Some initial thoughts on the UK elections.
1. It confirms once again that when a center-right party veers to the hard right to weaken the far right, it ends up doing the opposite. After purging moderates and going full-on wingnuts and fever swamp, the Tories got decimated by Reform, not Labour.
🧵
2. Labour held steady in total votes, but combined with the fractured vote on the right, won a historic parliamentary majority. This is in line with trends elsewhere in Europe. The far right rises and wins when the center-left atomizes (Italy, France) and falls short when it holds (Spain, Portugal).
3. I'd been thinking with relief that the UK was bucking the trend of a rising radicalized far right. But I think that was premature. And Labour inherits a catastrophic landscape for governance. It will take near-perfect leadership and a lot of luck to get this right. Otherwise 2029 could be scary.
4. To tie these two thoughts together, Labour won after shifting to the center. So it may have got the same number of votes as in 2019 but not necessarily from the same voters.
Starmer would do well to learn from Macron's mistakes, otherwise radicalizing extremes could render the center irrelevant.
Labour got slightly fewer votes than in 2019 (9.5 mn vs 10.2 mn), but picked up 213 seats.
Same for the LibDems (3.5 mn votes vs 3.7mn in 2019), but picked up 63 seats.
And Reform got 4mn votes, but just 4 seats.
Seems very premature to talk of a remade electoral landscape outside Scotland.
Hard to disagree with any of this. Starmer needs to deliver, quickly, to try and restore faith in politics and yet almost all issues in UK can't be improved in very short term.
Agree that 2029 could be very interesting, especially if the Conservatives and Reform morph. That said, the age demographics of both parties are not playing in their favour.
It's exactly the outcome Cameron was trying to avoid by calling the brexit vote, and May was trying to avoid by invoking article 50, and Johnson was trying to avoid by "getting brexit done" - the destruction of the Tory parliamentary party by the xenophobe vote.
Yes, the entire last 10 years has been pretty much one hail Mary after another as the Tories and their supporters in the press have desperately tried to avoid ever having to admit Osbornism was wrong. And now they have a labour chancellor who agrees with it, the party can be allowed to collapse.
The Tories were never, in my opinion, "center" right. They weren't hard right, but Thatcher, like Reagan, just looks center right because both of their parties veered even further right since.
Yes. I'm puzzled that, even after all the experience with the ERG, they have never learned this lesson: you can't outflank the hard right by going further right. If they try it again, I could see Reform campaigning for return of the death penalty.
Oh wow. In the US, our “center right” GOP is practically campaigning to put botched executions on pay per view. Reform seems moderate compared to the Ghastly Orange Party, err, Republicans
I'm worried that Canada may be bucking this trend. The opposition Tories have veered in this direction, ate the lunch of the far-right's 'People's Party of Canada' and are surging. Perhaps this is all due to a deeply unpopular incumbent, but the result is worrisome.
The Tories in Canada (Progressive Conservatives) were already overtaken by our own Reform party through a merger in 2003, and then swiftly dominated by the Reform elements of the party. They haven't had a moderate PC leader since before the merger. We didn't buck the trend, were the model.
One fundamental truism of Canadian politics is that people don't pay attention to politics until an election campaign.
My hope is that people will turn from supporting the Tories once they do start paying attention.
I don't think it explains the results this time - the Tory plus Reform vote is eight points less then the Tory plus Brexit vote five years ago - but it would be really funny if the Tories lost so not because ten or so years ago they screwed their Lib Dem coalition partners who wanted voting reform.
The thing is; this isn't really the Tories' floor and we could see the Tories do even *worse* at the next election ala 2010 Labour>2015 Labour. People forget there was a net flow to Labour to Tory at that election.
