A post-election trio of posts
Held onto any political ideation until I'd had some sleep
Slept like a baby, so maybe I'm onto something here.
All in all, I think "Labour win a landslide" is the worst of the likely outcomes of this election, and the 2nd worst of the technically-possible outcomes (I mean they could have fucked it somehow and failed to secure a majority?)
I will obviously take this over an extension of Tory rule, but the way the party has lurched to the right over the last 4 years while abandoning any pretence of ambition means I consider a landslide electoral victory a really bad outcome for anyone with an interest in improving life in this country.
This victory has been projected for literal years at this point, and with a dead-cert win on the cards any progressive party worthy of the category would have put some ambition into its campaign, some kind of radical adjustment into it's policy, but instead Labour went hyper-safe into right-wing "secure borders," "antisocial behaviour," and "we love financial services" rhetoric and was rewarded with a Tory collapse to vindicate their cowardice.
We won't see an ambitiously left-wing Labour party in our lifetime.
Anyway I'd love to be wrong, I'm really praying the manifesto was just a way to guarantee a mandate so they can go hard on public services, but their manifesto drained the joy from my body. I'm fine with people celebrating a victory over a Tory party that propped itself up with literal fascism, I just can't share the optimism.
Extremely battered Stats Hat on for this one.
Having done a bit of number scanning, my key takeaway is that my expectations about the mechanics of this election were about right - this is less a Labour resurgence than it is a collapse of the Tory and SNP vote - both losing about half the popular vote they had in 2019.
Hell, Labour got fewer votes this time than in 2019 - 9.7M (final counts pending) vs 10.2M.
This does not bode well for UK politics.
The clearest indicator of this collapse was the "resurgence" of the Lib Dems. They're currently tallying fewer votes than 2019 (3.5M vs 3.6M) but have gone from 11 seats to 71.
Overall turnout dropped from 67% to barely 60%.
My hypothesis is that people just broadly did not give a shit, and Tories would rather stay home than pick an alternative. I may grab a dataset to try to back this up later.
I forgot to mention the wee fascists in this post
They hoovered up a bunch of Tory votes, so thanks for that but honestly fuck 'em.