United Kingdom General Election: July 4, 2024

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

They're trying to lose, aren't they?

Honestly seems that way, doesn't it? Calling the election on a lark when the party is unprepared in over 200 constituencies. Blair-ing "Things Can Only Get Better" over his election call while he was busy getting drenched head-to-toe by heavy rain because No. 10 apparently forgot the concept of an indoor speech after COVID. His Welsh football mistake. Docking the sinking ship at the Titanic Quarter in Belfast because the Tory just had to go on a 4-nation tour like Nixon went to Hawaii in 1960. Trusting Gove to not retire. One-up'ing a tepidly unpopular Starmer announcement by announcing certifiably insane policy. If he's a Labour mole playing the long game, I'm not sure what he should've done any differently to kick the campaign off. I'm just sayin', if we never actually ruled out Truss being a secret Lib Dem mole solely intent on taking the Tories down, maybe we can't rule out a guy who was 16 in 1997 being a secret Blair fanboy either

I think I've said on here before that Sunak has never really figured out whether he wants to be the adult in the room or a red meat-throwing populist.

It's this fundamental disconnect, combined with clearly crap political instincts as well as an ultra-rich person awkwardness that could well turn this into one of the worst campaigns that any of us have ever seen. If the Tories have any sense they should stop him from running this as a presidential campaign immediately.

He has obviously been in Parliament for 8 years & I don't always like the comparisons with the US, but he seems extremely similar to business people who enter politics in the states and waste millions on expensive advisers who tell him different things which leads to them having 4-5 different 'versions'

Was Mitt Romney this bad ? Now that I remember, yes he was that bad.

No, amazingly, he really wasn't. He was brought down by two or three specific, very bad gaffes in what was otherwise a competently-run, if implausibly right-wing, campaign. Sunak is having a "47%"/"corporations are people, my friend"/dog-on-a-hot-car-roof moment seemingly every day.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Some journalists here started talking about Canada 1993. And how Nigel Farages goal is basically to make the Tories lose so that they have to merge with Reform and make the Conservative Party more right wing / conservative and have people like Farage have more influence.

Ultimately, some of the journalists are fags like Andrew Pierce, which is unfortunate, because the non-bender population of the UK is larger than the outside observer might observe due to the assumption that the UK is populated by roaring poofters (not unreasonable given our governing class). It is actually populated by good old boys, nonetheless, the poofters do predominate. Press F.

Ignore the unusual name homosexual c*** factor.

What is this trash?

It seems likely to be an ill-judged attempt at humor. Or at least that's the hope.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

So, he didn't leave the commemoration early to campaign. He... um...

https://twitter.com/johnestevens/status/1798827679158067279

Is Max Bialystock running his campaign?

He's just being consistent. Stop Channel crossings means stop Channel crossings, in either direction.

Was there any commemoration for the Dunkirk evacuation that Sunak missed?

The eightieth anniversary of Dunkirk would have been in late May and early June of 2020, when then-Chancellor Sunak was busy racking up popularity for announcing COVID stimulus policies that he opposed.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I genuinely think after the D-Day sh**tshow the King might want to do Sunak slowly.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I genuinely think after the D-Day sh**tshow the King might want to do Sunak slowly.

I've never noticed before that Hewson himself laughs in this clip. How very Australian!

I do think if they made Cameron leader they could get back A LOT of the moderate Tories who are voting Labour. Enough to win? Surely not even close. But def keep it closer to bring the Tories below a Blairslide

No. Bringing the Tories TO a Blairside is probably a tall order at this point.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Just rubbing salt in the wound at this point 😬

https://twitter.com/politlcsuk/status/1800668636606312481?s=46&t=UeA4vI7CVeO...

It's fascinating that they seem to have decided "f**k D-Day" is something worth highlighting. Is Sunak trying to collect the insurance money on CCHQ?!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Any sense on what is the bare minimum of total national vote support that would likely yield a Labour majority? With the emergence of Reform adding a bunch of wasted votes, perhaps the low 30s?

Without the collapse of one of the two governing parties, recent history suggests 36 to 37%. In both cases the opposition was between 3 and 7 points behind.

If the Tories, Lib Dems and Reform got 20% each, that would put Labour on about 30-32% and they would still get a majority.

If Labour get a big majority from such a low percentage, it would only highlight the absurdity of FPTP

If, but it seems very unlikely to me that they will given that even relatively weak polling has them around 40%.

The recent record for a Labour GE total is, of course, 43.2% in 1997, before which you have to go back to 1966, when Wilson got 48.0% in the era of two-party politics in Britain (this was the first election in twenty-one years where the Liberals had a double-digit seat count).

Labour has never hit 50%+1 in any general election, although in 1945 they did in Great Britain since they were at 49.7% and about 3% of the total vote was in Northern Ireland.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Here's a link if anyone wants to read the 80 page "The Conservative and Unionist Party
Manifesto 2024"

In sum: we'll lower your taxes

We will put our guidance on banning mobile
phones in the school day on a statutory
footing which will require all schools to operate
a ban, as the best schools already do. We will
provide funding for schools to help them ban
mobile phones where they need it. 

Page 19
Tories are really chasing the youth vote.

wouldn't be a bad thing for Labour to endorse.

This is the sort of thing that is pretty straightforwardly sound policy (have you ever tried to get teenagers to concentrate on a lesson? I have) but that starts to be thermonuclear with ordinary voters fast once you get into young enough age ranges.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

So if you plug the yougov poll (the one with Reform ahead of the Conservatives by 1) into the financial times model, it gives you the following seat count:

https://ig.ft.com/uk-general-election/2024/projection/

Labour: 440
Lib Dems: 97
SNP 38
Reform 26
Conservatives 26

The great majority of the Lib Dem seats are in the south/southwest - basically a huge swath of the currently Tory seats which are anywhere south-east of the line from Dover, through London, up to Birmingham.

The Reform seats and the Conservative seats are fairly random in the remainder of the Tory shire seats, though with Reform concentrated a bit more near the Brexit coast/east coast.

It's also worth noting that a huge amount of those remaining Tory/Reform seats are 3 way races between Conservatives, Reform, and Labour, where all 3 parties have support in the mid-to-high 20s. So it wouldn't take much more of a swing to Labour to wipe out many of those remaining seats as well, thanks to the Tory-Reform vote splitting.

Some are also basically 4-way races between Labour-Lib-Dem-Reform-Conservatives.



If you give Reform 1 extra point of support and subtract 1 from the Conservatives (i.e. Reform 20% to Conservatives 17%), then the projected seat count becomes:

Labour: 437
Lib Dems: 97
SNP 38
Reform 43
Conservatives 12


Then if you go one step further and swing a single extra percentage point, then the Conservatives collapse to only 2 seats... The sole survivors are South Shropshire and Rutland and Stamford.

Obviously take it with a grain of salt, because it is plugging numbers from one poll into a model from a separate source. But it is interesting nonetheless, and it is an indication that if Reform can keep picking up support as the Tories fall, we are not far from the point where Reform could start overtaking the Conservatives not just in popular vote, but potentially also in seats.

The polling average overall is certainly not there yet, but if other polls start catching up to this Yougov poll, then we are not far removed from an extinction level event.


And IMO, there is a good chance of this happening simply as a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the media coverage will start to be about the possibility of Reform taking over the Conservatives, and there will be Tory voters who see that news coverage and switch to Reform partly as a result of no longer seeing it as a wasted vote.

Then in the next few weeks more polls could start showing further Reform gains, with a serious possibility of that prompting more Tory voters to jump over to Reform, creating a positive feedback loop of momentum.


This is such a crazy election.



--- edit --- my numbers are slightly influenced by the fact that I accidentally didn't hold SNP and Plaid Cmyru support constant, so those had some minor swing. If you hold their support constant, then you come out with slightly different projections, but with the same general patterns

I got Labour above 1997's seat count at 35% of the vote by plugging in 20% each for Reform and the Tories, 9% each for the Lib Dems and the Greens, 31% for the SNP in Scotland, and 17% for Plaid Cymru in Wales. It has the Tories as the Official Opposition, but only just: 80 seats for them, 64 for the Lib Dems, 33 for the SNP, 30 for Reform, one for the Greens (Brighton Pavilion), three for Plaid (the two big Cardigan Bay seats and Caerfyddin). Labour is at 420 seats (dude weed lmao). Crazy to think about, especially since it isn't exactly unbelievable.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Lol at the Business Secretary arguing with a newspaper.

Wasn't it joked that communists read the FT as it was the only paper that couldn't afford to lie to its readers.

https://twitter.com/KemiBadenoch/status/1801529234919137755?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoog...

idk guys i'm starting to think bojo's 2019 gains might not stick with the tories

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I like the rhetoric about this being a 'game-changing government' that leaves the country 'transformed'. I've heard it before though and it didn't work out though.
https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1805759150321696916

When lawyers talk about "game-changing" and "transformation", it means making sure every legal document has the Oxford comma. or allowing ketchup in the civil service canteens.

There'll need to be fresh leadership if the outdated mess of the British constitutional system is to go.

I really don't think that's a huge priority for British voters this election, but other than that you're broadly right.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Labour are pledged to implement (and seem very keen on) various labour law, social policy and housing/planning policy reforms that could make quite a large difference to how the country functions if implemented successfully. Not been that much media attention on these areas as the media largely finds them boring, but it is stuff that a lot of voters care about.

Do those reforms reach the areas that could be described as the UK's "constitutional system", though? That is what I'm skeptical about, but you would know better than I would.