Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

Also what is frustrating most in where we find ourselves today is that this is EXACTLY the scenario that the Brexit referendum was meant to avoid: the Tories torn apart by their internal squabbles and Farage's right-wing party ascendant.

It was all for nothing. You and your kids will suffer the disadvantages of being separated from the EU and while that was a price the Tories were willing to pay, they have failed to meet a single objective they wanted from it.

Their failure is complete.

[HVC]

Uk election stuff coming up in my feed. First time actually seeing starmer. He looks vaguely robotic.

[Josquius]

Also what is frustrating most in where we find ourselves today is that this is EXACTLY the scenario that the Brexit referendum was meant to avoid: the Tories torn apart by their internal squabbles and Farage's right-wing party ascendant.

It was all for nothing. You and your kids will suffer the disadvantages of being separated from the EU and while that was a price the Tories were willing to pay, they have failed to meet a single objective they wanted from it.

Their failure is complete.

Give them an inch, they'll take a mile. Thus has always been the way.

Its curious that so much of the comment we're seeing is about how reform's massive success proves the tories have to go right- despite a chunk of the reform vote coming from Labour and being about 'fuck em all', and the Lib Dems doing drastically better in terms of seats.
Yet the lib dem victory is barely getting mentioned.
The real lesson for the tories, which they won't learn, should be to chill out with the lunacy.

[Sheilbh]

I have a feeling Owen Jones is typing away furiously right now:

I can already see his next column, "Labour landslide: a disaster for Starmer"

[Tamas]

Also what is frustrating most in where we find ourselves today is that this is EXACTLY the scenario that the Brexit referendum was meant to avoid: the Tories torn apart by their internal squabbles and Farage's right-wing party ascendant.

It was all for nothing. You and your kids will suffer the disadvantages of being separated from the EU and while that was a price the Tories were willing to pay, they have failed to meet a single objective they wanted from it.

Their failure is complete.

Give them an inch, they'll take a mile. Thus has always been the way.

Its curious that so much of the comment we're seeing is about how reform's massive success proves the tories have to go right- despite a chunk of the reform vote coming from Labour and being about 'fuck em all', and the Lib Dems doing drastically better in terms of seats.
Yet the lib dem victory is barely getting mentioned.
The real lesson for the tories, which they won't learn, should be to chill out with the lunacy.

Indeed, but Farage is our Trump: nobody can take their eyes away from him. What he does and say will continue to drive  discourse on the Right at the very least.

[Tamas]

Sheilbh trigger warning: Jonathan Pie's farewell to the Tories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYMy2qdNPF0


BTW Sheilbh, I am not sure you are right to cast the guy as a "both sides are crap ignore politics" kind of guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptKNOK4eQ3c

[crazy canuck]

I really enjoyed reading the analysis and commentary here.  Well done guys.

[Valmy]

I feel bad for Sunak.

I heard he is richer than the King. He'll be fine.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah no sympathy for being a quietly incompetent prick in a team of loud wrecking balls.

He sided with the hard Brexiteers he served under Johnson, then his party membership chose a visibly insane white woman over his Hindu ass, but still he put up with all that crap just to sit in the chair and do nothing.

Fuck him.

I think he'll end up being quite popular. We love a failure. The most popular/highest approval for ex-PMs (who people can remember) are for Major, Brown and May who are all in one way or another failures in the top job, but get re-evaluated as basically decent people, tried their best and couldn't cut it in one way or another. I think the same will happen to Sunak. By contrast the lowest approval is for Blair and Thatcher who won multiple elections and actually tried to do something with one degree of success or other - I hope Starmer ends up in that camp.

Also what is frustrating most in where we find ourselves today is that this is EXACTLY the scenario that the Brexit referendum was meant to avoid: the Tories torn apart by their internal squabbles and Farage's right-wing party ascendant.

It was all for nothing. You and your kids will suffer the disadvantages of being separated from the EU and while that was a price the Tories were willing to pay, they have failed to meet a single objective they wanted from it.

Their failure is complete.

I think one of the objectives for some of them, like Sunak, was just leaving. But I'm struck by the Scottish parallel. George Robertson, one of the great Scottish Labour leaders who helped design devolution always used to say that it would "kill Scottish nationalism stone dead".

Its curious that so much of the comment we're seeing is about how reform's massive success proves the tories have to go right- despite a chunk of the reform vote coming from Labour and being about 'fuck em all', and the Lib Dems doing drastically better in terms of seats.

Yeah. In part I think it is Professor Sir John Curtice's analysis which forms the basis but I don't think you necessarily go to the conclusion that this means the Tories go right - I can see how that argument superficially makes sense, but I think it's wrong.

I think there is a way you can look at these results as basically a right bloc (Tories+Reform) - and, in this election (as I think the Lib Dems are free floaters), a left bloc (Labour+Greens+Lib Dems). I think there could be circumstances where that's the right frame, but I'm not sure it is in this election. In this election, I don't think Reform split the Tory vote I think, if anything, they split the anti-Tory vote. There will be future elections where they split the anti-Labour vote which is going to be a challenge for the Tories but I don't think it's as simple as if the Tories move right they'll be able to squash Reform.

As I say I think both parties are in quite tough positions with their coalitions now. I think Reform are to the Tories what the Lib Dems were to New Labour. They are an irritant, but in an anti-Labour election (whenever that happens) actually they'll take seats from Labour and the Tory vote in their target seats will recover. I think the big threat is actually the Lib Dems (and their result - best since 1923 - is very impressive especially given Lib Dem ground game etc). So I suspect that at least this term we'll see tilting to address the (smaller) Reform flank followed by a late panicked realisation that they actually need to fight the (larger) Lib Dem flank.

But also Labour are in a difficult position. I think they've got over 100 seats with Reform in second place and over 30 with the Greens in second place. So the bind that Labour found themselves in over Brexit (as Stephen Bush put it: "actually I would rather that Caroline Flint gets eaten by the Brexit Party than I get eaten by the Lib Dems/Greens) is going to play out again - Labour have a lot of seats with quite small majorities. Brexit clarified by basically putting all of Labour and the Lib Dems and Reforms' target seats v the Tories - that's gone and, as we've seen, voters are volatile. I also slightly wonder if Labour's campaign strategy which was exactly right to win a FPTP general election is the right one to build a durable governing majority for future elections. So far, they've won back voters in the Red Wall and Scotland, they're neglecting minorities (I think over Gaza, a perception they're anti-India and the treatment of Diane Abbott) and middle class urban lefty voters. One of the stories of the last 9 years since 2015 has been the impact of Labour taking voters for granted in both Scotland and the North - I think they're facing a similar risk, particularly with minorities.

But, just on the point I mentioned earlier that I think left v right v centre is a distraction for the Tories. I think this from John Burn-Murdoch is right (and you can see what a disaster Johnson was for them - it was like a monkey's paw, win a general election but at what cost ):


I'd also just add that this chart from the Economist is extraordinary. FPTP is about voter efficiency and the Lib Dems have gone from the biggest victims of that to having a more efficient vote than the Tories

I heard he is richer than the King. He'll be fine.

Richer than the King and arguably our richest PM ever. Weirdly I think the guy who might have been richer than Sunak is the Earl of Roseberry and, like Sunak, while he was very wealthy on his own it was his wife who puts him into the super-rich league. In Roseberry's case he married a Rothschild heiress, in Sunak's the heiress to one of the biggest IT companies in the world.

Indeed, but Farage is our Trump: nobody can take their eyes away from him. What he does and say will continue to drive  discourse on the Right at the very least.

So it's not entirely just this but I think the BBC's coverage was pretty dreadful last night - it might have been because it's the first post-Huw Edwards - and the focus on Reform was a big part of that. But not the only issue Sky was a bit better but I think ITV was best of all.

There was no way in hell I was going to watch Channel 4

[Josquius]

A BBC writeup about who Keir Starmer is.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw4y9evzzppo

That started at school, when he joined the Young Socialists, Labour's youth movement.

After school, Sir Keir became the first person in his family to go to university, studying law at Leeds University and later at Oxford.

At Leeds, he was influenced by the indie music of the 1980s, from The Smiths and The Wedding Present to Orange Juice and Aztec Camera.

His biographer, Tom Baldwin, notes his favourite drink as a student was a mix of beer and cider - or Snakebite - and he had a taste for curry and chips.

You know Keir.
I think we could be friends.

There was no way in hell I was going to watch Channel 4

Why?
Its usually the channel with the more intelligent factual reporting.

[Sheilbh]

I think he is our first properly 80s PM - from his New Romantic phase:


Also don't think I'd really count him as Oxbridge either (he went but for post-grad on a very specific law course) - and he is by all accounts a very serious football fan (I actually thought the jokey Southgate question was kind of revealing, certainly about what type of Arsenal fan he is ). From what I've read he is actually one of the more "normal" people at the top of politics but comes across as very robotic and stilted on TV v people who can perform normality.

[crazy canuck]

I have fond memories of drinking snakebites.  Well not memories of the event itself-memories of people telling me how much fun we had the day after.

[Barrister]

So reviews I've read are that Labour vote is almost entirely unchanged from 2019 - to the extent it went up at all it is because of gains in Scotland / decline in SNP.  Instead the result is due to collapse in Tory votes going to Reform, which has allowed Labour to rack up a huge win with only 35% of the vote.

True?  Not true?

[Sheilbh]

So reviews I've read are that Labour vote is almost entirely unchanged from 2019 - to the extent it went up at all it is because of gains in Scotland / decline in SNP.  Instead the result is due to collapse in Tory votes going to Reform, which has allowed Labour to rack up a huge win with only 35% of the vote.

True?  Not true?

True. But I'm not totally sure it's relevant. Obviously we have FPTP and it doesn't reward vote share, so it's not something the parties are trying to maximise. They want breadth not depth of support.

The share of the vote is the same - the location of the vote is different. They lost votes (and turnout) in safe Labour areas (including Starmer's seat). Nationally the swing is about 11%, but Labour were picking up seats with 20%+ swings. So their vote share isn't great, but the results are in line with their electoral strategy (which is the right one for a FPTP system). Although what you're saying is a point Corbyn has made that they did worse than he did in 2017 and it may be "a landslide of seats but it's not a landslide of votes" which perhaps explains some of his weakness as a leader If we had an electoral system that cared about vote share, Labour would have had a different strategy and voters would have behaved differently.

I think Scotland should be a lot more prominent in the coverage of this though given the collapse of the SNP there and the impact that has on the very literal future of the country.

I agree with Stephen Bush that a good way of looking at it is that it's like 2005 but with a worse Tory Party and more volatile voters. So then Labour also won a very strong majority (about 50-60 seats) on 35% despite losing lots of votes in their core constituencies over Iraq. But the Tories are weaker - so in 2005 they won 32% of the vote, while this time they won 24%. Similarly the Lib Dems won 22% in 2005 but about 60 seats while this time they've won 12% of the vote but over 70% (so the Lib Dems now, like Labour, probably would lose seats with PR ). And the electorate is more flighty - so they're going to Reform, to Greens, to the four pro-Gaza independents.

Edit: Separately I think Sunak's concession and resignation speeches were good. Same goes for Starmer - a bit more relaxed to the party on winning and then good at Number 10.

Edit: He said it a lot during the campaign but I do like his line/goal about getting "politics to tread more lightly in your lives".

[Sheilbh]

Incidentally on the media criticism front.

Johnson had very low (slightly negative) approval ratings, boosted the Tory vote by 1-2% and won a majority of 80.

Starmer's approval rating is about the same, he's increased the Labour vote by about 2% and won a majority of 160 seats (from a lower starting point).

I think the difference in media reception/analysis of this election is quite instructive. Although you're already seeing a little bit of a shift in how they're being talked about now they're in government - I think we forget from 97-2010, then the shift to the Tories just how hegemonic a British government can be in terms of the media.