Aufhebunga Bunga
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/422/ Meat the New Prime Minister: UK Election Rundown
🕑 Added 2024-07-07 20:47:06 +0000 UTCOn Labour's landslide and sandcastle majority.
We unpick what happened in the UK's general election, discussing:
How did Labour get such a large majority with so little enthusiasm for them?
Is the UK now a multiparty democracy, and will there be demands for serious electoral reform?
What accounts for low turnout and the fragmentation of the vote (Reform, Greens, Independents, etc)?
What is Keir Starmer's electoral base and how will he govern? What is their electoral programme?
Is Nigel Farage's reform the real opposition now?
Is the Brexit period now definitely over? Will there be a move to rejoin the EU?
Links:
The McSweeney Project, Tom McTague, UnHerd
Debasing Citizenship, Peter Ramsay, TNS
Data on the nationalist right + driving to work in the UK and French train stations
Comments
Mouldy L
What was the cause of the SNP's landslide in 2015? My understanding was that these gains correlated with the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, which Labour campaigned against. UKIP and Tory voices for Brexit were growing louder before the 2015 general election which culminated in Cameron's calling for the Brexit referendum. So the question of national sovereignty (Scottish and English) seems inextricably linked to the geography of the parties in the UK.
Aneurin
I think the populist right are just trading off the novelty the popular left had around 10 years ago. When they inevitably fail, even on their own terms, things will change again, though I suspect this just means even more widespread apathy.
Aneurin
Did Labour ever complain that they couldn’t do something because of the EU? Also, the destruction of the 2 party system was well underway before Brexit, as was widely acknowledged at the time, most notably with the SNP in 2015. If anything the two “Brexit elections” temporarily reversed this process. A quick google search brought up loads of articles from 2015 predicting a multi party democracy in the immediate future.
Eli S
The unfortunate lesson, which we're seeing in a lot of countries, even with PR systems, is that base enthusiasm and overall popularity appear to trade-off pretty severely for Left and center-left parties these days.
