My many thoughts on the UK elections.

The British election, which was a rather one-sided affair, has produced a number of interesting stories, although some of them are more long-term. I'll start with the part that will probably disappoint most Kossacks.

This probably says nothing about how the US election will play out.

Some have sought to find hope in the negative fallout from the debates. I hate to break it to you, but the circumstances surrounding the British election were different. First, Keir Starmer did not last long in the British debates. Second, and more importantly, he was in an enviable position. A struggling European economy*, outraged Conservatives (though not quite reaching the threshold of outrage in public opinion that Trump did when Paul Manafort was convicted six years ago), and a divided British right. None of these factors will help Biden.

Indeed, given above-average inflation and all the polls suggesting that voters are very concerned about this issue, the economic factor is probably negative. It may decline in the coming months, but it is too late for that to give him much of a boost.

And no, the US and the UK don’t always follow each other’s political lead. It’s true that Reagan followed Thatcher, Blair followed Clinton and Trump followed Brexit, but Cameron followed Obama, but for the same reason: economic collapse on the other side. And remember all that speculation That Boris Johnson, with his visual and stylistic similarities to George W. Bush, was a foretaste of a possible landslide victory for Trump? I think so.

*By the way, it is not hard to understand why MAGA supporters in the European Union are on the rise. Unlike in Britain, the center and the left are in power (for now). So they are suffering the consequences of the economic crisis. It is as simple as that.

A kind of mandate-free journey.

It turns out that the polls were not SO After all, that is true. While Labour won a 1945/1997-style majority, as expected, the median estimate of around 40% of the popular vote (high for multi-party systems) was way off the mark. It is less than 34%. If that is not the lowest record in Britain for a winning party, it must be close. So while Labour won many more seats than the Conservatives have nearly won in forty years, it has the dubious distinction of having done so without most Britons voting for it.

What is happening? One possible explanation is that Labour was greatly helped by Reform. With 14% of the vote, this probably had an impact on the final seat count. Labour should at least be concerned about how long this new era will last. The right is well aware of its divisions. Within a few years, I expect Reform to become the main opposition or, more likely, the Tories to MAGAZIise enough to co-opt Reform like UKIP before it. If the economy is not booming, Keir Starmer and his colleagues could be in trouble.

That said, no matter how many people say otherwise (and the rightward bias of the British press shows this), Labour did not win simply by riding a right-wing revolt against high immigration and lockdowns. First, if you want to add reformist votes to the Tories, why not add the Greens and the SNP to Labour? Second, Labour had a very dispersed base in this election. It rebuilt its links with the Red Wall working class, winning over anti-Brexit voters in the historically conservative South of England, and how can we forget the collapse of the SNP (and the return of the Scots to their pre-2015 voting habits)?

Electoral Calculus is a British site that offers a create-your-own-election game that lets you bring your speculations to life. Unlike similar ones from Election Polling and Principal Fish, its creators foresaw the widening geographic appeal of the Labour Party coming. As a result, by placing the top two parties on a tie on the EC model, Labour is by far the largest party and strikes a deal with the Liberal Democrats.

Can Democrats emulate this? I tend to think America is too polarized, but you never know.

UK Reform: Britain's Big Bad.

If anything bad has come out of this election, it is the semi-relevance of Reform UK, the far-right, fascist-sympathising party in Britain. Maybe Labour can ignore it with so many seats, maybe Reform's 14% of the vote was too concentrated in uncompetitive constituencies, but it clearly has a lot of supporters and is making the Tories tremble.

And the scary thing is that Reform's best days may yet be ahead. Given the geographic advantage that Labor and the Liberal Democrats enjoy in this election, it is entirely possible that Reform will get five new seats in the next election, even if its vote share drops dramatically.

This creates threatening front lines. Just as a CDU victory in Germany would effectively put the Alternative for Germany forward, because the former's base would not tolerate it ignoring the latter's votes, a conservative minority government in four or five years could also put Reform in power, formally or informally.

The Greens could also be on the rise.

On a brighter note, the Greens, Labour’s left-wing alternative, could be in a similar situation. They have increased their vote total considerably since 2019, from 2.5% to 6.8%. And while this only resulted in 4 Green MPs, it would have required a vote share of around 10% to do so in the past. As with Reform, the trajectory points to a bright future.

I have highlighted the threat that Reform poses to the Conservatives and that it may have no choice but to move to the right. The same may be true of Labour. Keir Starmer may have to be more ambitious than some think to avoid losing support to Reform. But I suspect that the Lib Dems may be more vulnerable to the Greens.

The time of the Liberal Democrats or a bubble that will soon burst?

This is my warmest view. The Liberal Democrats won more than 70 seats, their best result ever, so what could go wrong? But like Labour, their position may be more precarious than it seems.

12%. That’s the percentage of the vote they got. A slight improvement on 2019, a third bad election in a row for them. They succeeded because of the Blue Wall, a group of constituencies in the south of England that used to support the Conservatives but seem to have abandoned them for cultural reasons, including Brexit. This old BBC video gives a good overview of how this happened:

The reason why it was the Liberal Democrats (for the most part) and not Labour who broke the Blue Wall is probably, once again, cultural. While Labour may no longer be the working-class favourite it once was, it still uses the language of the working class and calls itself the party of the working people of Britain. The Liberal Democrats, by contrast, have a cosmopolitan image. Unfortunately for them, so do the Greens. And for voters in the south of England who have become progressive, the Liberal Democrats may not be the ideal candidate. However socially progressive they may be, the economy is another story. Not to the same degree as they were under Nick Clegg and his coalition with David Cameron’s Conservatives, but they are not exactly leftists in the full sense.

Even though the Greens have not always matched their national average in the new southern base of the Lib Dems, I think that is largely because it was a wasted vote. As I said above, that may not be the case next time. And then they could do the Lib Dems some damage.

Scottish National Party: declining, but not yet completely eliminated.

The SNP were going to take a hit, but like this? My goodness, only nine seats? It's rather ironic. They lost a significant place 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. With 30% of the Scottish vote to Labour’s 35%, things may not be as bad as they seem for the SNP, although they still need to rebuild. The next Scottish Parliament election will tell us whether the SNP has returned to a level just above zero. If they lose to Labour again, SO it might well be cooked.

Why pay so much attention to elections in another country?

Two reasons. On the one hand, certain aspects of British politics, such as the conflict between unionists and nationalists in Scotland and the shifts in political loyalties within the Red Wall and the Blue Wall, fascinate me.

The other reason is that it affects us more than you think. I think the similarities between Trump and Farage are profound, for example. So national trends can become global, although not all of them, as I said before.