[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]

See, also, by Steve Sailer: Tories Smash Labour In Blue Collar By-election

I haven’t lived in England for thirty years now, and have been a U.S. citizen for nearly twenty, so I don’t have much interest in politics over there. I do browse some posts by British commentators, though, as part of my morning trawl through the internet looking for items of interest, and now and then something catches my eye—something I think is pertinent to our own politics here in the U.S.A.

This one didn’t just catch my eye; it had me jumping to my feet, fist-pumping to a degree that endangered the ceiling light, and emitting Rebel Yells.

The writer was James Delingpole. I thought I remembered that name as belonging to the ballet critic at the London Spectator circa 1980. Looking James Delingpole up, though, I see he was born in 1965, so that seems improbable. He’s married with three children, too, so … ballet critic? Eh, whatever, probably a false memory.

Mr. Delingpole certainly got my attention with Delingpole: Why I’m Not Voting Conservative on Thursday—Or, Indeed, Ever Again…, Breitbart, May 5 2021.

You need just a little background here.

Britain has two big political parties: the Conservative Party, a.k.a. the Tories, and the Labour Party. The Tories currently control Parliament under Party Leader and Prime Minister Boris Johnson. There are also some minor parties represented in Parliament, the most troublesome one currently being the Scottish Nationalists.

The Conservative Party naturally advertises itself as the more conservative of the two big parties, standing against radical change. The Labour Party was historically the party of, duh, Labour: of horny-handed sons of toil—coal miners, steel workers, ship-builders, and working-class folk in general. A lot of big names in the old Labour Party—for example Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary in the post-WW2 Labour government—came up through the ranks of the union movement.

Like our own Democratic Party, though, Britain’s Labour Party has in recent decades been taken over by gentry liberals. To the degree that unions still play a role, they are the fake “unions” of the public sector, lobbying not for a bigger share of the profits of capitalism, but for a bigger share of the public fisc.

A typical Labour member of parliament seventy years ago had started his working life as a coal miner; the typical one today drew his first paycheck as a lecturer in sociology at some minor college.

Well, Thursday this week there were elections over there. These mostly weren’t parliamentary elections. There was a national general election two years ago, and the next one isn’t due for another three years. Thursday’s elections were for regional and municipal positions—mayors, town councillors and such. You could think of it very approximately as like our mid-terms, although more heated than usual because last year’s elections were postponed on account of covid.

There was one parliamentary seat up for grabs Thursday: Hartlepool, a grimy seaport in the far northeast of England. (It’s fictional hometown of one of Britain’s most famous cartoon characters, the flat-capped, working-class loafer Andy Capp).

Who is Andy Capp voting for in today’s Hartlepool by-election? pic.twitter.com/O4iRyizfOP

— Patrick Sean