UK Politics 2024

[Jubal]

Well, it's the UK's election year, and things look... mostly predictable, oddly enough. There will probably be an election, maybe in early autumn, the Conservatives will probably lose badly, and we'll get a Labour government. But we'll see what events have to say about that.


Polling averages as of now have the Conservatives in the mid twenties, Labour in the mid forties, the Liberal Democrats on about ten percent and the same for hard-right Reform, the Greens a bit below those two. Models vary a lot as to what that means exactly, but all of them agree that's a healthy Labour majority: the least bullish models now for Labour put them on a solid 345 seats, the most bullish have them well over four hundred. It's in the zone where it becomes really difficult to do the swings because where the votes come from becomes harder to model with an extremely big vote shift.

The Lib Dems should pick up 15-20 seats on those sorts of numbers: I think the party not gaining double figures of seats would constitute a significant failure (honestly the fact that the party might poll worse than at the previous general election is pretty bad in these circumstances). The Greens are going to struggle because they have only one seat to defend, almost all of their targets are Labour facing, and their few percent of the vote is far less concentrated than that of the Lib Dems. Reform have similar issues, it's far from clear where they can actually target given their almost total lack of a local base anywhere (though if they do well they'll probably hurt the Conservatives especially and also Labour a bit).

[Jubal]

Looking at recent polls and my assumptions for the election outcome are shifting towards Labour from where they were.

The thing is, that's shifting towards Labour in a situation where I already thought Labour was going to win by quite a large amount. I kinda now think they might win by an absolutely staggering amount. The Conservatives are not really recovering with polling averaging to below 25% and Labour in the low to mid forties - and some polling is even worse. Blair's landslide in 1997 was won on a 12.5 percent lead: Starmer is seriously looking at winning by twenty points, as a sort of average likelihood - that could shrink, but it could get even larger.

What does that mean for everyone else? Well, the Conservatives are very much not on track to get more than about 150 seats, and some predictions have them hitting their worst results ever. What that would need depends on how you count: under 156 (their 1906 total) is the fair number, which drops to 131 if you don't count the Liberal Unionists in their 1906 total and drops to 106 if you count pre-Conservative Tories in the 1754 election, but given parties in the modern sense weren't really a thing then that would be rather silly. In any case, a recent large seat-estimation poll had them on eighty seats, which it's safe to say is worse than any of those.

The Liberal Democrats might do surprisingly well, through no fault of their own. I've generally been sceptical of this case: I think that the lack of a national campaign message will hurt the party, and that Labour will leapfrog them in a lot of seats with this sort of polling lead. That said, the Conservatives are doing so incredibly badly that the Lib Dems can hold still or even drop back a bit in some of their 2019 second places and still pick up a surprising number of seats.

The SNP look like they'll hold on to a good chunk of their current seats, but take a few losses to Labour - things are looking less bad for them than they might have feared last year. Reform are a bit of a wild-card but would have to do better off the back of a major Tory implosion to be seriously threatening picking up seats.