‘One election victory does not mean that work is now finished for the Democrats; for us in the Labour party, it is only just beginning,’ Keir Starmer wrote today in the Guardian. Amongst his comrades on the centre-left, he seems almost alone in understanding this point.
Biden’s victory was greeted by the British centre-left on social media as the definitive end of an era. Brexit is ‘over’ somehow, or at least, no-deal Brexit has become impossible. The Tories are now supposedly on the brink of being pushed from office by a moderate centre-left wave. Except of course, Starmer is correct – and Labour is in real danger of learning the wrong lessons from this US election, as their American cousins in the Democratic party already seem to have done.
In the face of an unprecedented public health crisis that his administration was deemed by many to have handled badly and the resulting, hideous economic fallout – and having run a terrible campaign on top of all that – Trump still managed to get 70 million votes.
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