NY Times finds out why Britain’s Conservative Party suffered a major loss: too radical

Britain’s Conservative Party suffered a massive defeat this summer after Labour’s Keir Starmer took over as prime minister in July. New York Times The Sunday Magazine of August 29 celebrated with a 4,000-word story by Mark Landler, “The Conservative Crack-Up.” The equally blunt online headline: “How the Tories Lost Britain.”

A gleeful, vengeful tone permeated the piece, reflecting Landler’s five years of hostile reporting on Britain’s Conservative Party when he was the paper’s London bureau chief. During that time, he had almost nothing positive to say about a party that had somehow managed to stay in power for 14 years.

He opened with an interview with Conservative politician Liz Truss, who had a “disastrous 49-day stint as prime minister”, in which Truss criticised mass migration and the aggressive push for transgender rights for the state of the country that day.

Landler did not appreciate her criticism of the left:

Never mind that Truss was ultimately undone by her own policies: an ill-conceived attempt at Ronald Reagan-style tax cuts that spooked financial markets, sent the pound into a tailspin and prompted warnings about financial instability from the International Monetary Fund, normally issued to rogue regimes in Latin America.

After references to “Tory filth” And “the self-sabotaging referendum on Brexit,” Landler again blamed Brexit for “pulling (Conservative) leaders to the right and forcing successive governments into increasingly extreme policies.”

That lingering disappointment acted as an accelerator for the anti-immigrant riots that rocked Britain for days this summer. Four weeks after voters ousted the government, gangs of far-right thugs stormed mosques and set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers.The incident was sparked by a brutal knife attack at a dance studio by a 17-year-old Welsh man, whose parents emigrated from Rwanda. He was accused of murdering three children and injuring 10 others.

A search on nytimes.com yields no Times writer once used the expression “far left scoundrels”. In contrast, “far right scoundrels” appeared 6 times. It is a biased newspaper.

Landler really hurt conservative sensibilities when he compared the party to Trumpism.

In their embrace of radicalism, Conservatives bear a striking resemblance to their American cousins ​​in the Republican Party. Both have ridden the whirlwind of populismBoth have thrown overboard decades of orthodoxy on core economic and social issues….

Landler quoted author Samuel Earle on “The strange dissonance between the Conservative Party’s ability to win elections and its destructive record in government is one of the defining enigmas of British politics.” The reporter failed to mention that Earle wrote something called “Tory Nation — The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party.” But surely he’s an objective source on the “Tory” party (aka the Conservative Party), right?

Never has that conundrum been more puzzling than in the eight years since the Brexit referendum. The party has had no fewer than five prime ministers, a spectacle of corruption, arrogance, folly and mismanagement.

One particularly painful sentence was mentioned “The media ecosystem that surrounds and supports the Conservatives – from The Daily Telegraph and other pro-Tory newspapers to the vociferous right-wing TV news channel GB News – continues to reinforce the message that the party’s problem is that it is not right-wing enough.”

As if the left-wing (and tax-funded) BBC, the left-wing Guardianand of course the New York Times did not help defeat the Tories.

Landler and his British team, including reporters Benjamin Mueller and Stephen Castle, have traditionally been particularly feverish in their attacks on Brexit and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who made “get Brexit done” a rallying cry. The newspaper blamed the Brexit push, among other things, on shorter lifespan; racist and Islamophobic attackseven “Talibanization.” NewsBusters reported on the Times’ long failure to tackle Brexit and Johnson after his lopsided re-election in 2019: “New York Times’ three-year smear campaign against Boris and Brexit backfired on election day.”