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.

[Jubal]

It now looks like Scotland could have an election sooner than the General Election, after the Scots Green/SNP coalition has exploded. The Greens and the right wing of the SNP were both pretty unhappy with the arrangement, and Humza Yousaf (who's more from the SNP's centre-left wing) decided to nuke the coalition himself rather than let the Greens potentially do it over the government failing to meet environmental targets. He doesn't however have any other options, as Alba (with their one MSP, a defector from the SNP) have produced such outrageous demands for propping him up that he's presumably going to have to refuse them.

[dubsartur]

I can't make sense of the contrast between the UK as chronically depressed (low on energy, fixated on the past, self-destructive, and unable to see actions which might lead to a better future - the way Labour refuses to state clearly which disastrous Tory policies they would reject is symptomatic) and that people on the continent are still risking their lives to get there.

[Jubal]

I think that's a general thing with a lot of countries in Europe, though the UK is an especially stark example: on an individual basis, they're just flat wealthier than most other places and have better functioning economies. You need a certain amount of money before you can really care about the sense of national lethargy, crumbling public services, etc, because a bad NHS and weak pay is better than being in (insert country here) with death squads after you and/or nothing to eat. And the UK has a big advantage for many migrants because it's English-speaking, and there aren't really many better options for people as a result.

I think it may be of not here that of people who do have elsewhere to go, some people actually do think better of the UK as an option: there've been occasional news articles like this one over the last year or so of Ukrainian refugees considering, attempting or deciding to move back, or returning to Ukraine for medical or dental care, for example.