I don’t know anything about UK politics, but one of the challenges of a wave election here in America is that a lot of those members who get elected in marginal districts have very different priorities than the more secure members of the victorious party. If they want any hope of being reelected, they’re going to have to show themselves to be aligned with the interests and values of their constituents, which leads to them making a show of not being “that kind” of Democrat or Republican – e.g. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin or the NY Republicans who unexpectedly won swing districts in 2022.
Of course, if your majority is large enough, it doesn’t really matter what they do. But it can sew trouble down the line by creating the public impression of a party divided and if the majority narrows at the next election.
Much as the US “tea party” faction of 20 years ago essentially usurped “common sense” as the touchphrase for their decidedly non-common and non-sensible views.
So many folks seem to think “common sense” is “whatever Grandad believed.” You know: the guy who lived from birth to death within a 10 mile radius of his home village and ended his formal education at age 14. Yeppers, now there’s an Oracle for the ages for you.
Even before that, the “Common Sense Revolution” was brought by the Ontario provincial tories. It basically transformed the talking points from, “we should implement [bog-standard conservative policy]” to “It’s just common sense that we should implement [bog-standard conservative policy]”.
It occurred to me that conservative movements around the world seem to coordinate their messaging, and it’s not a coincidence that Reagan and Thatcher and Mulroney all showed up at about the same time. Then I learned about the IDU where they basically do just that.
That small change in phrasing you cite effectively de-legitimizes any objection and all contrary views. Anything else becomes, by definition, high falutin’ at best, mostly just cockamamie in the main, and downright traitorous at worst.
Doesn’t seem to work here, my useless local MP was a turd of a man, and did nothing at all, with a very slim majority (and indeed, blocked me on twitter when I asked why he voted to remove the suspension of Owen Patterson for corruption).
Interestingly, I had actually come across Owen Patterson in real life, on my travels down to London in First Class from Wolverhampon (he’s on a train which sometimes starts earlier), he was in the carriage obnoxiously loud on the phone, repeating the usual Brexit bollocks of “The German Car industry will save us”. He wasn’t a minister or anything, but he was a shitty person, and did talk that sort of nonsense.
The polls come just over halfway through the election campaign, after a week in which both the Conservatives and Labour set out their manifestos, and shortly before voters begin to receive postal ballots.
The issue with Right Wing Populism, is that they make promises to appeal to the masses- promises that general they cant deliver- and when they do not deliver- smart voter remember and vote them out.
This happened to trump in 2020, when his promises to bring back the factory jobs failed.
But for some reason the voters in Israel havent figured Netanyahu promises are bogus also.
Left Wing Populism too, though the undeliverable promises tend to mean (at least in the UK) they don’t get into government in the first place (see Corbyn 2019, Foot 1983).
As a parenthetical note for American readers who might be confused by the terminology: In the UK (and elsewhere in Europe), “government” refers to the elected group of political officials who take control of the structure of state administration with the objective of enacting their governing agenda. This can be confusing to Americans who think of “government” as the entirety of the non-private state apparatus, from legislators to judges all the way down to school principals and clerks at the DMV.
To an American, the fact that Corbyn was an elected member of Parliament means he was “in the government.” But in the UK, he’s not “in government” unless he’s in the party which has achieved a ruling majority and thereby gets installed in a ministerial position. Keir Starmer as Labour leader is similarly in Parliament, but he won’t be in government unless Labour wins as expected and Starmer becomes PM.
I am a bit confused about Corbyn’s undeliverable promises. Many things ruined his prospects, mainly him, with decades of contrarianism, his screwing up of Brexit fight (they won, and he wanted to be in charge) and a relatively left wing manifesto (it wasn’t that left wing, really, just more left wing than 2017, which wasn’t really left wing at all).
It seems massively different to the “free gold for all us once all the immigrant swear have gone” promises of the kippers and Fartrages latest parade.
I certainly was surprised by the relative caution of the 2017 Labour manifesto, but the 2019 campaign kept bringing out new promises (free broadband for all?) and no clear idea of how it could be paid for, which played into the standard RW media narrative about Labour right back to the tail end of the 1945 government. Corbyn’s own student union style of opinionating made it worse.
Now, is this accurate? Well, having worked in the UK broadband industry, it’s not that far fetched, there’s been about 15 years of optical already plumbed in.
The British English word “government” can be thought of as more or less equivalent to the American English “administration”. Though there are of course differences, stemming from the fact that in the US, the executive and the legislature are two independent branches, while in the UK, the executive is part of the legislature.
But given enough propaganda power in our modern self-selecting media world, the RWPs can run successfully another 20 years past their unequivocal failures to deliver by blaming that on the bastard LWPs who thwart them at every turn.
Reality as political gravity is indeed an inexorable force as you say. But it’s a very weak and hence slow-acting force. Doubly so when actively counteracted by hot air. Lots and lots of very hot air.
Sunak is the latest in a string of five Conservative prime ministers — including his predecessors, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — who have cumulatively driven the U.K. into a seemingly endless series of crises.
To lance the boil of internal Conservative Party fighting over Britain’s role in the European Union (EU), Cameron made the entirely disastrous decision to allow a referendum on continued membership, and then ran an entirely disastrous campaign to keep Britain in the EU that foundered in the face of Boris Johnson’s faux-populist opposition. Every leader in the eight years since that vote has been consumed by its consequences — by disentangling the country from a half-century of regulatory and legal involvement with the EU and its predecessor, the European Economic Community; by managing the economic and demographic dislocation of the ending of reciprocal rights to live, study and work in any of the 27 member nations of the EU; and by trying to sufficiently staff the chronically underfunded National Health Service (NHS) now that the EU’s medical workers are no longer granted automatic right of entry…Sunak is the heir of all of this incompetence and hubris, the arrogance of a governing class that has so badly lost its way that fewer than one in four voters say they are likely to support Conservative Party candidates in the general election. He came in promising to restore stability — the core currency of Conservative governance across the centuries — yet during his time in office, the economy has stagnated, inflation has remained high, NHS waiting lists for medical treatment and shortages of basic medicines have grown to catastrophic levels, the country has seen rolling strikes in sectors ranging from transport to teaching to medicine to border security, and the Rwanda deportation policy has been mired in a series of ongoing legal challenges.
Given all of this, the election is Labour’s to lose.
This is what Right Wing Populism does- make promises and blame minorities- stoke the flames of xenophobia in the uneducated masses. They promised Brexit would gain the UK so much extra $$ that they could fix the NHS, etc. which has only gotten worse.
And of course Sunak is making more promises he cant keep-He has tacked to the populist right on environmental issues, has doubled down on the cruel — and vastly expensive — policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, and has used the power of the purse to promise tax cuts to senior citizens. Xenophobia and lies about tax cuts- which the Uk cant afford.
And the SMH part is the Tories were not even supposed to be populists they were supposed to be the archetype of capital-c grey suit and tie (and bowler if you went back a few years) Conservatives. Now they are at risk of not even being the main voice of the Right in the near future.
Johnson expelled the core of them when they rebelled over his Brexit plan. They tried creating a new party with some anti-Corbyn Labour MPs, and that withered away with the 2019 election.
I’m curious what the overall vibe is for the true left in the UK. My impression is that Starmer is kind of an unexciting centrist technocrat who is fine selling out the left for short term electoral gain (eg: on trans rights). Given the magnitude of the likely Labour victory, it feels like there should be little loyalty between the left and Labour and an openness to exploring more authentically leftist alternatives as a “protest vote”. My supposition is that this should rebound most in favor of the Greens but the recent polling hasn’t shown any marked jump in Greens support?
Am I off base here in some way? How are people significantly more left of Labour thinking about this election and how are the power dynamics shifting?
Well that remains to be seen. The egomaniac George Galloway (the Farage of the left) is no doubt hoping to pick up support from there for his Workers Party, but since he’s also jumped on some conspiracy theory bandwagons he may have little impact.
With more and more signs of tactical anti-Tory voting, it may well be that the Greens would be limited in their gains - especially where a higher vote for them might risk a marginal seat going back to the Tories. Or there may be so much confidence that there’ll be a Labour landslide anyway that the Greens will get those extra votes, regardless. Or the left might just stay at home. The polls aren’t showing much sign of movement either way.
Is this seen as likely? It feels like the opportunity to help fuel an historic if not unprecedented wipeout would be a pretty powerful motivator. In other words, it’s one thing to just win, but here there’s a chance to really run up the score.