The populists march on

The larger question for observers of politics worldwide is where British result fits into the broader narrative about the upsurge in populism and right-wing nationalism

The wholesale defeat of the Labour Party in Britain’s general elections is unprecedented in scale. The party has won the fewest seats of any election since the 1930s — during a period when, in fact, the party itself had split into two. Worse, it has lost seats to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives even in areas which have been Labour strongholds for decades, and where the cultural resistance to voting Tory seemed, in the past, insurmountable. Appropriately, among the seats lost to the Conservatives in the formerly industral north of England is Sedgefield — which was, for his entire career,