They wanted a second People's Vote... and they got the one they deserved
By Richard Littlejohn
This wasn't just a defiant reaffirmation of the EU referendum result, it was a damning repudiation of those who have spent the past three and a half years trying to Stop Brexit.
It also served as a timely reminder that there is life outside the Westminster bubble, that social media is not the real world.
As late as Thursday lunchtime, political commentators were confidently predicting a hung parliament on the evidence of a handful of photos on Twitter showing a few dozen young people queueing at polling stations in London.
Like children chasing a football round a school playground, they all rushed to follow the herd.
The Corbynistas were crushed. The self-deluding Remain Alliance, which thought it could bully the British people into reversing the referendum result, was routed
The Corbynistas were crushed. The self-deluding Remain Alliance, which thought it could bully the British people into reversing the referendum result, was routed. That gurning gargoyle John Bercow, the ex-Speaker who has done more than most to frustrate the will of the people, turned up as a pundit on Sky News. When the official exit poll predicting an 80-seat Tory majority dropped at 10pm, he looked as if he'd just heard through his earpiece that his wife was having an affair with his cousin Alan. Bercow, nominally a Tory, appeared devastated by the scale of the projected Conservative victory. He wasn't alone. The outcome of this election was an even greater defeat for the forces of Remain than the original referendum in 2016.
We were told that not only would the Conservatives fail to secure an overall majority, but there was a real chance Boris Johnson would lose his own West London seat.
In the event, Boris romped home, not just in Uxbridge, but across the country, in constituencies which had never previously returned a Conservative MP.
The Corbynistas were crushed. The self-deluding Remain Alliance, which thought it could bully the British people into reversing the referendum result, was routed.
They didn't see the Leave vote coming, but once the initial shock subsided they were able to regroup and move heaven and earth to overturn it, at little cost to themselves. After all, they argued, the result was merely advisory.
Did Swinson really think that the British people were going to take her threat to cancel the result of the biggest-ever popular vote in favour of anything lying down?
This time it was personal. This time they were on the ballot. They had everything to lose. And lose they did, on a spectacular scale. They didn't just lose a referendum, they lost their jobs. They had it coming.
Grieve, Gauke, Soubry Loo and the rest were all sent packing. Not a single one of the turncoat Tory MPs who rebelled against their own government over Brexit managed to retain their seats.
Nor did any of those who resigned the Labour whip to join Change UK or the Lib Dems, Chucky Umunna included. What an ignominious downfall for the man dubbed (by himself, probably) Britain's Barack Obama.
Speaking of sticky ends, were you up for Swinson?
Me, neither.
But if there was a Portillo moment, it had to be the defenestration of Liberal leader and self-proclaimed 'next Prime Minister' Jo Swinson.
The woman who promised to abort Brexit without so much as a second referendum couldn't even hold on to her own constituency.
(I'm no fan of Wee Burney, but the SNP leader's animated celebration when she heard Swinson was dead meat was a joy to behold.)
Did Swinson really think that the British people were going to take her threat to cancel the result of the biggest-ever popular vote in favour of anything lying down?
The most ludicrous argument put forward by Bercow and the Stop Brexit crowd as they paralysed Parliament to prevent Boris's withdrawal agreement being passed was that they were 'defending democracy'.
Democracy? They don't understand the meaning of the word.
Swinson was still at it yesterday, blaming the people for their stupidity in voting Tory.
For the past three and a half years, the mantra coming from the Remain camp at Westminster has been that Leave voters are thick racists, who didn't understand what they were voting for.
Now the People have taken their revenge.
Labour, in particular, has paid the price for prevaricating over Brexit and reneging on its repeated promises to honour the referendum result
The Blyth spartans have spoken. So have millions of other former Labour voters across the party's traditional heartlands in the North-East, the North-West, North Wales and the Midlands.
Presumably, Labour didn't think the people of Sedgefield were all morons when they kept sending Tony Blair back to Westminster.
They can't all be thick racists. They are just sick and tired of being ignored, insulted and taken for granted.
In an election which we were told was about trust, voters have decided to put their trust in Boris Johnson and the Tories on everything from Brexit to the NHS.
They certainly didn't trust Corbyn and Labour further than they could throw them.
But Corbyn still doesn't seem to understand the calamity he has visited upon his party — or the reasons why. Yesterday he was grumbling that the problem was the election had become all about Brexit.
Eh?
Without the gridlock over Brexit, caused by Corbyn and Labour, there wouldn't have been an election. Since it was called, they've tried to make it about anything but.
Voters had other ideas, fortunately. They saw through Labour's Fantasy Island giveaway manifesto, and the lies about selling the NHS to Trump. Getting Brexit Done became an article of faith.
This was as much a vote for the sacred principle of democracy as it was for the Conservatives.
It helps that Corbyn himself was unelectable — although it is frightening to think that millions of people, particularly in London, were prepared to vote for a party led by a Seventies throwback, Marxoid, terrorist-loving, anti-Semite.
And if the post-mortem is anything to go by, the broadcast media still hasn't come to terms with what's happened.
Most of the analysis has concentrated not on the reasons why Boris won such a spectacular, historic victory, but on nauseating navel-gazing about how Labour can be saved for the nation. Who gives a monkey's?
This wasn't just a defiant reaffirmation of the EU referendum result, it was a damning repudiation of those who have spent the past three and a half years trying to Stop Brexit
Forget about Labour's troubles and concentrate on what this means for Britain.
The great news is that, yet again, the British people have resoundingly rejected Left-wing extremism. The ruinous notion that the citizens of this ancient democracy are gagging to live in a highly-regulated socialist utopia has been tested to destruction.
Thanks to the Tory landslide, we shall soon be free of the shackles of the sclerotic European superstate. And don't believe the naysayers who are already demanding an extension to our membership and trashing our chances of ever agreeing a free trade deal with Europe.
We've heard it all before. Under a united Tory government with a massive majority, we hold the trump cards in any upcoming negotiations with Brussels.
This was undoubtedly a personal triumph for Boris, but more importantly it was a glorious victory for freedom and democracy.
On the day after the referendum in 2016, I quoted G.K. Chesterton's line about the 'secret people of England who have not spoken yet'. We have now.
They wanted a second People's Vote. They got the one they deserved.
greybeard wrote:Summed up nicely by Littlejohn.
Littlejohn
Burgerman wrote:Correct.
I have had a highly fun day in bed watching all the remainers and socialists throwing their toys out of the pram. I am still laughing.
Gina millar will be busy trying to make it illegal or suing all the leave voters.
PIERS MORGAN: Boris Johnson's triumph proves democracy-denying radical socialists backed by self-righteous celebrities on Twitter are electoral poison – and if Democrats fall for the same delusion, Trump will decimate them in 2020
By Piers Morgan for MailOnline
Published: 12:41, 13 December 2019 | Updated: 17:28, 13 December 2019
'What an earthquake we have created!' cried a jubilant Boris Johnson after his stunning UK election triumph last night.
Unusually, the British Prime Minister wasn't either wildly exaggerating or speaking with forked tongue.
Johnson's victory was a genuinely seismic moment, and one whose forceful tremors will be felt most keenly across the Atlantic in America.
Because make no mistake, the lessons from this election carry extraordinary pertinence for next year's US election.
Like Donald Trump and his 'Make America Great Again' mantra in 2016, Boris Johnson won with one very simple message that he rammed home every minute of every day of the six-week campaign.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his girlfriend Carrie Symonds arrive in Downing Street on Friday morning after the Conservative Party was returned to power in the General Election with an increased majority 'GET BREXIT DONE!' he bellowed ad nauseum, and this relentless three-word mission statement worked spectacularly well.
Johnson's Conservative Party was the only one to run on a platform of delivering the result of the 2016 Referendum into whether the UK should remain in or leave the European Union. 17.4 million people voted then to leave, a 52 percent majority of Britons, but scandalously the losing Remainers – who were quickly dubbed Remoaners - launched a concerted campaign to stop it happening.
Rather like Democrats after Hillary Clinton lost to Trump, they wouldn't accept the result and have spent the past three-and-a-half years screaming their heads off about how unfair it all is - and demanding another vote.
Since Johnson, one of the key architects of the Brexit win, became Prime Minister in the summer, Remoaner fury has grown ever more hysterical as they've branded him a lying cheating racist scumbag with a tawdry history involving women.
And they've mocked all his supporters as thick, racist morons who are just too stupid to know what they're doing.
Sound familiar?
For Boris, read Trump.
For Brexit, read the 2016 Election.
And for Remainers, read Democrats.
The similarities don't stop there.
Like the Democrats when Hillary ran, Remainers enlisted the very vocal support of Hollywood luvvies to fight their cause.
Hollywood actors Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan led the way, backed up by the likes of grime artist Stormzy and pop singer Lily Allen.
Grant, who seemed to forget that playing a fictitious Prime Minister in Love Actually is not a qualification to be a real politician, spent weeks marching around ordering people not to vote for Johnson or the Conservatives because they had the audacity to want to act on the democratic will of the people.
Hugh Grant looks glum as he watches the election result coming in a London restaurant with a friend after the actor campaigned for Labour
'I don't want to sound dramatic,' he said, dramatically, 'but I really think we're facing a national emergency.'
The absurdly affected arrogant and pompous twerp believed he was the one to save us all from ourselves.
Instead, Britons responded exactly how I assumed they would to a jumped-up hectoring thespian trying to destroy democracy - and voted against everyone he supported.
There was a wonderful photo taken in a West London restaurant of the precise moment multi-millionaire Grant read the devastating (for him) 10pm exit poll on his cell-phone and his head sunk in abject disbelief.
Like the Trump-hating liberal celebrities who so raucously endorsed Hillary, he was hit by a sudden thunderbolt of reality that his views are not shared by most actual real people.
Grant was only matched in his sneering self-righteousness by fellow thespian Coogan who the night before the election went on national television to condemn all 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit as 'ill-informed and ignorant.'
What stupefying arrogance!
Stormzy just resorted to plain abuse, branding Johnson a 'f***ing pr*ck' in a message to his millions of social media followers.
And Lily Allen – who most Americans will only have heard of because she is dating Stranger Things star David Harbour - blamed the subsequent loss on the fact that 'racism and misogyny runs so deep in this country.'
Of course, the one thing uniting all these stars was their utter refusal to accept democracy. They just couldn't deal with the simple fact that their side lost.
So, they tried to overturn the result of the Referendum, and unsurprisingly, they've now lost all over again.
If there's one thing the British people hate, and Americans for that matter, it is snotty rich celebrities telling them they're idiots and their vote shouldn't count.
There was also another massive reason why Johnson won so big, and it was that his opponent, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, is a hard-core socialist so far left he makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look like a capitalist.
Corbyn pledged to spend £60 billion ($80 billion) investing in schools, hospitals, education, green energy and home-building.
But as with Ocasio-Cortez and her outlandish promises like free tuition, healthcare and a green new deal, he planned to pay for it all by punitively taxing the rich and middle class in a way that many economists feared would bankrupt the country.
Britons firmly rejected that hard-left agenda in this election, and this should also send a very firm message to Democrats as they choose their nominee to take on President Trump in 2020.
As I've been warning for months, there's not a cat-in-hell's chance of a socialist candidate beating Trump next November, especially not with the US economy doing so well.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both share Jeremy Corbyn's socialist agenda and both appear to be as popular as him on Twitter.
But Twitter's not the real world.
The lesson for Donald Trump from the British General Election is that he will win if the Democrats are too radical and take their lead from celebrity supporters on Twitter
It's become a cesspit echo chamber where many people only follow others who agree with their political opinions, thus creating a wall of partisan – and increasingly abusive - noise that bears little relation to reality.
Liberal Twitter was thus shocked when Trump won, stunned when Brexit happened, and is frothing at the mouth again now Boris Johnson's pulled off a huge success.
It was so blinded to the infallibility of its own beliefs that it never saw any of this coming.
And if Democrats don't forget about Twitter and base their candidate choice on cold, hard reality, they're going to get a similar drubbing to the Labour Party.
The clear takeaway from this UK election is that a radical socialist candidate, backed by whining supercilious celebrities, against a populist opponent with a fervent base of support, will fail.
And if the only tactic they come up with to win is to try to thwart democracy, they will fail badly.
The sinister establishment-driven attempt to stop Brexit happening is not dissimilar to the current equally ill-advised Democrat impeachment move on Trump.
Those who voted for Brexit and Trump don't take kindly to their democratic vote being abused in this way.
And their retribution comes at the ballot box.
If people think Boris Johnson's earthquake was big, just wait until the Senate acquits President Trump and he uses that victory to storm to re-election.
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Let the bells ring out for Christmas - Boris Johnson's election victory could spark a cultural revolution
By Richard Littlejohn for the Daily Mail
Published: 00:08, 20 December 2019 | Updated: 01:51, 20 December 2019
For the past 160 years, Big Ben has been an enduring beacon of British freedom and democracy, not just at home but around the world.
During World War II, the chimes of the Great Bell of Westminster, broadcast by the BBC World Service, gave comfort to the resistance movements in Europe and to our troops fighting abroad. The distinctive peal of Big Ben has been used by news bulletins to introduce everything from the death of kings to the end of hostilities.
Throughout the reigns of six monarchs, it sounded on the hour, every hour.
But for the past two-and-a-half years, it has fallen silent and is not due to ring out regularly again until 2021. Big Ben has been mothballed to protect the hearing of building workers renovating the tower. As I wrote at the time: the Little Hitlers of elf'n'safety have succeeded where the Fuhrer failed.
They could have spent a couple of hundred quid a pop on the kind of protective headsets issued to those working in equally potentially deafening conditions, such as on airport runways or operating pneumatic drills.
But that's not the modern British way. Risk aversion is the name of the game. Always legislate for the worst-case scenario.
Don't panic!
Which brings us to Brexit, until recently hampered by the ultimate manifestation of risk aversion, Project Fear.
But now that we are leaving the EU, at long last, it's time to cast caution to the wind.
Originally, we were due to depart on March 29. Brexiteer MPs wanted Big Ben rung to mark the occasion, but were blocked by a committee chaired by the gruesome Remainer Speaker John Bercow — even though exceptions were made for Remembrance Sunday. With Britain finally throwing off the shackles of the EU next month, there are now fresh calls for Big Ben to sound at 11pm on January 31 — the night we will break free, no ifs, no buts.
While unseemly and unnecessary squabbles over our future trading relationship with Europe are inevitable, we will shed the Brussels straitjacket and forge a new destiny as a truly independent global nation. It's hard to think of a more appropriate way of marking the occasion.
Big Ben could be joined by church bells the length and breadth of the land. Our departure should be the catalyst for national renewal, the first bold steps of which were outlined in yesterday's Queen's Speech.
Time to ring out the old and ring in the new. Time to embrace risk, not to run a mile in the other direction.
During World War II, the chimes of the Great Bell of Westminster gave comfort to the resistance movements in Europe and to our troops fighting abroad, writes Richard Littlejohn
During World War II, the chimes of the Great Bell of Westminster gave comfort to the resistance movements in Europe and to our troops fighting abroad, writes Richard Littlejohn
The doom-mongers and naysayers who have dominated British political debate for years have been routed.
Boris Johnson, if he keeps his eye on the prize, has the opportunity to bury them for good.
It's time not just for a political revolution, but for a cultural revolution, too. The citadels of the Left, the quangocracy, the 'woke' mindset which infests every single public institution, must be dismantled.
It's not enough for Boris to hire an extra 20,000 coppers. He has to ensure they're deployed on the streets, fighting knife crime and tackling burglary, instead of pursuing politically motivated prosecutions for 'hate crimes'.
The fire brigade must be reminded that their job is fighting fires, not 'celebrating diversity' and putting the safety of firemen ahead of the lives of the people they're paid to rescue. The Armed Forces should be told they will be judged on their ability to defend us against our enemies, not on how many sexual and ethnic minorities they employ.
Ministers should ensure that schools exist to teach children to read and write, to teach geography, maths and foreign languages — and not fill their heads with a revisionist Left-wing version of history and endless propaganda about 'climate change' and gender fluidity.
Boris must guarantee the extra billions being pumped into the NHS go to benefit patients and do not disappear inevitably into the black hole of the self-serving permanent bureaucracy. There has to be a bonfire of the proscriptive, enterprise-sapping EU-inspired regulations permeating every aspect of our lives. That can happen after we leave on January 31. Let Big Ben ring long and loud into the new dawn.
With an 80-seat Tory majority and the support of the secret people of this great nation, we shouldn't have to ask for whom the bell tolls.
It tolls for the Corbinystas, and for the so-called Labour 'moderates' such as 'Sir' Keir Starmer who not only went along with the corruption of a once-respectable political party, but instigated its cynical attempts to thwart the democratically expressed will of the 'People' it disingenuously purports to represent.
Who comes next for Labour? Who cares? A prolonged period of silence — at least four years, ideally — is overdue. The bell also tolls for Bercow, who abused his high office to derail Brexit and is destined for well-deserved ignominy. In future, he will be found barking 'Order, Order!' on foreign TV shows and at passengers on the Clapham omnibus — a modern-day, one-man freak-show like the Vicar of Stiffkey, who ended his days preaching from inside a lion's cage.
It tolls for that weird Gina Miller woman, who having failed to stop Brexit is threatening more legal action to throw a spoke into Boris's proposed constitutional reforms.
It tolls for Tory turncoats Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry, David Gauke et al, who thought they were entitled to overturn the democratic will of the British people. It tolls for pro-EU has-beens Johnny Major, Michael Heseltine, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair, who even now deludes himself that he is a force in the land.
It tolls for la-la-land luvvies such as Steve Coogan, Hugh Grant and Lily Allen, who think they're morally superior to the great unwashed who watch their movies and buy their records. They are all yesterday's news.
We've had to put up with decades of being patronised by the smug, self-appointed metropolitan elite and betrayed by an arrogant, self-serving political class. As of last week, those days are over. We hope.
When the scaffolding comes down at Westminster, Big Ben must once again become that shining symbol of our ancient, hard-won liberty and democracy. After we voted Leave in 2016, we didn't expect to have to come back for an encore three-and-a-half years later. But the wisdom of the people has prevailed.
Take another bow, Britain!
That’s my lot for 2019. What a year, eh? And what a result in the end.
Readers often write to say that this column reassures them they’re not alone. Trust me, the feeling’s mutual.
Thanks for all your wonderful letters and emails, kind Christmas cards, and contributions to You Couldn’t Make It Up, Here We Go Looby Loo, Mind How You Go and Makes You Proud To Be British.
I know I say it every year, but this column really wouldn’t be the same without you.
To you and yours, from Gary and me, a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year.