this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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UK Politics

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Westminster voting intention:

๐Ÿ”ด Lab 51% (+3)

๐Ÿ”ต Con 25% (-1)

๐ŸŸ  LD 8% (NC)

๐ŸŸก SNP 3% (-1)

โšช Ref 5% (-2)

๐ŸŸข Green 5% (NC)

via @Omnisis , 06 - 07 Jul

Busy day for polling, and another big but increasing lead for Labour

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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This would be a bad result.

I want the Tories gone. I am content for that to be a Labour majority - although I think we'd get a far better quality of government (including much-needed electoral reform) if Labour were the largest party in a hung parliament and depended on Lib Dem support. Governments that have to convince people other than their own supporters to vote for their policies tend to come up with more rigourously thought-through policies and pay more attention to addressing their critics' concerns.

But regardless of whether you agree with that last statement, Labour winning 535 out of 650 seats (on barely a majority of the vote) would be a recipe for atrocious government. We'd have to rely overwhelmingly on their own backbenchers to be the ones to scrutinise and hold the government to account, in the absence of an opposition presence - and the vast majority of those backbenchers would be people who only just entered Parliament themselves for the first time, many of them likely people who were selected for their seats without expecting to win, and who wouldn't even know what they were doing for the first few years.

[โ€“] thatwill 2 points 1 year ago

A government with a big majority is essentially a 5-year dictatorship. It's the worst of both worlds - not only do they have barely any short-term accountability but no long-term planning is required either.

[โ€“] 15liam20 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe from a purely democratic point of view, however in the current environment it's better than what we have now and it's a reflection of the general mood of the country.

Blair had big majorities and we look back on this as a period of good governance up until the war and identity cards.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Blair had 418 MPs to 232 opposition MPs (including 165 Tories and 46 Lib Dems). So Labour outnumbered the opposition about 2-to-1, which wasn't great. Even then, Blair voluntarily chose to work with other parties, such as the joint committee on constitutional reform.

The Flavible prediction for these polling numbers would give Starmer 535 seats to 115 opposition - so Labour outnumbering the opposition nearly 5-to-1.

And far from working with other parties, Starmer is currently purging long-standing Labour pluralists like Neal Lawson. That's a very different proposition to 1997.

Also Blair went into the 1997 election with 271 MPs (the 1992 result plus defections and by-elections) - so around 1-in-3 of his 1997 party were rookie MPs. Starmer is going in with 195, so roughly 2-in-3 of his MPs would be rookies - yet, to a far greater extent than 1997, we'd be relying on those rookies to hold the government to account as if they were wily experienced old hands.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Flavible:

Party Pred % Pred Seats
CON ๐ŸŒณ 25.0% 129
LAB ๐ŸŒน 51.0% 435
LD ๐Ÿ”ถ 8.0% 29
REFUK โžก๏ธ 5.0% 0
Green ๐ŸŒ 5.0% 1
SNP ๐ŸŽ—๏ธ 3% 31
PC ๐Ÿ’ฎ 0.5% 3

Electoral Calculus (2023 Boundaries'):

Party 2019 Votes 2019 Seats Pred Votes Gains Losses Net Change Pred Seats
CON ๐ŸŒณ 44.7% 376 25.0% 1 325 -324 52
LAB ๐ŸŒน 33.0% 197 51.0% 338 0 +338 535
LIB ๐Ÿ”ถ 11.8% 8 8% 8 0 +8 16
Reform โžก๏ธ 2.1% 0 7% 0 0 +0 0
Green ๐ŸŒ 2.8% 1 6% 0 0 +0 1
SNP ๐ŸŽ—๏ธ 4.0% 48 3.5% 0 15 -23 25
PlaidC ๐Ÿ’ฎ 0.5% 2 0.4% 1 1 +0 2
Other โฌœ๏ธ 1.1% 0 2.0% 1 0 +1 1
N.Ire โฌœ๏ธ - 18 - 0 0 +0 18
[โ€“] zabil 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Con with 1/10th the seats of Labour. What a day that would be.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Those poor LibDems though...

[โ€“] mron 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The UK is effectively an entrenched two party system by design rather than by democratic means.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

โ€Itโ€™s an outlier, itโ€™s an outlier, itโ€™s an outlierโ€ฆโ€

Be still my beating heart.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

"Nothing to report sir; just a meaningless and ever increasingly large and dense cluster of outliers"

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Starmer's "purge" of the left is a vote winner then

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

More like 'anything but Tory' to be honest; it's hard to be worse than The Last Tory Governmentโ„ข, but somehow they keep managing it.

[โ€“] Tagger 1 points 1 year ago

Hard to be worse than any Tory government.

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