British pollsters, unlike their counterparts in many other countries, are known for their accuracy, especially when conducting exit polls. Once again they proved to be correct. The Labour Party defeated the Tories in a landslide, garnering 412 seats; the Conservative Party managed to hold only 121 seats in the 650-seat parliament.

It was the Conservatives’ worst showing since the Reform Act of 1832, which for the first time extended the franchise beyond the relatively small class of large property holders, usually aristocrats.

Labour’s supermajority reflects a major turnaround from the 2019 election, in which the Conservatives, led by Boris Johnson, made major inroads into traditional Labour strongholds to garner 365 seats and virtually wipe out Britain’s long-standing third party, the Liberal Democrats. But in that election, Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, and he was an electoral disaster.

Corbyn had long been the party’s ultra-leftist outlier. He was a throwback to the left-wing socialists who were a major force in the Labour Party in the decades after World War II and who sought to nationalize anything they could get his hands on. Like those earlier left-wing Labour stalwarts, he was uneasy with Britain’s special relationship with the United States. He also opposed Labour’s membership of NATO — indeed advocated disbanding the alliance — and was a proponent of unilateral nuclear disarmament and the termination of Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

Corbyn also had a soft........

© The Hill