General British politics discussion thread

Think they tended to come 2nd to Labour. Hopefully a CSV dataset will be released in the next few days so can find out for sure..

Lots of the London constituencies had 10k swings to Greens. That wouldn't happen if it wasn't a nailed on Labour landslide. It's one of the many reasons vote share is pointless because people are just playing the game in front of them.

But now that it's Labour who benefits the media suddenly have a problem with FPtP.

Yeah, but I'm not sure that it's the kind of support that he can sustain, much less build on. There's a fair history in the UK of third parties climbing to 12%+ of the vote and declaring that all is changed, changed utterly, only for the bubble to burst at the next election. As we can see, 12%+ of the vote gets you bugger all seats, and correspondingly little influence in Parliament, and next time round the voters who voted for you question the wisdom of voting for a party that has delivered so little.

I'm inclined to see the vote for Reform as largely a protest vote. It's a right-wing and/or alienated protest; those protesting from the a left-wing perspective will have voted Labour. But next time round right-leaning voters will be able to protest against the government, and to rather greater effect, by voting Tory. The Tories and Reform will be competing for the same space, but the Tories will be the official opposition with c. 130 MPs, at least some of whom are sane, and Reform will be a marginal party with 4 MPs, all bonkers. It's not a great position from which to build a famous victory.

The UK electoral system — which the Labour government will not for an instant consider changing — strongly entrenches two dominant parties, and freezes out all others. You can establish a permanent position for yourself as a minor party if you have a strong regional appeal (and nearly all parties that have managed this have been nationalist parties, one way or another) but moving from "established third party" status to one of the two dominant parties — jumping from 12/15% of the vote to over 25% — is next to impossible. It's happened just once in the two hundred years since the UK became a semi-democracy.

What Farage has achieved so far — which is quite a lot — he has achieved by influencing the Tory party to shift its position. I think it's actually going to be much harder for him to do that now that he and they are competing head-to-head in the opposition space; the Tories have a vested interest in differentiating themselves from the Faragists so they can exploit their much stronger institutional position.

FPTP is a weird one. On the one hand he is not better than Corbyn and had better timing. On the other a labour landslide was assured and so a lot of independent and green voters may have felt more comfortable value voting for their preferred candidate. They also seemed to have focused resources on less sure seats.

So it is hard to say if it would have turned out differently under a different voting scheme or a different set of circumstances.

They polled worse because the massive London and urban majorities felt comfortable voting for smaller parties.

Corbyn was way more popular but with a smaller cohort. Ide love to use this as a big fuk you to the anti Corbyn crowd but it just isn't.

its also weird that each constituency only elects one MP

I hope Ian Paisley is squirming in his grave this morning

Im delighted to see the Lib Dems doing well.

Ed Davey played a blinder

Disappointing Streeting hung on, but hopefully he had a bit of a squeaky bum.

Interestingly, a not insignificant amount of the supposed 'Red Wall' are very right wing in fact : voted for Johnson's Tories in 2019 and now Farage's Reform.

Been a racist bigot isn't location specific - there is no clustering of racists. Reform would have done nearly as badly under PR.

Agree that the split vote has been what's driven the landslide win but I also think the fact that the vote share hasn't grown much is actually a really big opportunity for Labour.

Starmer seems like the good sort. I think he will be really sensible and make sensible policy decisions. If he can get modest wins with the boat crossings the channel and waiting lists in the NHS then he can potentially really solidify his case for another term beyond this one. I think the protest vote can be brought on board relatively easily.

The most satisfying result of the night (as in unexpected), for me, was Leicester South where the Shadow cabinet member Ashworth was unseated by an independent standing against genocide

As for the SNP, it was galling to see the architect of the downfall being paid thousands by ITV to provide her deflections live on air

Kuenssberg looks like she wants to chin someone