It feels a bit like today is the end of the world; or, at least, the end of Britain. The general election being held in my home country today feels like the last shot we have at becoming a compassionate, sane country. This is an arrogant fallacy, of course: Everyone who worked to defeat the Tories will still be around tomorrow. But after four years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, which wrestled the party away from the moral absence of Blairism, after a general election and a leadership challenge, it feels like Boris Johnson is the final boss in his whole project. Except, unlike playing Super Mario, you can’t just pick it up and start again, and also you might actually die.

Following American coverage of British news might lead you to think that Brexit is the only problem we have, but this is utterly wrong. Use of food banks is higher than ever. Poverty among children and the elderly has risen. The National Health Service is underfunded, leading to long wait times for emergency and routine care. Local councils have seen their funds gutted, leading to shuttered public programs and facilities, thanks to the politics of austerity—a deliberate, vicious decision to punish and harm those who depend on public services, i.e., the poor. We shouldn’t expect anything else: This is what a Tory is born to do. He is birthed in a country house onto a silk pillow, fed only on pheasant pâté and port, and bundled off to Eton and Oxford in preparation for running the country. He then arrives in Westminster to attack the poor, who have had it so easy.



Jeremy Corbyn has focused on the dark realities of poverty and austerity in this campaign. The party has its Brexit promises—a new referendum with a “credible Leave option” actually spelled out this time—but the campaign has focused on restoring cut social services and, particularly, saving the NHS. Corbyn has warned voters that Johnson would put the NHS “up for sale” to American companies, privatizing and selling off bits of its core functions as part of a trade deal with Trump. The specter of private, American-style health care is enough to turn most Britons’ blood cold. Meanwhile, in a move that has absolutely no horrifying historical precedents, the Tories promise to “tackle” Gypsy camps.



Just the day before the election, Boris hid in a walk-in freezer to avoid a journalist.

British elections always seem to serve up a few Armando Iannucci-esque moments of absurd and excruciating content, and this one has been no different. Prime Minister Boris Johnson driving a digger labeled “Get Brexit Done” through a brick wall labeled “Gridlock,” followed by a baffled silence. A Tory candidate getting caught on a hot mic trying to set up a known supporter to act like a random member of the public for an interview with a journalist, telling him over the phone, “Don’t make out you know who I am, that you know I’m the candidate but not a friend, all right?” (The supporter ruined the plot to ensure a good interview when he told the journalist that problematic public housing tenants should be given the “cat o’ nine tails” and put in a “pink tutu.”) Just the day before the election, Boris hid in a walk-in freezer to avoid a journalist.



And then there was the disgraceful saga of the boy sleeping on a pile of coats in a hospital, and the Punch That Never Was. The photo of four-year-old Jack Williment-Barr, who was at Leeds General Infirmary with suspected pneumonia, went viral this week. It was a terrible image and an indictment of the dire state of the NHS after years of Tory underfunding—his little arm shielding one eye from the light and an oxygen mask on the ground next to him. On Monday, four days before the election, Boris Johnson demonstrated his characteristic political acumen by refusing to look at a photo of the boy as an ITV journalist tried to show it to him during an interview, eventually putting the journalist’s phone in his own pocket. Nicking a mobile to own the libs.

