The World’s oldest democracy is going to elections (coincidentally, on the independence day of the world’s most prominent democracy): The 68 million citizens in the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will elect a new Parliament for the British Isles, forming a government under the authority of King Charles III, the island’s symbolic monarch and the Empire on which ‘the sun never sets’ – a model of constitutional monarchy.
In contrast to the strong trend in the Western world, which is experiencing a tendency toward the right, it seems that Britain is actually going to turn left – when after 14 years of rule, the Conservative Party is expected to lose power. The Conservatives, led by Rishi Sonak, currently hold an absolute majority of the seats in Parliament (about 650) – but according to polls, it seems quite certain that the rival Labour Party will win an absolute majority by itself. The Conservative Party will also be affected by the influx of many votes into the new Reform Party (where a split is a serious danger with the British electoral system), so the Conservative Party, the oldest party in the world, may absorb the biggest defeat in its history and almost be erased from the political map. The circumstances are numerous, but in short, we can point to the decline in the standard of living that occurred under the leadership of conservatives, the Brexit vote that failed, the character of Boris Johnson, the short term of Liz Truss, the handling of the coronavirus, and more.
The Labour Party is currently led by Kir Strammer, a gray lawyer. If in the previous election, which took place 5 years ago, Israelis (and Jews in general) hoped for the Labour’s defeat due to its former leader Jeremy Corbyn’s bias toward anti-Semitic regions, in the period since the Left Party has been carrying out a significant “stables-cleaning” and filtering out many anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic elements – when Strummer himself is married to Victoria, a Jewish woman with a family in Israel. Strummer expressed his commitment to Britain’s friendship with Israel, and is unlikely to significantly change the UK’s policy regarding Israel and the war.