What the UK can teach the U.S. (again)
by Will Marshall, PPI President
for New York Daily News

Political trends in the United States and Great Britain often seem to move in parallel, and last week’s local elections across the United Kingdom yield some pertinent lessons for U.S. political parties.

For Republicans, the main takeaway is that competent governance matters. One big reason Britain’s Conservatives scored major gains on “Super Thursday” is that voters credit Prime Minister Boris Johnson with having done a good job of rolling out COVID vaccines.

In contrast, Donald Trump bungled the pandemic from start to finish in a clownish performance that his own pollster has cited as the number one reason U.S. voters denied him reelection in 2020.

For Democrats, the sad state of Britain’s Labour Party is a cautionary tale against what can happen to progressives when they abandon electoral pragmatism and indulge left-wing purists. The party seems unable to exorcise the ghost of ex-leader Jeremy Corbyn, the doctrinaire socialist who led the party two years ago to its worst drubbing since the 1930s.

On this week’s Radically Pragmatic Podcast, Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute sat down with Matt Goodwin, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, a researcher and a published author. They discussed the dynamic political atmosphere across Europe and how it relates to the US political stage, among a host of other topics and issues.

Matthew Goodwin is an academic, bestseller writer and speaker known for his work on political volatility, risk, populism, British politics, Europe, elections and Brexit. He is Professor of Politics at Rutherford College, University of Kent, Senior Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House and previously Senior Fellow with the UK In a Changing Europe.