UK Politics 2024

[Jubal]

There's definitely room for someone to write a D-Ream parody entitled "Things Can Only Stay Similar" for Starmer's election campaign.

[Rob_Haines]

I was talking about this with my wife earlier, and while I'm pretty disappointed in how firmly embedded in centrist values and anti-immigration rhetoric Labour have become, I still think there's enough of a difference between the parties that it's worth holding out some hope.

And then, if Labour do finally get back in, there's then an opportunity to apply pressure to make it clear that compassion is *actually* a virtue. (How effective it will be remains to be seen, but surely it *has* to be better than trying to make the Tories care.)

~ Rob

[Jubal]

I was talking about this with my wife earlier, and while I'm pretty disappointed in how firmly embedded in centrist values and anti-immigration rhetoric Labour have become, I still think there's enough of a difference between the parties that it's worth holding out some hope.

And then, if Labour do finally get back in, there's then an opportunity to apply pressure to make it clear that compassion is *actually* a virtue. (How effective it will be remains to be seen, but surely it *has* to be better than trying to make the Tories care.)

~ Rob

I think that's very fair: I certainly think there'll be a sense of reliability to a Labour government that's in and of itself a worthwhile improvement, and I agree that I'd always rather be opposing Labour who might listen to their consciences than opposing the Conservatives who definitely won't do that. I'm probably a shade more tired and cynical than I'd like to be about UK politics after I got so burned out on heavy duty policy advocacy a few years ago, but I think that's definitely a flaw that I'd like to shake off.

There's some possible writing projects I might be doing or helping with in the next year or so which I hope will get me back into thinking about politics more productively again. For the time being I've been doing some little bits of campaign activity in any case, helping my local Lib Dem group get its website updated and so on. I'm trying to keep it fairly lightweight this election: I've only got so much time and I'm not in a good place mentally lately for various reasons. I might donate some money to one or two candidates as well though: it's always best to donate early in a campaign so I should really have done that already, but oh well. I think my main hopes in Norfolk are that I'd like to see my lot get North Norfolk back: then besides Norwich which will shift back to two Labour MPs, the rest of the county's seats are in that "they're probably all safe unless we're in total Tory wipeout at which point they might suddenly all flip Labour" category of southern rural/farming areas. Which is a pity, I'd love to see Liz Truss lose.

A YouGov poll out today suggest that Reform are up a couple and the Tories down a couple since Farage announced he was leading Reform, which is about what I might have expected, and makes an absolutely shattering loss for the Tories that much more likely overall...

[Jubal]

Latest blogpost is just me getting annoyed about local political commentators but it does also include some analysis of why seats like mine are actually so ultra-safe for the Conservative party and why it'll be hard to shift them even with an exceptionally weak candidate in an exceptionally bad year for the Tories:
https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/whats-in-a-bylines-column/

[dubsartur]

Since Labour are polling around 40%, the Tories around 20%, and Reform UK around 16% I think you could tell a story where the hard right is splitting and a centrist party is sailing up the middle, rather than a story about British Right Collapsing.

[Jubal]

Yeah, that seems a viable take. The hit to the total right-wing vote is more like an 8% drop compared to last election (where the Tories got 43ish and Brexit Party 2ish) and it's the split that's turning that into a wild catastrophe for the right in seat numbers. The electoral calculus model suggests that if the Conservatives got all the Reform votes, they'd "only" lose about 130 seats and Labour would have only a thirty seat majority. That said, the right losing eight points to the centre is still a fairly chunky swing in most electoral systems.