The rather one-sided UK election, with all the British parties that took hits or landed them, created a number of interesting stories, though a couple are more long-term things. I’ll start with the part that will probably disappoint most Kossacks.
This probably doesn’t say anything about how the U.S. elections will go.
Some have tried to gain hope from this after the rough fallout from the debates. I hate to break it to you, but the circumstances surrounding the British election were different. First, Keir Starmer didn’t flameout in the UK debates. Second, more importantly, he was in an enviable position. A bad European economy*, scandalized Tories (without hitting scandal overload in popular opinion like Trump did about the time Paul Manafort was convicted six years ago), and the British right was divided. None of these factors will help Biden out.
Indeed, based on above average inflation and all polling evidence suggesting that voters are very concerned about it, the economic factor is probably a negative. Maybe it drops in the months ahead, but it’s too late for that to give him a big boost.
And no, the U.S. and UK don’t always follow each other's political examples. It’s true that Reagan followed Thatcher, Blair followed Clinton, and Trump followed Brexit, but Cameron followed Obama, albeit for the same reason: economic collapse on the other side’s watch. And remember all that speculation that Boris Johnson with his visual and stylistic similarities to George W. Bush was a preview of a potential Trump landslide? I do.
*For that matter, it’s not hard to figure out why the MAGAs of the European Union are on a roll. Unlike in Britain, the center and left are in power (for now). They are therefore taking the heat for the economy. It’s as simple as that.
A mandate-free rout… sort of.
Turns out the polls weren’t so accurate after all. While Labour got a 1945/1997 style majority as was predicted, the about 40% median estimate in the popular vote (high for multi-party systems) was way off. It’s under 34%. If that’s not a record low in Britain for a winning party, it’s got to be close. So while Labour got much more seats than the Tories have come close to over forty years, it’s got the dubious distinction of doing it without most Britons voting for it.
What gives? One explanation is that Labour really was helped significantly by Reform. At 14% of the vote, that probably had a bit of an impact on the final seat tallies. Labour should have at least some concern about how long its new era will last. The right is well aware of its divisions. Within a few years, I’d expect either Reform to have become the bigger opposition or, far more likely, the Tories to MAGAize to enough of an extent to coopt Reform like UKIP before it. If the economy isn’t booming, Keir Starmer and company could be in trouble.
That said, no matter how many say otherwise (and the right-wing slant of the British press is showing), Labour didn’t just win by taking advantage of a right-wing revolt over high immigration and lockdowns. First, if you’re going to add Reform’s votes to the Tories’, why not add the Green Party’s and SNP’s to Labour’s? Second, Labour had a widely dispersed base in this election. It rebuilt its ties to the working class Red Wall, winning over anti-Brexit voters in historically Conservative southern England, and how can I forget the collapse of the SNP (and the Scots returning to their pre-2015 voting habits)?
Electoral Calculus is a British site with a “Create your own election” game that lets you bring your speculation to life. Unlike the similar ones at Election Polling and Principal Fish, its creators saw Labour’s broadening geographical appeal coming. As a result, putting the top two parties at equal votes on the EC model leaves Labour the largest party by a good distance and making a deal with the Liberal Democrats.
Can the Democrats emulate this? I tend to think America is too polarized, but you never know…
Reform UK: the great villain of great Britain.
If anything bad happened as a result of this election, it was the semi-relevance of Reform UK, the far right, fascism-sympathizing party of Britain. Maybe Labour is able to ignore it with such a large number of seats, maybe Reform’s 14% of the vote was too concentrated in uncompetitive seats, but it’s clearly got a lot of supporters and has the Conservatives shaking in their boots.
And the scary part is that Reform’s best days may lay ahead. Based on how much more geographically advantaged Labour and the Liberal Democrats became in this election, it’s entirely possible that Reform’s 5 new MPS are multiplied next election even if its vote drops precipitously.
This forms threatening battle lines. Just as a CDU victory in Germany would effectively put Alternative for Germany because the former’s base wouldn’t tolerate it disregarding the votes of the latter, a Conservative minority government in four or five years might also put Reform in power, formally or informally.
Greens may be on a roll as well.
On a more pleasant note, the Greens, the more left-wing alternative to Labour may be in a similar place. They have greatly increased their vote total from 2019, from 2.5% to 6.8%. And while this may only elected 4 Green MPs, it would have taken a vote percentage in the teens for that in the past. Like Reform, the trajectory points to a bright future.
I pointed out the threat that Reform poses to the Conservatives and how it may have no choice but to move right. The same may be true of Labour. Keir Starmer may have to be more ambitious than some suspect to avoid losing support to it. But I have a feeling the liberal Democrats may be more vulnerable to the Greens.
The Lib Dems’ time or a bubble that will pop soon?
This is my hottest take. The Liberal Democrats have gone up to over 70 seats, their best result ever… so what could go wrong. But like Labour, their position may be more precarious than it looks.
12%. That’s how much of the popular vote they got. A slight improvement from 2019, a third straight bad election for them. They have succeeded because of the Blue Wall, a collection of constituencies in southern England that used to support the Conservatives but seem to have walked away from them due to cultural matters, especially Brexit. This old BBC video has a good rundown on how this happened:
The reason it was (for the most part) the Lib Dems and not Labour that broke the Blue Wall is probably, once again, because of culture. While Labour may not be the giant favorite of the working class that it once was, it still uses blue-collar language, calling itself the party of working people of Britain. The Lib Dems, by contrast, have a cosmopolitan image. Unfortunately for them, so do the Greens. And for voters of Southern England who have turned progressive, the Lib Dems may not be a perfect fit. However socially progressive they are, economics is a different story. Not to the degree that they were under Nick Clegg and his coalition with David Cameron’s Tories, but hardly full-blown lefties.
Though the Greens didn’t consistently match their national average in the Lib Dems’ new southern base, I think a lot of that might be because it was a wasted vote. As I said above, it might not be next time. And then they could do some damage to the Liberal Democrats.
Scottish National Party: way down but not quite out.
The SNP was going to take a hit, but like that? Good God, only nine seats? Kind of ironic. They lost significant stature in the House of Commons the way they entered it: a landslide of biblical proportions! For them in 2015, against them this time.
Or not. At 30% of the Scottish vote to Labour’s 35%, things may not be quite as bad as it looks for the SNP, although there’s a rebuilding phase to come. The next election for the Scottish Parliament will tell us whether the SNP is back to just barely above nothing. If it loses to Labour again, then it just might be cooked.
Why pay so much attention to another country’s elections?
Two reasons. For one thing, aspects of British politics like the unionists versus nationalists feud in Scotland and the changing political loyalties in the Red and Blue Wall fascinate me.
The other reason is that this affects us more than you’d think. I think the similarities between Trump and Farage are profound, for example. So national trends can go global despite not all of them doing so as I said before.