UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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As a non-Brit, I always wondered how conservatives held power for so long over there. But now that I’ve seen how Labour governs it makes a lot more sense. They’re both awful.
It's more FPTP.
The Left is split over Labour, LebDem, Green, SNP and Plaid Cymru. Now, also Corybn's new party.
The Right traditionally consolidated on the Conservatives and in NI, UUP. Now Reform are the Right consolidation point. Plus Con+Reform merge seams likely. UUP always worked with the Conservatives.
Amazing Labour ever win really. If Labour cared about country over party, they would be doing electoral reform. But they are still hoping they can take all the power under FPTP, with a few more point of the vote than others by the time the election. They are betting the country on it. Right now, it looks like this will let the fascists.
Labour aren't meant to be like this. If Ed Milliband or Jeremy Corbyn had got in some years ago, this wouldn't be happening.
Maybe some other shit would be happening, but not this.
Keir Starmer and his right-wing clique have taken over the Labour Party, and pushed anyone even slightly left-of-centre to the fringes, or out of the party.
The Tories are still even further to the right, and the UKIPs are even further right than that.
Corbyn is unelectable as PM. Britain just doesn’t bend that far, and he had plenty of failings as a politician that would rule him out.
I know that's what the news told us every day for years and years on end, but more people voted for Corbyn in 2019 (10.2 million) than Starmer in 2024 (9.7 million), and Starmer ended up PM with half a million fewer votes than Corbyn got. The difference between the two elections was that in the latter, the Tories got fewer votes.
If Starmer was electable, so was Corbyn.
[Edit] Also, Corbyn got 12.8 million votes in 2017, that's 3.1 million more people voting for the "unelectable" man, than the apparently "electable" man.
Corbyn led Labour to their worst electoral defeat since the 1930s. What is performant in one election doesn’t translate to another. This is the crux of how ridiculous Corbyn’s “winning the argument” claim was.
So the press likes to tell us every day. I'd really think it was more down to the fact that a lot of people actually thought Boris Johnston was a good idea at the time (in the 2019 election) - compared to in 2024, when a lot of Tories/Undecideds (for a variety of reasons) voted for the UKIPs instead.
If you'd put Keir in the 2019 election, he would have done even worse.
These are first-past-the-post problems really, and problems of how boundaries are drawn.
Anyway, it's all theoretical anyway - as you say, it's hard to compare one election to another in this way - and it won't change anything, we've got a right-wing Labour Prime Minister for a few years, whether we like it or not.
Yeah, Boris had that Trump factor.
Somebody people recognise from the TV and for some reason assume that means they're suitable to run a country.
Losing against Theresa May, on the other hand...
The real issue is that we don't really have democracy. We just sort of gesture in a direction every 4 years based the colour tie they wear, and then they do whatever they want and we get no say in it.
So your argument to explain Corbyn’s historic loss is…. The entire country temporarily went insane?
Jezza, is this you?
Hahaha, I guess you must be Keir then.