"Believes He Has Been Vindicated When the Record Shows He Has Been Humiliated"

"After Labour's historic defeat in last December's general election, he now claims the moral victory. The coronavirus outbreak and the British government’s response to it—which has included wage guarantees for furloughed workers and quasi-renationalization of the railways—has vindicated his brand of far-left politics, he told the BBC. 'I didn't think that it would take only three months for me to be proved absolutely right,' he said with his usual modesty and grace. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party holds a 26-point lead in public polling."

Liam Hoare at Slate marks the end of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader.

And Owen Jones in The Guardian welcomes the new leader, Keir Starmer.

"Was Brexit Inevitable?"

"A misguided narrative is taking hold about Brexit, both here and abroad. According to this argument, David Cameron called the 2016 referendum on whether Britain should remain a member of the European Union solely for party-management purposes. When he did, he unleashed a wave of atavistic xenophobia whipped up by the tabloid media, and uneducated, working-class Britons were consequently fooled by lies and false promises.
"If only politicians hadn't picked the scab, the country could have ticked along quite happily, so the conceit goes."

Henry Newman at The Atlantic writes that the above "interpretation might provide comfort to some, but it's fundamentally specious."

"The Rift Between EU Remainers and Leavers in the Referendum Vote of 2016 Has Stuck"

"Yet this compromise will amount to little as long as the underlying divisions separating Britain's two tribes persist.
"That will happen unless the government responds to the real grievance of Leavers: that the prevailing free market model no longer works for them. It is no accident that Britain as well as the United States has experienced a fierce populist revolt. Both countries have been cheerleaders for economic liberalization since the 1980s under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher."

Paul Wallace at Reuters argues that "[t]he paradox of Brexit is that the best way to mend the rift it exposed is by staying in the EU."

"In a Lot of These Places, in Terms of Basic Security and a Collective Belief in the Future, Life Was Probably Better 40 or 50 Years Ago"

"In Britain and elsewhere, the liberal left has still not found the language to speak to that sense of loss. Even now, a lot of the people who feel it see Brexit as the better of two options: the continuation of the way things were before, or a chance to at least upturn the tables, bring decision-making much closer to home and somehow start again. This is not to dispute that Brexit is a bad idea, or that the people who have taken charge of the process are inept beyond words. But if you reduce the reasons why so many people voted for it to mass prejudice and stupidity, you are guilty of the same transgression the liberal misanthropes wail about: the denial of fact."

John Harris at The Guardian warns against dismissing Brexit and Trump voters.

"This Is Not a System That Is Intrinsically Broken, Just One That's Underfunded"

"What's maybe the most staggering fact is that the US government spends more money on healthcare than the UK government does, despite the latter managing to offer a comprehensive, single-payer health system for the price. The total is $4,860 per person–that's more than the UK's total health budget, and $1,500 a head more than the UK government spends.
"The reason US healthcare costs so much is its immense complexity: hospitals charge insurers as much as they can, doctors are used to prescribing expensive tests and drugs, and the whole system is so complicated that huge swathes of funding go on administrating the whole mess."

James Ball at The Guardian explains Britain's National Health Service for American readers.

"It's About the Value Divides in British Society and to Some Extent in All Rich Democracies"

"There is a group I call the 'Anywheres' who are about 25 percent of the society. They tend to be highly educated and mobile, and the combination of the two is especially important here in Britain because we have an overwhelmingly residential university system.  We also have a very very dominant capitol city that sucks in so much of the professional class. Anywhere people tend to value the kinds of things that you'd expect from people who live those kind of lives. They value openness and autonomy and fluidity. They generally find social change easy to handle, and they have weak attachments to place and to group.
"On the other side of the ledger you have a much larger group, less politically influential, but much larger, about 50 percent of the people, who I call 'Somewheres.'  They tend to be much less well educated and to be much rooted and attached to places and to value familiarity and security and the things you would expect to flow form those kind of lifestyles. Anywheres can find social change easy and have weak group attachments whereas Somewheres find social change more difficult and tend to have much stronger group attachments, whether to nation or city or place."

John Judis at Talking Points Memo interviews David Goodhart, author of The Road to Somewhere.

Trump May

David Frum at The Atlantic reacts to former FBI chief James Comey's testimony against Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May's snap election.

Steven W. Thrasher and Owen Jones at The Guardian react to the British election (as does John B. Judis at The New Republic). And Joseph Stiglitz blames austerity for Britain's problems.

"The Distant People Who Rule Them Simply Do Not Give a Damn"

"That Brexit will do little to restrain those winners, and will instead injure the people of Barnsley, Grimsby and Sheffield, is almost certainly true. That it will result in yet another triumph of the hated Tories seems highly likely. That it will conclude in outright disaster like the miners’ strike of 30 years ago is also very possible.
"But it is not hard to understand. Just as in America, a certain chunk of the British ruling clique now traces its legitimacy to its globalist enlightenment and an intimate familiarity with the thinking of the new-economy god. They meet every year at Davos; they conjecture about the nature of creativity and how innovation will save the world; and in happier times they swooned for the idea that Britain's great national virtue was its coolness. And it is bullshit, all of it."

In The Guardian, Thomas Frank "visited the industrial heartlands of northern England" in the run-up to Britain's parliamentary election.

"Election May Prove to Be a Self-Inflicted Blow, and Perhaps a Fatal One, for Prime Minister Theresa May"

"She called for the election in April, hoping to consolidate her power, increase the Conservative majority, and exploit the perceived weakness of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The Tories' 17-point polling lead in April suggested they would widen their 12-seat majority in Parliament by as many as 70 seats. May could be excused for not fearing Corbyn, since his loudest critics have been the Blairites in his own party and the center-left press.

"But the last six weeks have been cruel to May and the Tories. The Labour Party's manifesto was received warmly, and the sense that Corbyn was an aloof and eccentric relic of the stagnant 1970s gave way to the notion that the actual Corbyn was the only politician poised to reverse the austerity regime in place since 2010 and restore and reinforce what was best about the British welfare state."

At New York, Christian Lorentzen asks, "Is Jeremy Corbyn Actually Going to Win This Thing?"

"Her Majesty the Queen Has Asked Me to Form a New Government, and I Accepted"

"As we leave the European Union, we will forge a bold, new positive role for ourselves in the world. And we will make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us."

The Washington Post offers a transcript of Theresa May's first speech as Britain's prime minister.