The exit polls are in and it looks like it's finally Independence Day for Britain's Tories:
- Labor: 410 (63%)
- Conservatives: 131 (20%)
- Liberal Democrats: 61 (9%)
- SNP: 10
- Reform UK: 13
- Plaid Cymru: 4
- Greens: 2
This is very close to Tony Blair's historic landslide Labor victory in 1997. A couple hundred Conservative MPs now have the independence to pursue other interests.
And good luck to incoming Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He's going to need it.
So what you're saying is, after Boris, Theresa, and Rishi, the Brits had finally had enough. A decade too late, mind you, to stop Brexit.
¯\(°_o)/¯
My favorite long-form video blogger, Tom Nicholas, breaks down how they got there. Cliff notes version: austerity.
How Britain Became a Poor Country
https://youtu.be/vry5deT8lc0?si=pGmDBHXcNRiphVhf
Brexit.
Before Brexit, there was "we have to cut government spending". Once the population was really hurting, then you blame the foreigners and roll into Brexit.
The playbook works on either side of the Atlantic.
You forgot Lettuce Lady on that list.
What was her name again? Oh dear. She was Prime Minister, and I don't remember anything about her except the lettuce.
Big Truss.
LOL her term was so short I forgot all about her.
And she lost her seat. Oh, the ignominy!
Liz Truss. Not to be confused with Lynne Truss, the author of "Eats, Shoots and Leaves."
Professional maggots crushed. There was one poll that had reform beating the conservatives and the maggot press had a field day with that. Instead, the conservatives got 50% more votes than the UK version of maggots. Reform did increase their number of elected MPs from 1 to possibly 7. Canada has a minimum mp requirement to be an official party and get resources. Does the UK? I asume reform wouldn't meet that threshold.
The percentages Kevin gives are, I think, not of votes but of seats in parliament. That is of electoral districts in which a party got the most votes. That explains the negligeable performance of the Greens, less than a percent in seats but certainly much more than that in votes.
It's Labour not Labor, you American.
Labour has moved to the centre.
Now I know where to move to. Britain has just come through its Trump moment.
But they still have to recover and figure out the budgets. The problem in every first world country is that the people have high living standards. The middle class gets pissed off when their living standards are reduced through inflation and high housing costs. The business class diverts the anger into fury at immigrants through manipulation of the media while they continue looting -- just take a look at the corporate profits over the past 20 years.
Britain still has a budget problem, the rich and businesses don't want to pay taxes and support those replaceable people who are more expensive than they are worth. Just because they tossed out the conservatives doesn't mean they've fixed the budget problem.
The problem is not that people get pissed off. The problem is that living standards are reduced through inflation and high housing costs.
Labour seems content to leave austerity and Brexit in place. They'll likely have continued economic woes - people will remain angry and will probably "throw the bums out" again. When that happens, it will be back to the Tories.
We thought we’d done that in 2020.
I believe I read something about the National Front not getting a majority in France as well. In some ways that may matter more than what happened in the UK
As far as I understand it, second-round elections are this Sunday and all other parties have deals to unite behind only one candidate in districts where FN is running. Kind of national unity tickets. FN will still win seats, maybe quite a few, but iirc they had 36% of the first-round vote last week so it would be hard for them to get a majority, assuming the overall share doesn't change much. Don't know what Le Pen's position has been, but it could matter a lot more to Ukraine than the UK party shift will.
Thanks for the update
National Front is pro-Russian and opposed to helping the Ukrainians.
Just to highlight what a difference FPTP makes: FN got almost the same proportion of the first-round vote in France as Labour did in Great Britain.
Labout got an overwhelming parliamentary majority; FN will be fortunate to get a plurality.
The Tories can come back, just as Labour did this evening. The Tories won a lot of traditional Labour seats in 2019 they promptly gave up in 2024 and the same can happen to Labour in 2029. The bottom line is they have to figure out how how to reunite the vote on the Right because so many of their losses came from that split with Reform.
Not really. Reform didn't run candidates in seats the Tories had a good chance of winning. Their good second place results were in seats where Labour won large victories.
There certainly is a contingent of Conservative MPs (Suella Braverman) and now-former-MPs (Jacob Rees-Mogg) who think that a hard turn to the right is just what the party needs. The analogous strategy didn't work for Labour in the previous election, and it won't work for the Tories in the next election. I'm sure Keir Starmer would be happy if that's the direction the Tories choose.
Has there ever, in the entire history of humanity, been someone named "Nigel Farage" who wasn't a total prat?
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer is determined to win the title of Most Boring Person in the World. Which is not a criticism.
Well that’s dumb. The whole western world is now ready to follow their conservative example and they dump them? In 2 years they will conclude that no one can fix what is broken and go back to the Tory nonsense. Liberals will be burned at the stake as they stumble over one culture war issue after another.
They won't have an election in two years, so your prediction is dead on arrival. And 14 years of Torie austerity economics has had the utterly predictable effect of alienating most of the UK middle class. Still, if you think their "conservative example" is the way to go, I'm sure you're all in on Nigel Farage and the Nazi sympathizers in the Reform Party.
I am not a conservative, but news from EU is pointing to conservatives rising. I hope they can turn their country around in 5 years, as you point out. So sorry for the error. These European folks seem to call for elections more frequently than required in parliamentary systems.
Obviously any party in power for that long runs out of steam and ideas and just starts fighting with itself and people just get sick of them and throw them out (and when UK voters throw the Tories out they don't just kick them out the door they throw them off the top of the building). Lord Mandelson pointed out last night that something like the Reform Party has existed in some form since the early 1990s and it's always been, I imagine, a Tory nightmare that they would do well enough to cost them even the safest of seats. So a rappoachemont would seem logical, but, the Tories also lost seats to the LibDems so you may be right that the more "Right" they go, the "Left" of the party sees the LDs as a feasible alternative, especially if their hot for another EU referendum.
The UK is lucky that they can turf out their incumbents in a fit of rage without endangering their democracy at all. Not every country has that luxury.
Roundup as of late Friday UK time, with one seat undecided, shows that actual results and estimates based on exit polls were close for the top three parties but not so much for the others. Reform ended up with 5 seats, LibDems 71, Tories 122, and Labour 412.
Seat count emphatically doesn't reflect vote share because of the plurality-takes-all system they share with us, plus multiple parties with overlapping voter bases. Reform took 14% of the vote, LibDems 12%, Tories 24%, and Labour 34%.
Turnout was very low for the UK at 60%. Only one election since 1885 was lower.
This is the only thing in current news that gives me some optimism.
Britain passed through its Trump moment. It discovered that austerity meant decimating the NHS. It discovered "going it alone" meant a contracting economy and an Irish problem that cannot be solved.
There's a reactionary wave around the world driven by cultural factors - elderly, rural, less educated.
If Britain can find their way through, maybe we can too.