI
he BBC’s flagship current affairs program Newsnight described the challenge facing the British Parliament this week using footage from the Avengers: Endgame. Over the film’s rousing soundtrack, presenter Mark Urban proclaimed, “Whichever side you’re on, one thing’s clear: The final battle for Brexit begins when Parliament gathers its forces on Tuesday.”

Britain, which sees itself as governed by the mothers of all parliaments, Westminster, has received a bitter taste of what occurs when a small minority of domestic political forces, who are teamed up with likeminded foreign actors, manage to prorogue – suspend – parliamentary rule for extremist purposes. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who became the occupant of Number 10 Downing Street after winning a majority of the votes of 160,000 members of the Conservative Party representing a paltry 0.2 percent of the electorate, was victorious over former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

BORIS AND THE QUEEN: Who remembers that hat in 2017?
Yesterday, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II met with members of Privy Council at her Balmoral residence, and accepted a prorogue, or suspension of Parliament for the period between September 9 to October 14. As a result, new Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson is now facing a significant anti-Brexit revolt from opposition within his own party, as well as Labour, Liberal Democrat, Greens and the Scottish National Party (SNP).