Leaders | Our election endorsement

Britain’s nightmare before Christmas

A divided country faces an election that will tear it still further apart

BRITISH VOTERS keep being called to the polls—and each time the options before them are worse. Labour and the Conservatives, once parties of the centre-left and -right, have steadily grown further apart in the three elections of the past four years. Next week voters face their starkest choice yet, between Boris Johnson, whose Tories promise a hard Brexit, and Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Party plans to “rewrite the rules of the economy” along radical socialist lines. Mr Johnson runs the most unpopular new government on record; Mr Corbyn is the most unpopular leader of the opposition. On Friday the 13th, unlucky Britons will wake to find one of these horrors in charge.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Britain’s nightmare before Christmas”

Britain’s nightmare before Christmas

From the December 7th 2019 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition
A wire frame hand hooked up to a lie detector. The graph indicates lying

How to keep AI models on the straight and narrow

Interpretability techniques are powerful, but must be used with care

An African migrant holds a European Union flag on board a ferry to Algeciras, Spain

Africans need jobs. The rest of the world needs workers

Migration from Africa is a mega-trend that transcends today’s populist surge


A poster for Canada's Liberal party candidate, Prime Minister Mark Carney, is attached to a telegraph pole.

How Canada went from preachy to pragmatic

On the eve of an election, its political transformation is stunning


The man Britain cannot ignore

Nigel Farage’s return means a new, more volatile era in British politics

Trump is a revolutionary. Will he succeed?

He has already done lasting harm to America

President Trump’s attacks on the Fed are not over

Jerome Powell wins a reprieve. But expect more showdowns between the White House and the Fed