British Labour  ‘Activists’ Coming to America To Campaign for Kamala Harris. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

And all the while our pols are taking thousands of dollars in free tickets to Taylor Swift.

AP/Kin Cheung
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer at London, July 5, 2024. AP/Kin Cheung

The best description of our Labour government’s July victory was “a loveless landslide.” That is, the noble comrades won so dramatically because our electorate were totally cheesed off with the Conservatives after a decade and a half of lazy misrule. Yet Labour won by only 33 percent of the vote.

Even so, their fall from grace after four months is so dramatic as to look like some sort of time travel is involved; governments are generally this disgraced as they limp towards the end of a five-year term. In this case, Labour’s busted flush turned up in fewer than six months in power (if that’s the word).

So it’s droll to read that  almost a hundred of young Labour Party “activists” (a word which once meant standing with the wretched of the earth on picket lines, but now means swearing at strangers on the internet while snacking copiously) will be coming across the pond to “help” Kamala Harris in the swing states.

Some cruel characters would even say it invites the question, “Why does Labour want Trump to win?” Because a child of nine could have explained with no difficulty whatsoever what it looks like when a foreign power interferes in another country’s election.

It looks exactly like what Labourites have complained bitterly about ever since Donald Trump came to power in 2016 and there were dark mutterings about Russian interference helping him there. As our Reform leader Nigel Farage comments: “Direct election interference — and particularly stupid if Trump wins.”

If the British left is “helping out” the Democrats, this result seems increasingly likely. I’m reminded of the laughs-aplenty that were had in 2004 when our left-wing newspaper the Guardian (the clue to their weapons-grade condescension is in their name) inadvertently helped George w. Bush to victory with its “pen-pal” campaign which urged readers to write to the undecided citizens of Clark County, Ohio.

The response from the floating voters was predictable to everyone except the Guardian, with one lucky recipient of a letter responding, “Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to not vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed … if you want to have a meaningful election in your crappy little island full yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels.”

Needless to say, Mr. Bush won.

There’s a bit of a logical contradiction here. British lefties believe that the people they’re targeting are too dumb to have a clear understanding of what’s going on in their own country, but also somehow intelligent/open-minded enough to *listen to reason* when it’s presented to them.

All this while also insultingly implying that all of the actual American Democratic campaigners who’ve already tried to sway those people were somehow incompetent, or just didn’t try hard enough. It’s uncomfortably close to Kipling’s description of the British attitude to the inhabitants of their colonies: “Your new-caught sullen peoples / Half devil and half child.”

I couldn’t help recalling how I literally winced on Prince Harry’s  behalf when His Highness mocked the First Amendment as “bonkers.” Brits have little idea how much — beneath the natural politeness of Americans and the amusement our “cute” accent engenders — your people are rightfully suspicious of Britain.

It’s only natural that a proud nation feels this way toward a former imperial power. How on earth can a British left so sensitive to matters of colonization not have noticed the awful optics of an ex-colonizer attempting to swing the result of a democratic election in an ex-colony?

Once again, as with all of Labour’s manifold mistakes, they can’t grasp that “It’s OK when our side do it” isn’t a logical argument.

It’s this way of thinking which has led the Labour government into the embarrassing brouhaha over Taylor Swift’s recent visit, during which a dozen ministers took free tickets to her much-coveted concerts worth almost £18,000.

And the charming chanteuse was subsequently afforded a blue-light police escort to her shows of the kind usually reserved for royalty. As Swift has a well-publicized beef with the Republicans and is an avowed Democrat, this helping-hands-across-the-water business looks even more sketchy, like a bunch of hormonal  and partisan teenage fans protecting their “Kween.”

Once, politicians got into hot water over having passionate affairs with beautiful young women; now they are such castrates that they get into hot water over cadging tickets to watch a beautiful young woman who sings songs about hating her best friend and breaking up with her boyfriend.

A few days after the election, I wondered here whether it would be possible for the Starmer government to be both fanatical and boring. It is, though we never dreamt that it would also be so amusing.


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