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.

[Jubal]

Well some politics definitely happened. As expected a big Labour win though not as big as it might have been and with a surprisingly low vote share: the Conservatives not at the worst end of their possibilities but nonetheless defeated to a historic degree. The Lib Dems doing very well on seats given their vote share, and Reform getting a big new chunk of votes without much in the way of seats. Some new Green MPs too, and a really horrible night for the Scottish Nationalists who have had most of their big gains from the past decade or so completely wiped out again by Labour.

In terms of where the right/left split is as we were discussing above:
Lab 33.7 + LD 12.2 + SNP 2.5 + GRN 6.8 + PC 0.7 = 55.9% centre and left
Con 23.7 + Reform 14.3 = 38.0% right

Compared to 2019:
Lab 32.0 + LD 11.6 + SNP 3.9 + GRN 2.6 + PC 0.5 = 50.6% centre and left
Con 43.6 + BXP 2.0 = 45.6 right

So I think broadly speaking there's been a definite shift toward the centre-left, of around five or six percent of voters, but also the usual Conservative advantage of unifying the right-wing vote better has definitely been heavily damaged.

In personal news, whilst I didn't vote for him, I am happy to have a not-Conservative MP for the first time in years, with Liz Truss losing my home seat of Southwest Norfolk to Labour!

[Rob_Haines]

I got re-boundaried into a new constituency this election, but was pleased to see that the Welsh Labour incumbent actually had a pretty good voting record on a lot of the things I care about, so I'm glad she got back in.

The election definitely could've gone a lot worse; I recognise that Labour may not necessarily in the place we want them to be at the leadership level, but I'm tentatively optimistic that they may at least be able to be reasoned with, which never even felt like a possibility with the Tory government in power.

[indiekid]

I was surprised by the big swing in Scotland, though I haven't really been following the news there. Is there a generally accepted explanation for the SNP's loss of support?

[Jubal]

Agreed with Rob H that I think it's a could have gone worse: I am optimistic mostly just about things starting to function better, and I'm hopeful that a bigger liberal/green bloc in parliament might make Labour feel some pressure to actually do things about climate change and internationalism.

I was surprised by the big swing in Scotland, though I haven't really been following the news there. Is there a generally accepted explanation for the SNP's loss of support?

I think a lot of it is the SNP simply having been in power too long, and people feeling they've got complacent and don't have the personnel strength they had under Sturgeon. The SNP seem to have had a poor campaign, as well - it's much harder to just be The Independence Guys when that isn't immediately happening and when people know that the Tories (which for a lot of people in Scotland are The Hated Foe) are about to lose anyways. Also the sense of being able to kick the Tories out in Westminster may have helped: knowing that you're going to either be electing an opposition backbencher or a potential cabinet minister might make you plump for the latter.

[Rob_Haines]

I haven't been following it too closely, but my impression is that the SNP has been struggling the past couple of years.

Sturgeon's resignation as party leader in 2023 - shortly before it became public that her husband was under investigation for embezzling party funds - definitely didn't look great, and earlier this year the breakdown of the power-sharing agreement between the SNP and the Green Party was handled badly - with the SNP scrapping climate change targets, then terminating the deal with the Greens just before the Greens were to vote on whether to terminate - which led to the SNP leader resigning ahead of a no-confidence vote.

[indiekid]

Under Sturgeon they looked very strong, it's been quite a fall!

[dubsartur]

Isn't Scotland's offshore oil and gas running out?  I think that was key to some arguments that Scotland could be prosperous and independent.

As others have said, its hard to hold government for 14 years and remain popular.  You have to make decisions that don't satisfy everyone and you are there to blame when bad things happen.

[Jubal]

I think people outside a country often can't judge a government's weakness well: Sturgeon was arguably doing better in how people outside Scotland saw the SNP than inside! Similarly with e.g. Macron who has until very recently been quite a strong voice on the European stage even as his government has been struggling harder and harder politically. And support for a government is often softening for a long time before something gives and voting intention shifts sharply.

I think it's hard to know just how tapped out the oil & gas is, but SNP voters on the left don't want "become a petro-state" to be the argument for independence, and that's certainly a problem within the SNP's voter coalition.