U.K. HAS NO GOOD CHOICES

None of the above, then.

That seems to be the underlying sentiment animating most of the United Kingdom’s 46 million voters as next Thursday’s national election approaches. There’s a lot of volatility in the electorate, churned up mostly by Britain’s on-again, off-again Brexit mayhem. Voters are shifting allegiances at an unprecedented pace. Cross-party strategic alliances are confounding pollsters, and tactical voting is all the rage.

There are 650 MPS to elect in a race dominated as usual by the Labour party and the Conservatives, and the wretched state of leadership in both parties is either the cause of Britain’s national malaise and world-weary befuddlement, or merely its effect. Either way, the banjaxed state of affairs is unprecedented in recent British history.

The next prime minister is likely to be the comically dishevelled and profoundly unserious Conservative incumbent, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, a serial philanderer straight out of a P.G. Wodehouse farce.

But there’s a strong outside chance that 10 Downing

Street will end up the digs of Labour’s cardigan-wearing allotment gardener, Jeremy Corbyn, whose promises to make the trains run on time have been rather overshadowed by the not unreasonable apprehension that he’s got some kind of weird attitude problem about the Jews.

In either event, the United Kingdom will not be the same after Dec. 12, in that it will not be a better place, most definitely not as an upstanding NATO ally, Commonwealth’s lodestar and UN Security Council anchor. In a world increasingly dominated by planet-devouring dictatorships, gangster states and plutocracies, the United Kingdom is a shrivelling presence.

A Conservative win will mean the U.K. will turn with relish to the task of cutting itself adrift from the European Union, beginning Jan. 31, and the English will have finally gotten what they wanted over the objections of the Scots and Ulsterpeople in the June 2016 Brexit referendum. They’ll all have a jolly old pandemonium and a shrinking economy to look forward to. But taxes will be frozen, and the National Health Service will be strengthened and not sold to some American medical-services corporation, Johnson insists. Honest.

A Labour win will mean the trains will not only run on time, they’ll be publicly owned again and the debilitating Conservative austerity measures will come to a close (mind you, Johnson promises the same). Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and the End Israeli Apartheid wing of our own New Democratic Party will be over the moon, of course. As for Brexit, Labour promises to attempt a new separation agreement with the EU, then another referendum on whether to stay or go, the outcome of which Corbyn says he will express no opinion about, unlike last time around, when he pretended to back Remain and oppose Leave.

Johnson, the former gonzo journalist, “colourful” London mayor and Etonian self-parody, ended up prime minister in July only after a particularly nasty turn in the Conservative party’s internecine warfare over Brexit strategy forced the resignation of Theresa May, who ended up prime minister only because her Conservative predecessor David Cameron resigned in 2016 after his big idea for a referendum on the EU ended up with the opposite result of his own intentions.

You might think that with this cavalcade of error and malfeasance in their immediate past, with this rap sheet of Conservative incompetence, failure and constitutional crisis so directly responsible for the United Kingdom’s ongoing turmoil, and with more than 14 million Britons living in poverty, this would be Labour’s heyday. But it isn’t.

In Theresa May’s 2017 snap election, with the longtime eccentric backbencher Corbyn suddenly in the wheelhouse, Labour managed to draw only a miserable 30.4 per cent of the popular vote. Just this past summer, an IPSOS-MORI poll showed Corbyn to be the U.K.’S least popular Opposition leader — a dissatisfaction rating of 75 per cent — since Tory Margaret Thatcher’s time in Opposition, in 1978. And Thatcher managed a disapproval rating of only 51 per cent.

But what should be most disturbing to democratic socialists with any sense of decency is the way the Corbynite ascendancy in the Labour party has caused such deep disaffection among Britain’s Jews. Even the Jewish Labour Movement, for the first time in its 100year history, is withholding support for Labour going into a national election. The JLM says it will support only “exceptional” Labour candidates, and there aren’t many of those.

Corbyn was a marginal backbencher when a wellorganized rush of Labour delegates and a change to voting rules landed him the leader’s job after David Miliband resigned following the 2015 election. But it’s not like he came out of nowhere. He came to the Office of the Leader of the Opposition straight from his job as chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, a dodgy amalgam of Hezbollah enthusiasts, Communist party retreads, Trotskyist sectarians, white-poppy wearers and tyrant-fanciers, not least the notorious celebrity backstreet demagogue George Galloway.

Ever since Corbyn took over, the Labour party has been dogged by allegations of anti-semitism — some of which may well by motivated by partisan bias — but also by unambiguous eruptions of unreconstructed anti-semitism of the type that cannot be so easily disguised by a mask of “anti-zionism.” Corbyn has won plaudits from a variety of racist bottom feeders, notably Nick Griffin, formerly of the neo-fascist British National Party, and David Duke of the Ku Klux Klan.

A regular guest on the Kremlin propaganda channel RT, and a paid presenter for Press TV — the Englishlanguage conduit for the Khomeinist regime in Tehran — Corbyn has consistently pleaded that he is a lifelong anti-racist, and that Briton’s Jews have nothing to fear from a Labour government with him as its prime minister.

This hasn’t convinced Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis. Formerly the preferred choice of British Jews, the Labour party now rates barely into double digits among Jewish voters. This is plainly because under Corbyn, the party has succumbed to the poison of anti-semitism, Rabbi Mirvis wrote two weeks ago. As for Corbyn’s claim that the party is taking pains to root out any vestiges of anti-semitism that may prevail around the edges, Mirvis calls it a “mendacious fiction.”

It hasn’t helped Corbyn’s case that there’s been an exodus of Labour MPS who have specifically cited anti-semitic abuse and bullying as the reason for their defections. During the first six months of this year, another 635 complaints of anti-semitic abuse were tabled with the party, resulting in only eight expulsions. Meanwhile, Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission is conducting a formal investigation into the Labour party, arising from allegations that the party has discriminated, harassed or otherwise victimized its Jewish members.

Britain’s pollsters put the Conservatives ahead of Labour by several percentage points, but their lead appears to be shrinking. There’s also the Greens, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, Ulsters Unionists and Nigel Farage’s Brexit party weirdos and other independents on various tranches of riding ballots.

“None of the above” is a no-show. But only in the official electoral lists.

Terry Glavin is a journalist and author.

Even the Jewish Labour Movement, for the first time in its 100-year history, is withholding support for Labour going into a national election.