Jumat, 13 Desember 2019

U.K. Election Updates: Victorious Johnson Vows to Finish Brexit - The New York Times

Image
Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

With all but one district declared on Friday morning, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives had won 364 seats — 47 more than they won in the last election, in 2017.

The victory is the party’s biggest since Margaret Thatcher captured a third term in 1987 — “literally before many of you were born,” Mr. Johnson told supporters Friday morning. It gives him a comfortable majority in the 650-seat House of Commons.

“We did it,” he said. “We smashed it, didn’t we?”

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party had to reach even farther back to find a more extreme result. It won 203 seats, down 59 from the previous vote, in its worst showing since 1935. It had not suffered a similar drubbing since 1983, when it took 209 seats.

The Scottish National Party captured 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats, a gain of 13. The Liberal Democrats, who were hoping to ride an anti-Brexit stance back to prominence, won just 11 seats, one fewer than in 2017.

The Conservatives collected 43.6 percent of the popular vote, to 32.3 percent for Labour. That 11.3 percentage point margin was also the largest for the Tories since 1987 — a dramatic shift from 2017, when Labour lost the popular vote by just 2.4 percent.

Speaking to his constituents in Uxbridge early Friday morning, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the election results appeared to have given his government “a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done.”

Later in the morning, he told supporters, “we put an end to all those miserable threats of a second referendum” that might have reversed the results of the 2016 vote on Brexit.

“We will get Brexit done on time on the 31st of January — no ifs, no buts, no maybes,” he added.

He also promised that his government would spend more at home after a decade of austerity under Conservative governments — in particular on Britain’s National Health Service, known commonly as the N.H.S., a cherished program whose conditions have deteriorated.

Mr. Johnson said that he would seek “to unite this country and to take it forward and to focus on the priorities of the British people, and above all on the N.H.S.”

As hospital beds have overflowed, waiting times have gone up and vacancies have gone unfilled, many Britons have grown fearful that the health service could be privatized or otherwise overhauled — for instance by a trade deal with the United States that could drive up drug prices. (President Trump, tweeting congratulations on Friday morning, said Britain could “strike a massive new Trade Deal” after Brexit.)

Mr. Johnson insisted he would protect the health service, echoing his campaign promises to hire 50,000 more nurses and 6,000 doctors.

He promised again to hire more police officers, whose ranks have also thinned, and vowed “colossal new investments in infrastructure and science.”

“Let’s spread opportunity to every corner of the U.K.”

Speaking in his constituency of Islington in London, the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said that he would step down before the next general election, but would stay at the party’s helm for now, as it reflects on how to move forward from its dismal showing.

Mr. Corbyn is already under intense pressure to resign. His has been accused of poor leadership and of failing to handle accusations of anti-Semitism in the party ranks.

“I will not lead the party in any future general election campaign,” he said. “I will discuss with our party to ensure there is a process now of reflection on this result and on the policies that the party will take going forward and I will lead the party during that period to ensure that discussion takes place and we move on into the future.”

It was not clear how long Mr. Corbyn meant to stay on as party leader. The next election could be as long as five years away.

Some members of the Labour Party were quick to criticize him on Thursday night.

“The Labour Party has huge, huge questions to answer,” Ruth Smeeth, a former lawmaker, told Sky News. She immediately laid blame on Mr. Corbyn.

“Jeremy Corbyn should announce that he’s resigning as the leader of the Labour Party from his count today,” she said. “He should have gone many, many, many months ago.”

The Scottish National Party’s success — it won 48 of the 59 seats that it contested — will intensify the debate over independence for Scotland, which voted against Brexit and has largely rejected Britain’s major parties.

In a 2014 referendum, 45 percent of the voters in Scotland backed independence, and as Brexit approaches, the Scottish National Party, which backs independence, has insisted on a second referendum.

Mr. Johnson has said a national government under him would not hold a Scottish independence vote, but the Scottish government has suggested that it might go ahead with one.

That raises the prospect of the kind of disarray and animosity plaguing Spain, where the government of Catalonia held an independence referendum two years ago that the central government said was illegal.

“The people of Scotland will have made very clear that they didn’t want Boris Johnson as P.M., that they don’t want Brexit, and they want Scotland’s future to be in Scotland’s hands,” Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, told Sky News late Thursday night. “There is a mandate now to offer the people of Scotland a choice over their own future.”

Before 2015, the Scottish National Party had never won more than seven seats in Parliament. But under Ms. Sturgeon, it has now dominated the Scottish vote in three successive elections.

The Liberal Democrats, a centrist party that had campaigned to stop Brexit, lost ground and its leader, Jo Swinson, lost her seat in Dunbartonshire East, Scotland, to the Scottish National Party.

“Some will be celebrating the wave of nationalism that is sweeping on both sides of the border,” Ms. Swinson said. “These are very significant results for the future of our country.”

She did not immediately say whether she would resign as the party leader, but declared that the Liberal Democrats would still support “values that guide our liberal movement: openness, fairness, inclusivity.”

With the Conservatives becoming almost uniformly pro-Brexit, and Labour failing to take a clear position, the Liberal Democrats, unequivocally anti-Brexit, hoped to become the refuge for voters who wanted to remain in the European Union.

They won 11.5 percent of the popular vote, a sharp improvement on the 7.9 percent they collected in each of the last two elections. But it did not translate into victories; they won just 11 seats on Thursday, one less than in 2017.

The general election results met with disappointment and anger from unionists in Northern Ireland, who bitterly oppose Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan that would effectively put a trade border between them and the rest of Britain.

Unionists — the people, mostly Protestant, who want to remain part of the United Kingdom — view the deal as a betrayal, because it would put Northern Ireland in a separate customs system from the rest of the United Kingdom. They see that as a step toward unifying Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland.

“The poll clearly creates the expectation that Boris Johnson will try to force the Betrayal Act through Parliament,” said Jamie Bryson, a prominent unionist activist who is challenging the Brexit agreement in court. “An economic united Ireland will never be tolerated.”

After the 2017 election, when the Conservatives fell just short of winning a majority in Parliament, they reached an agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland that allowed the Tories to govern.

But the D.U.P. opposed Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal with Brussels because it could have resulted in Northern Ireland being treated differently from the rest of Britain. For them, Mr. Johnson’s deal is worse, making that difference a certainty.

Mr. Johnson’s big victory eliminates any leverage the D.U.P. had over the government, and the party fell from ten seats to eight.

Many Northern Ireland republicans — those people, mostly Catholic, who favor unification with Ireland — also oppose the deal.

Both republicans and unionists say it is incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement, the 1998 pact that ended three decades of violence between the two communities, and threatens to inflame sectarian tensions.

“If the political process has been exhausted then potentially, we could face some very dark days ahead,” Mr. Bryson said. “And that’s obviously something everyone wants to avoid.”

Britain will have a record number of female members of Parliament after Thursday’s vote, when women won at least 220 of the 650 seats, according to the Press Association.

At just over one-third of the House of Commons, women remain far short of parity with men, but they have made tremendous gains since the mid-1980’s, when there were only 23 in Parliament. In the last general election, in 2017, women won 211 seats, a record at the time.

This year’s increase comes at a time when many people feared that women were being driven away from politics in a climate of heightened divisions. Online threats and abuse have risen sharply, and were disproportionately directed at female candidates.

Ahead of the campaign, more than a dozen prominent female lawmakers said they would not be standing for re-election citing that abuse as a reason for stepping away from politics. Many female candidates described threats and insults as a grim new reality on the campaign trail, a change that cast a harsh light on British politics.

An analysis of Twitter during the campaign, conducted by PoliMonitor, showed that all candidates received about four times as much abuse as in the 2017 election. The hostility aimed at women, the study said, was often based specifically on their sex or appearance.

Reporting was contributed by Richard Pérez-Peña, Megan Specia, Benjamin Mueller, Ceylan Yeginsu, Stephen Castle and Alan Yuhas.

Let's block ads! (Why?)


https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiR2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMTkvMTIvMTMvd29ybGQvZXVyb3BlL3VrLWVsZWN0aW9uLWJyZXhpdC5odG1s0gFLaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnl0aW1lcy5jb20vMjAxOS8xMi8xMy93b3JsZC9ldXJvcGUvdWstZWxlY3Rpb24tYnJleGl0LmFtcC5odG1s?oc=5

2019-12-13 09:37:00Z
52780493131202

U.K. Election Updates: Victorious Johnson Vows to Finish Brexit - The New York Times

Image
Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

With all but one district declared on Friday morning, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives had won 364 seats — 47 more than they won in the last election, in 2017.

The victory is the party’s biggest since Margaret Thatcher captured a third term in 1987 — “literally before many of you were born,” Mr. Johnson told supporters Friday morning. It gives him a comfortable majority in the 650-seat House of Commons.

“We did it,” he said. “We smashed it, didn’t we?”

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party had to reach even farther back to find a more extreme result. It won 203 seats, down 59 from the previous vote, in its worst showing since 1935. It had not suffered a similar drubbing since 1983, when it took 209 seats.

The Scottish National Party captured 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats, a gain of 13. The Liberal Democrats, who were hoping to ride an anti-Brexit stance back to prominence, won just 11 seats, one fewer than in 2017.

The Conservatives collected 43.6 percent of the popular vote, to 32.3 percent for Labour. That 11.3 percentage point margin was also the largest for the Tories since 1987 — a dramatic shift from 2017, when Labour lost the popular vote by just 2.4 percent.

Speaking to his constituents in Uxbridge early Friday morning, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the election results appeared to have given his government “a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done.”

Later in the morning, he told supporters, “we put an end to all those miserable threats of a second referendum” that might have reversed the results of the 2016 vote on Brexit.

“We will get Brexit done on time on the 31st of January — no ifs, no buts, no maybes,” he added.

He also promised that his government would spend more at home after a decade of austerity under Conservative governments — in particular on Britain’s National Health Service, known commonly as the N.H.S., a cherished program whose conditions have deteriorated.

Mr. Johnson said that he would seek “to unite this country and to take it forward and to focus on the priorities of the British people, and above all on the N.H.S.”

As hospital beds have overflowed, waiting times have gone up and vacancies have gone unfilled, many Britons have grown fearful that the health service could be privatized or otherwise overhauled — for instance by a trade deal with the United States that could drive up drug prices. (President Trump, tweeting congratulations on Friday morning, said Britain could “strike a massive new Trade Deal” after Brexit.)

Mr. Johnson insisted he would protect the health service, echoing his campaign promises to hire 50,000 more nurses and 6,000 doctors.

He promised again to hire more police officers, whose ranks have also thinned, and vowed “colossal new investments in infrastructure and science.”

“Let’s spread opportunity to every corner of the U.K.”

Speaking in his constituency of Islington in London, the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said that he would step down before the next general election, but would stay at the party’s helm for now, as it reflects on how to move forward from its dismal showing.

Mr. Corbyn is already under intense pressure to resign. His has been accused of poor leadership and of failing to handle accusations of anti-Semitism in the party ranks.

“I will not lead the party in any future general election campaign,” he said. “I will discuss with our party to ensure there is a process now of reflection on this result and on the policies that the party will take going forward and I will lead the party during that period to ensure that discussion takes place and we move on into the future.”

It was not clear how long Mr. Corbyn meant to stay on as party leader. The next election could be as long as five years away.

Some members of the Labour Party were quick to criticize him on Thursday night.

“The Labour Party has huge, huge questions to answer,” Ruth Smeeth, a former lawmaker, told Sky News. She immediately laid blame on Mr. Corbyn.

“Jeremy Corbyn should announce that he’s resigning as the leader of the Labour Party from his count today,” she said. “He should have gone many, many, many months ago.”

The Scottish National Party’s success — it won 48 of the 59 seats that it contested — will intensify the debate over independence for Scotland, which voted against Brexit and has largely rejected Britain’s major parties.

In a 2014 referendum, 45 percent of the voters in Scotland backed independence, and as Brexit approaches, the Scottish National Party, which backs independence, has insisted on a second referendum.

Mr. Johnson has said a national government under him would not hold a Scottish independence vote, but the Scottish government has suggested that it might go ahead with one.

That raises the prospect the kind of disarray and animosity plaguing Spain, where the government of Catalonia held an independence referendum two years ago that the central government said was illegal.

“The people of Scotland will have made very clear that they didn’t want Boris Johnson as P.M., that they don’t want Brexit, and they want Scotland’s future to be in Scotland’s hands,” Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, told Sky News late Thursday night. “There is a mandate now to offer the people of Scotland a choice over their own future.”

Before 2015, the Scottish National Party had never won more than seven seats in Parliament. But under Ms. Sturgeon, it has now dominated the Scottish vote in three successive elections.

The Liberal Democrats, a centrist party that had campaigned to stop Brexit, lost ground and its leader, Jo Swinson, lost her seat in Dunbartonshire East, Scotland, to the Scottish National Party.

“Some will be celebrating the wave of nationalism that is sweeping on both sides of the border,” Ms. Swinson said. “These are very significant results for the future of our country.”

She did not immediately say whether she would resign as the party leader, but declared that the Liberal Democrats would still support “values that guide our liberal movement: openness, fairness, inclusivity.”

With the Conservatives becoming almost uniformly pro-Brexit, and Labour failing to take a clear position, the Liberal Democrats, unequivocally anti-Brexit, hoped to become the refuge for voters who wanted to remain in the European Union.

They won 11.5 percent of the popular vote, a sharp improvement on the 7.9 percent they collected in each of the last two elections. But it did not translate into victories; they won just 11 seats on Thursday, one less than in 2017.

The general election results met with disappointment and anger from unionists in Northern Ireland, who bitterly oppose Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan that would effectively put a trade border between them and the rest of Britain.

Unionists — the people, mostly Protestant, who want to remain part of the United Kingdom — view the deal as a betrayal, because it would put Northern Ireland in a separate customs system from the rest of the United Kingdom. They see that as a step toward unifying Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland.

“The poll clearly creates the expectation that Boris Johnson will try to force the Betrayal Act through Parliament,” said Jamie Bryson, a prominent unionist activist who is challenging the Brexit agreement in court. “An economic united Ireland will never be tolerated.”

After the 2017 election, when the Conservatives fell just short of winning a majority in Parliament, they reached an agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland that allowed the Tories to govern.

But the D.U.P. opposed Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal with Brussels because it could have resulted in Northern Ireland being treated differently from the rest of Britain. For them, Mr. Johnson’s deal is worse, making that difference a certainty.

Mr. Johnson’s big victory eliminates any leverage the D.U.P. had over the government, and the party fell from ten seats to eight.

Many Northern Ireland republicans — those people, mostly Catholic, who favor unification with Ireland — also oppose the deal.

Both republicans and unionists say it is incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement, the 1998 pact that ended three decades of violence between the two communities, and threatens to inflame sectarian tensions.

“If the political process has been exhausted then potentially, we could face some very dark days ahead,” Mr. Bryson said. “And that’s obviously something everyone wants to avoid.”

Britain will have a record number of female members of Parliament after Thursday’s vote, when women won at least 220 of the 650 seats, according to the Press Association.

At just over one-third of the House of Commons, women remain far short of parity with men, but they have made tremendous gains since the mid-1980’s, when there were only 23 in Parliament. In the last general election, in 2017, women won 211 seats, a record at the time.

This year’s increase comes at a time when many people feared that women were being driven away from politics in a climate of heightened divisions. Online threats and abuse have risen sharply, and were disproportionately directed at female candidates.

Ahead of the campaign, more than a dozen prominent female lawmakers said they would not be standing for re-election citing that abuse as a reason for stepping away from politics. Many female candidates described threats and insults as a grim new reality on the campaign trail, a change that cast a harsh light on British politics.

An analysis of Twitter during the campaign, conducted by PoliMonitor, showed that all candidates received about four times as much abuse as in the 2017 election. The hostility aimed at women, the study said, was often based specifically on their sex or appearance.

Reporting was contributed by Richard Pérez-Peña, Megan Specia, Benjamin Mueller, Ceylan Yeginsu, Stephen Castle and Alan Yuhas.

Let's block ads! (Why?)


https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiR2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMTkvMTIvMTMvd29ybGQvZXVyb3BlL3VrLWVsZWN0aW9uLWJyZXhpdC5odG1s0gFLaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnl0aW1lcy5jb20vMjAxOS8xMi8xMy93b3JsZC9ldXJvcGUvdWstZWxlY3Rpb24tYnJleGl0LmFtcC5odG1s?oc=5

2019-12-13 09:12:00Z
52780493131202

U.K. Election Updates: Victorious Johnson Vows to Finish Brexit - The New York Times

Image
Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

With all but one district declared on Friday morning, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives had won 364 seats — 47 more than they won in the last election, in 2017.

The victory is the party’s biggest since Margaret Thatcher captured a third term in 1987 — “literally before many of you were born,” Mr. Johnson told supporters Friday morning. It gives him a comfortable majority in the 650-seat House of Commons.

“We did it,” he said. “We smashed it, didn’t we?”

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party had to reach even farther back to find a more extreme result. It won 203 seats, down 59 from the previous vote, in its worst showing since 1935. It had not suffered a similar drubbing since 1983, when it took 209 seats.

The Scottish National Party captured 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats, a gain of 13. The Liberal Democrats, who were hoping to ride an anti-Brexit stance back to prominence, won just 11 seats, one less than in 2017.

The Conservatives collected 43.6 percent of the popular vote, to 32.3 percent for Labour. That 11.3 percentage point margin was also the largest for the Tories since 1987 — a dramatic shift from 2017, when Labour lost the popular vote by just 2.4 percent.

Speaking to his constituents in Uxbridge early Friday morning, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the election results appeared to have given his government “a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done.”

Later in the morning, he told supporters, “we put an end to all those miserable threats of a second referendum” that might have reversed the results of the 2016 vote on Brexit.

“We will get Brexit done on time on the 31st of January — no ifs, no buts, no maybes,” he added.

He also promised that his government would spend more at home after a decade of austerity under Conservative governments — in particular on Britain’s National Health Service, known commonly as the N.H.S., a cherished program whose conditions have deteriorated.

Mr. Johnson said that he would seek “to unite this country and to take it forward and to focus on the priorities of the British people, and above all on the N.H.S.”

As hospital beds have overflowed, waiting times have gone up and vacancies have gone unfilled, many Britons have grown fearful that the health service could be privatized or otherwise overhauled — for instance by a trade deal with the United States that could drive up drug prices. (President Trump, tweeting congratulations on Friday morning, said Britain could “strike a massive new Trade Deal” after Brexit.)

Mr. Johnson insisted he would protect the health service, echoing his campaign promises to hire 50,000 more nurses and 6,000 doctors.

He promised again to hire more police officers, whose ranks have also thinned, and vowed “colossal new investments in infrastructure and science.”

“Let’s spread opportunity to every corner of the U.K.”

Speaking in his constituency of Islington in London, the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said that he would step down before the next general election, but would stay at the party’s helm for now, as it reflects on how to move forward from its dismal showing.

Mr. Corbyn is already under intense pressure to resign. His has been accused of poor leadership and of failing to handle accusations of anti-Semitism in the party ranks.

“I will not lead the party in any future general election campaign,” he said. “I will discuss with our party to ensure there is a process now of reflection on this result and on the policies that the party will take going forward and I will lead the party during that period to ensure that discussion takes place and we move on into the future.”

It was not clear how long Mr. Corbyn meant to stay on as party leader. The next election could be as long as five years away.

Some members of the Labour Party were quick to criticize him on Thursday night.

“The Labour Party has huge, huge questions to answer,” Ruth Smeeth, a former lawmaker, told Sky News. She immediately laid blame on Mr. Corbyn.

“Jeremy Corbyn should announce that he’s resigning as the leader of the Labour Party from his count today,” she said. “He should have gone many, many, many months ago.”

The Scottish National Party’s success — it won 48 of the 59 seats that it contested — will intensify the debate over independence for Scotland, which voted against Brexit and has largely rejected Britain’s major parties.

In a 2014 referendum, 45 percent of the voters in Scotland backed independence, and as Brexit approaches, the Scottish National Party, which backs independence, has insisted on a second referendum.

Mr. Johnson has said a national government under him would not hold a Scottish independence vote, but the Scottish government has suggested that it might go ahead with one.

That raises the prospect the kind of disarray and animosity plaguing Spain, where the government of Catalonia held an independence referendum two years ago that the central government said was illegal.

“The people of Scotland will have made very clear that they didn’t want Boris Johnson as P.M., that they don’t want Brexit, and they want Scotland’s future to be in Scotland’s hands,” Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, told Sky News late Thursday night. “There is a mandate now to offer the people of Scotland a choice over their own future.”

Before 2015, the Scottish National Party had never won more than seven seats in Parliament. But under Ms. Sturgeon, it has now dominated the Scottish vote in three successive elections.

The Liberal Democrats, a centrist party that had campaigned to stop Brexit, lost ground and its leader, Jo Swinson, lost her seat in Dunbartonshire East, Scotland, to the Scottish National Party.

“Some will be celebrating the wave of nationalism that is sweeping on both sides of the border,” Ms. Swinson said. “These are very significant results for the future of our country.”

She did not immediately say whether she would resign as the party leader, but declared that the Liberal Democrats would still support “values that guide our liberal movement: openness, fairness, inclusivity.”

With the Conservatives becoming almost uniformly pro-Brexit, and Labour failing to take a clear position, the Liberal Democrats, unequivocally anti-Brexit, hoped to become the refuge for voters who wanted to remain in the European Union.

They won 11.5 percent of the popular vote, a sharp improvement on the 7.9 percent they collected in each of the last two elections. But it did not translate into victories; they won just 11 seats on Thursday, one less than in 2017.

The general election results met with bitter disappointment and anger from unionists in Northern Ireland, who bitterly oppose Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan that would effectively put a trade border between them and the rest of Britain.

Unionists — the people, mostly Protestant, who want to remain part of the United Kingdom — view the deal as a betrayal, because it would put Northern Ireland in a separate customs system from the rest of the United Kingdom. They see that as a step toward unifying Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland.

“The poll clearly creates the expectation that Boris Johnson will try to force the Betrayal Act through Parliament,” said Jamie Bryson, a prominent unionist activist who is challenging the Brexit agreement in court. “An economic united Ireland will never be tolerated.”

After the 2017 election, when the Conservatives fell just short of winning a majority in Parliament, they reached an agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland that allowed the Tories to govern.

But the D.U.P. opposed Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal with Brussels because it could have resulted in Northern Ireland being treated differently from the rest of Britain. For them, Mr. Johnson’s deal is worse, making that difference a certainty.

Mr. Johnson’s big victory eliminates any leverage the D.U.P. had over the government, and the party fell from ten seats to eight.

Many Northern Ireland republicans — those people, mostly Catholic, who favor unification with Ireland — also oppose the deal.

Both republicans and unionists say it is incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement, the 1998 pact that ended three decades of violence between the two communities, and threatens to inflame sectarian tensions.

“If the political process has been exhausted then potentially, we could face some very dark days ahead,” Mr. Bryson said. “And that’s obviously something everyone wants to avoid.”

Reporting was contributed by Richard Pérez-Peña, Benjamin Mueller, Ceylan Yeginsu, Stephen Castle and Alan Yuhas.

Let's block ads! (Why?)


https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiR2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMTkvMTIvMTMvd29ybGQvZXVyb3BlL3VrLWVsZWN0aW9uLWJyZXhpdC5odG1s0gFLaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnl0aW1lcy5jb20vMjAxOS8xMi8xMy93b3JsZC9ldXJvcGUvdWstZWxlY3Rpb24tYnJleGl0LmFtcC5odG1s?oc=5

2019-12-13 08:28:00Z
52780493131202

What the UK election result means for Brexit - CNBC

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks to supporters at the Copper Box Arena on December 11, 2019 in London, United Kingdom.

Leon Neal | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson has secured a five-year term as prime minister with a comfortable parliamentary majority, paving the way for Britain to leave the European Union by the end of next month.

The result, which proved even more decisive than pollsters had forecast, follows a bitterly-fought and divisive election campaign.

It is expected the newly-elected prime minister will return to Downing Street with an outright majority of 78 seats, according to an updated version of the exit poll.

In the early hours of Friday morning, the Conservatives had returned enough Members of Parliament (MPs) to ensure an overall majority in the House of Commons. That's because the center-right party has surpassed the 326-seat threshold required, with two constituencies still to declare.

Johnson's victory bookends more than three-and-half years of political wrangling after a small but clear majority of the British electorate voted to leave the EU.

At around 8:20 a.m. London time, sterling traded at $1.3403, up almost 2%.

How does Johnson plan to 'get Brexit done'?

The former London mayor repeatedly encouraged voters to re-elect the Conservatives in order to "get Brexit done," promising that only his party would be able to deliver his so-called "oven ready" divorce deal to take the country out of the bloc by Jan. 31.

Unlike his predecessor Theresa May in June 2017, Johnson now has a strong mandate to try to put an end to the U.K.'s long-running constitutional crisis.

Speaking shortly after winning his seat of Uxbridge in west London in the early hours of Friday morning, Johnson described the national poll as "historic."

It "gives us now, in this new government, the chance to respect the democratic will of the British people, to change this country for the better and to unleash the potential of the entire people of this country," Johnson said.

Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn had promised that, if elected, his left-leaning Labour party would hold another EU referendum within six months. This vote would have offered Britain the choice between a "credible" renegotiated leave deal — including a customs union and close single market relationship with the EU — or the option to remain.

However, Labour ultimately failed to return enough MPs to the House of Commons to prevent another Conservative-led government.

The Houses of Parliament on October 23, 2019 in London, England.

Peter Summers | Getty Images News | Getty Images

"Boris Johnson is set for a huge majority in the general election, which will give him a free hand to pursue the long-term trade deal with the EU he wishes," Mujtaba Rahman, managing director of Europe at Eurasia Group, said in a research note shortly after the exit poll was published Thursday evening.

"It means the U.K. will leave the EU on 31 January. Crucially, Johnson will not be beholden to the 20 hardline Brexiteers in the European Research Group, who would have enjoyed much more influence if had won only a small majority. "

"Johnson will have to decide whether to remain closely aligned with the EU, or diverge sharply," Rahman said.

Reduced hard Brexit risk

As the dust settles on Britain's third general election in less than five years, many market participants will seek clarity from the government on what happens immediately after Jan. 31.

The world's fifth-largest economy will maintain relations with the EU until at least the end of 2020 as it negotiates trade and other ties to the bloc.

"An orderly Brexit from the EU on 31 January 2020 will reduce the Brexit uncertainty somewhat," Kallum Pickering, senior economist at Berenberg, said in a research note published Thursday.

"Of course, the U.K. could still have a hard exit from the single market and customs union at the end of 2020 if the U.K. and the EU do not manage to strike a free-trade agreement in time for the end of the transitional period."

"But even in this respect, the apparent election result mitigates the risk: If the exit poll is right and Johnson is set for a big majority, the hardline eurosceptic wing of the Conservative will matter less than before. This would make it easier for Johnson to go for a longer transitional period if needed," Pickering said.

'Wishful thinking'

Johnson has consistently said he will be able to secure a trade deal with the EU by the end of 2020 or leave without one if he doesn't.

To be sure, a so-called "no-deal" Brexit is seen by many inside and outside of Parliament as a "cliff-edge" scenario to be avoided at all costs.

Johnson's "oven ready" deal states that if Britain wants to extend the transition period beyond the end of next year, his government must give notice to Brussels by the end of June.

European Union (EU) flags fly from flag poles outside the Berlaymont building.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

It means that despite the party's campaign slogan to "get Brexit done," political debate about the terms of Britain's departure from the EU is likely to reach fever pitch once again over the coming months.

"It took Canada seven years to finalize a trade deal with the EU, so this looks like wishful thinking. Any delays could hit the value of the pound," Hamish Muress, senior currency strategist at OFX, said in a research note ahead of the vote.

Let's block ads! (Why?)


https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiaGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmNuYmMuY29tLzIwMTkvMTIvMTMvYnJleGl0LXdoYXQtZG9lcy10aGUtdWstZWxlY3Rpb24tcmVzdWx0LW1lYW4tZm9yLWJyaXRhaW4tYW5kLXRoZS1ldS5odG1s0gFsaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuY25iYy5jb20vYW1wLzIwMTkvMTIvMTMvYnJleGl0LXdoYXQtZG9lcy10aGUtdWstZWxlY3Rpb24tcmVzdWx0LW1lYW4tZm9yLWJyaXRhaW4tYW5kLXRoZS1ldS5odG1s?oc=5

2019-12-13 06:01:00Z
CAIiEFwgD0SdaR05nMZdyJrJvV4qGQgEKhAIACoHCAow2Nb3CjDivdcCMP3ungY

U.K. Election Updates: Victorious Johnson Vows to Finish Brexit - The New York Times

Image
Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

With all but handful of districts declared on Friday morning, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives had won 359 seats and the BBC projected they would end up with 363 — 46 more than they won in the last election, in 2017.

The victory is the party’s biggest since Margaret Thatcher captured a third term in 1987 — “literally before many of you were born,” Mr. Johnson told supporters Friday morning. It gives him a comfortable majority in the 650-seat House of Commons.

“We did it,” he said. “We smashed it, didn’t we?”

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party had to reach even farther back to find a more extreme result. It won 203 seats, down 59 from the previous vote, in its worst showing since 1935. It had not suffered a similar drubbing since 1983, when it took 209 seats.

The Scottish National Party captured 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats, a gain of 13. The Liberal Democrats, who were hoping to ride an anti-Brexit stance back to prominence, won just 11 seats, one less than in 2017.

The Conservatives collected 43.6 percent of the popular vote, to 32.3 percent for Labour. That 11.3 percentage point margin was also the largest for the Tories since 1987 — a dramatic shift from 2017, when Labour lost the popular vote by just 2.4 percent.

Speaking to his constituents in Uxbridge early Friday morning, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the election results appeared to have given his government “a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done.”

Later in the morning, he told supporters, “we put an end to all those miserable threats of a second referendum” that might have reversed the results of the 2016 vote on Brexit.

“We will get Brexit done on time on the 31st of January — no ifs, no buts, no maybes,” he added.

He also promised that his government would spend more at home after a decade of austerity under Conservative governments — in particular on Britain’s National Health Service, known commonly as the N.H.S., a cherished program whose conditions have deteriorated.

Mr. Johnson said that he would seek “to unite this country and to take it forward and to focus on the priorities of the British people, and above all on the N.H.S.”

As hospital beds have overflowed, waiting times have gone up and vacancies have gone unfilled, many Britons have grown fearful that the health service could be privatized or otherwise overhauled — for instance by a trade deal with the United States that could drive up drug prices. (President Trump, tweeting congratulations on Friday morning, said Britain could “strike a massive new Trade Deal” after Brexit.)

Mr. Johnson insisted he would protect the health service, echoing his campaign promises to hire 50,000 more nurses and 6,000 doctors.

He promised again to hire more police officers, whose ranks have also thinned, and vowed “colossal new investments in infrastructure and science.”

“Let’s spread opportunity to every corner of the U.K.”

Speaking in his constituency of Islington in London, the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said that he would step down before the next general election, but would stay at the party’s helm for now, as it reflects on how to move forward from its dismal showing.

Mr. Corbyn is already under intense pressure to resign. His has been accused of poor leadership and of failing to handle accusations of anti-Semitism in the party ranks.

“I will not lead the party in any future general election campaign,” he said. “I will discuss with our party to ensure there is a process now of reflection on this result and on the policies that the party will take going forward and I will lead the party during that period to ensure that discussion takes place and we move on into the future.”

It was not clear how long Mr. Corbyn meant to stay on as party leader. The next election could be as long as five years away.

Some members of the Labour Party were quick to criticize him on Thursday night.

“The Labour Party has huge, huge questions to answer,” Ruth Smeeth, a former lawmaker, told Sky News. She immediately laid blame on Mr. Corbyn.

“Jeremy Corbyn should announce that he’s resigning as the leader of the Labour Party from his count today,” she said. “He should have gone many, many, many months ago.”

The Scottish National Party’s success — it won 48 of the 59 seats that it contested — will intensify the debate over independence for Scotland, which voted against Brexit and has largely rejected Britain’s major parties.

In a 2014 referendum, 45 percent of the voters in Scotland backed independence, and as Brexit approaches, the Scottish National Party, which backs independence, has insisted on a second referendum.

Mr. Johnson has said a national government under him would not hold a Scottish independence vote, but the Scottish government has suggested that it might go ahead with one.

That raises the prospect the kind of disarray and animosity plaguing Spain, where the government of Catalonia held an independence referendum two years ago that the central government said was illegal.

“The people of Scotland will have made very clear that they didn’t want Boris Johnson as P.M., that they don’t want Brexit, and they want Scotland’s future to be in Scotland’s hands,” Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, told Sky News late Thursday night. “There is a mandate now to offer the people of Scotland a choice over their own future.”

Before 2015, the Scottish National Party had never won more than seven seats in Parliament. But under Ms. Sturgeon, it has now dominated the Scottish vote in three successive elections.

The Liberal Democrats, a centrist party that had campaigned to stop Brexit, lost ground and its leader, Jo Swinson, lost her seat in Dunbartonshire East, Scotland, to the Scottish National Party.

“Some will be celebrating the wave of nationalism that is sweeping on both sides of the border,” Ms. Swinson said. “These are very significant results for the future of our country.”

She did not immediately say whether she would resign as the party leader, but declared that the Liberal Democrats would still support “values that guide our liberal movement: openness, fairness, inclusivity.”

With the Conservatives becoming almost uniformly pro-Brexit, and Labour failing to take a clear position, the Liberal Democrats, unequivocally anti-Brexit, hoped to become the refuge for voters who wanted to remain in the European Union.

They won 11.5 percent of the popular vote, a sharp improvement on the 7.9 percent they collected in each of the last two elections. But it did not translate into victories; they won just 11 seats on Thursday, one less than in 2017.

Reporting was contributed by Richard Pérez-Peña, Benjamin Mueller, Ceylan Yeginsu, Stephen Castle and Alan Yuhas.

Let's block ads! (Why?)


https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiR2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMTkvMTIvMTMvd29ybGQvZXVyb3BlL3VrLWVsZWN0aW9uLWJyZXhpdC5odG1s0gFLaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnl0aW1lcy5jb20vMjAxOS8xMi8xMy93b3JsZC9ldXJvcGUvdWstZWxlY3Rpb24tYnJleGl0LmFtcC5odG1s?oc=5

2019-12-13 08:15:00Z
52780493131202

Kamis, 12 Desember 2019

UK election: Jeremy Corbyn could become nation's first socialist leader in 40 years - Fox News

As Brits prepare to head to the polls on Thursday to vote in the country’s general election, the chance that far-left Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn becomes Britain’s next prime minister remains very real — a prospect that has even raised red flags from members of his own party.

Some polls show Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party ahead by double digits, and on track for as much as a 30-seat majority in the House of Commons, depending on the poll. But surveys going into the country's polling blackout have also suggested a significant tightening and polls in recent elections in the U.K. have frequently misjudged the eventual result. Tories are reminded of how then-Prime Minister Theresa May was predicted to win an overwhelming majority in 2017, only to end up struggling to hold onto power in a hung parliament.

BORIS JOHNSON SMASHES THROUGH 'GRIDLOCK' WALL IN PUSH 'TO GET BREXIT DONE'

Additionally, with Britain’s parliamentary system, even if the Tories were the biggest party overall, if they fail to win a majority it could open the door for Corbyn to form a coalition government of his own with other left-wing parties such as the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats.

The possibility of a Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn, who is perhaps even to the left of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is something that is sending pre-election jitters throughout many in Britain, where voters have for decades avoided electing a radical prime minister. He would be the first far-left British prime minister since the days of Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in the 1970s — Callaghan was eventually ousted by Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

Corbyn has spent decades on the fringe left-wing on the party. He has been an advocate for nuclear disarmament and has fiercely opposed privatization of industries, while calling for higher taxes on the rich. Since his surprise win of the Labour Party leadership in 2015, surged by young left-wing activists, he has rejected many of the “New Labour” reforms instituted by former Prime Minister Tony Blair that saw the party dominate U.K. politics for more than a decade after 1997 by moving to the center.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn gestures, at a rally in Stainton Village, on the last day of General Election campaigning, in Middlesbrough, England, Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2019. (Owen Humphreys/PA via AP)

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn gestures, at a rally in Stainton Village, on the last day of General Election campaigning, in Middlesbrough, England, Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2019. (Owen Humphreys/PA via AP)

In addition to a left-wing agenda on issues such as health care, taxes and foreign policy, his more sympathetic stances toward violent terrorist groups is especially noteworthy. Most recently, he questioned the U.S. decision to kill ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and in a 2014 interview with Russian television, Corbyn blamed strife in Iraq on “Western meddling” and drew a comparison between U.S. troops to ISIS.

“Yes, [ISIS troops] are brutal, yes some of what they have done is quite appalling; likewise, what Americans did in Fallujah and other places is appalling,” he said.

He has in the past describes members of Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” when he invited them to the House of Commons in the 1980s.  The Telegraph reported in 2017 that Britain’s MI5 opened a file on Corbyn over his links to the IRA in the '80s and '90s, amid fears he was a threat to national security and suspicions as he attended events to honor dead terrorists.

The Daily Telegraph reported this week that victims of terror attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) have written to Corbyn demanding a meeting over his ties to the group. The outlet reports that Corbyn invited two convicted IRA members after it bombed the Tory party conference in Brighton in 1984, and was arrested in 1986 for a protest in which he showed “solidarity” with accused IRA terrorists.

He was also attacked for partaking in the 2014 laying of a wreath near the graves of terrorists who killed 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics. He later said he was present, but not involved at the wreath-laying ceremony.

While, as expected, Corbyn’s political opponents have repeatedly sounded the alarm about a Corbyn government — that criticism has also come from members of his own party. A number have quit the party over Corbyn’s failure to deal with alleged anti-Semitism from members and supporters. Corbyn has condemned anti-Semitism and apologized for instances of it in the party.

“Obviously I’m very sorry for everything that’s happened but I want to make this clear: I am dealing with it. I have dealt with it,” Corbyn said this month.

But Labour was hit this week when the political blog Guido Fawkes published audio of Shadow Health Minister and Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth telling a friend Corbyn would not be prime minister — and that if he did, the “machine” would safeguard the nation’s security.

“I don’t know, on the security stuff; I worked in No.10, I think the machine will pretty quickly move to safeguard security (I mean the civil service machine). But it’s not going to happen. I can’t see it happening,” he said, according to the recording.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

But he also urged the person he was speaking to not to worry about a potential Corbyn win on Thursday, arguing that Labour's muddled stance on top issues like Brexit, is leading to a likely Labour drubbing.

“I’ve been going round these national places, it’s dire for Labour… it’s dire… it’s awful for them, and it’s the combination of Corbyn and Brexit….outside of the city seats… it’s abysmal out there… they can’t stand Corbyn and they think Labour’s blocked Brexit,” he said.

Ashworth later walked back the remarks, saying they were just “banter” with someone he thought was a friend.

Let's block ads! (Why?)


https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiUGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmZveG5ld3MuY29tL3BvbGl0aWNzL2plcmVteS1jb3JieW4tc29jaWFsaXN0LXByaW1lLW1pbmlzdGVyLTQwLXllYXJz0gFUaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZm94bmV3cy5jb20vcG9saXRpY3MvamVyZW15LWNvcmJ5bi1zb2NpYWxpc3QtcHJpbWUtbWluaXN0ZXItNDAteWVhcnMuYW1w?oc=5

2019-12-12 12:43:23Z
52780464144156

Live Updates: U.K. Votes in General Election - The New York Times

Image
Credit...Lisi Niesner/Reuters

Britain’s voters head to the polls in their local areas on Thursday to cast ballots for members of Parliament in the second general election to be held since the country voted to leave the European Union.

And while Brexit has dominated the agenda — with the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Boris Johnson putting the issue at the center of its campaign, vowing to “get Brexit done” — other key issues may determine the outcome. The opposition Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, has put health care at the center of its pitch, framing itself as the defender of Britain’s revered National Health Service.

Several smaller parties — including the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Brexit Party, and pro-independence parties in Scotland and Wales — are also running and could play a decisive role.

Voters will be choosing who will represent their local district, or constituency, in Parliament: 650 lawmakers in total will be chosen as members of the House of Commons, which decides the country’s laws and policies. Polls are open from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m., and the results of exit polls will begin to emerge almost immediately after the end of the vote, with the official results coming in overnight.

Once polls are open on Election Day, the British broadcasters that were reporting feverishly in the lead-up to the vote will suddenly have a noticeable lack of coverage.

It’s illegal for anyone in Britain to publish information on how people say they have voted — exit polling, or forecasts based on it — until after polls close at 10 p.m. local time.

The rules for broadcasters go further, however. A code of conduct laid out by Britain’s communications regulator, Ofcom, specifies that all discussion and analysis of election issues on television and radio must cease once polls open, that no opinion polls can be published and that no coverage of opinion polls is allowed while people are voting.

“When people are going to the polls on Election Day, it’s important that everyone can vote on the same information,” the regulator explained.

The Guardian has an item on its live briefing urging readers to comment, but to avoid saying how they voted.

“Please keep posting your comments below, but don’t say how you voted,” the note reads. “The Representation of the People Act outlaws the reporting of how people voted.”

Broadcasters’ websites generally follow suit. “There will be no coverage of any issues directly pertinent to the election campaigns on any BBC outlet,” according to the public broadcaster’s internal election guidelines.

But the broadcaster found itself in hot water almost immediately when Laura Kuenssberg, a political editor, offered a short assessment of the postal vote on Wednesday night. The BBC denied that her comment broke any laws.

While broadcasters must keep quiet on substantive issues while polls are open, when they close it’s another story. The BBC pioneered televised election night coverage in 1950, when the main concern was whether keeping the transmitter going throughout the night might make it explode.

Now, rolling coverage is standard and the offerings from British broadcasters are a far cry from the radio reports in the first half of the 20th century, when “listeners simply tuned in to the radio to hear the election results read by an announcer.”

The BBC will, as always, be there to broadcast and analyze the results as they are announced. But it faces stiff competition for eyeballs from other broadcasters.

John Bercow, the former speaker of the House of Commons who burnished his reputation during endless Brexit debates, will be taking his shouts for “Order!” to Sky News for election night.

“John will bring his own authority, and no little wit to a night of high drama,” said John Ryley, the head of Sky News. The broadcaster will also try to entice younger views by partnering with BuzzFeed and streaming on platforms like Twitch and YouTube.

Channel 4 has brought on board political heavyweights like Amber Rudd, the former home secretary, and Tom Watson, the former deputy Labour leader, as well as comedians like Katherine Ryan. They will also be joined by Rylan Clark-Neal, a former contestant on the talent show “The X Factor” and on the British “Celebrity Big Brother” who will be talking through results with the studio audience. On his role, Mr. Clark-Neal said, “Who would have thought that as an ‘X-Factor’ reject I would be hosting election night?”

#Dogsatpollingstations has become something of an Election Day tradition in Britain, with voters sharing photographs of their pups outside their local polling stations. And with three general elections and the Brexit referendum held since 2015, people have had plenty of chances to participate.

Several high-profile voters got in on the action on Thursday, with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, accompanied by his dog, Luna, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson arriving with his dog, Dilyn.

In much of Britain, the dogs and their owners had to brave a cold, wet morning at the polls, but few seemed to mind.

Mark Landler, Stephen Castle, Amie Tsang, Megan Specia, Adam Satariano, Benjamin Mueller and Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.

Let's block ads! (Why?)


https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiSGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMTkvMTIvMTIvd29ybGQvZXVyb3BlL3VrLWVsZWN0aW9ucy1icmV4aXQuaHRtbNIBTGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMTkvMTIvMTIvd29ybGQvZXVyb3BlL3VrLWVsZWN0aW9ucy1icmV4aXQuYW1wLmh0bWw?oc=5

2019-12-12 11:34:00Z
52780464144156