United Kingdom General Election: July 4, 2024

[Steve from Lambeth]

So now we have two Harry Hayfield-sponsored 2024 General Election threads. Interesting. Will pretend that the larger, older one is just the speculation thread while this is where all the actual election action happens, though.

[Steve from Lambeth]

Talking of cringeworthy moments (from Sunak and whoever else), what's it going to be like once the Euros actually get going? There isn't much precedent for this. The 1970 World Cup was of course before the 24/7 news cycle, let alone social media. There's already been plenty of stupid photos and posts on Twitter etc from politicians during Euros and World Cups but they weren't during general election campaigns.

If anything, I'd say that the effect from Mexico '70 was quite the reverse: England got knocked out in almost-embarrassing fashion and Wilson got thrown out of office soon enough. (In what remains, interestingly, the only time one majority has been replaced by another majority at an election. Attlee, Douglas-Home, Callaghan and Major all left in the minority; Wilson was re-elected with a minority then re-re-elected with a majority; Cameron had his coalition.)

UK's anti-smoking laws could be lost in pre-election parliamentary rush (Reuters)

No, they won't. All major parties support it and it is almost certain to be enacted in the next Parliament.

The only such consensus I can remember from 2019 was when all parties promised that they would outlaw the keeping of pet monkeys if elected. I still do not know why pet monkeys were an issue - nobody ever brought it up in any other context. The Kept Animals Bill is, ironically, also doomed.

[Steve from Lambeth]

Craig Mackinlay (Conservative, Thanet South, about to become Thanet East) won't be seeking re-election.

Just came across this on YouTube.
Evidently Labour does seem to know very well what it's doing.

I would binge-watch this series. Although surely the title would be more fitting for a series about the period between the 1967 Greek Election getting cancelled on the eve of a sure G. Papandreou victory and the 1981 Greek Election delivering a rightly-deserved A. Papandreou victory.

[Steve from Lambeth]

According to Wikipedia, the Tories are going into this election with 346 seats, down nearly 20 from the 365 they won in 2019. Has any British government lost more seats over the duration of a single term?

The early-stage BoJo Tories were infamously reduced to 282 MPs at one stage, down from 318 after the 2017 election, due to a spate of Brexit-related whip suspensions. I have no idea how many of them were allowed back into the party by the time the election was called, however.

[Steve from Lambeth]

https://x.com/Peston/status/1794488768277123563

So presumably Onward's Director, Sebastian Early Anthony Payne, holds some credit/blame for this latest masterstroke.

I read Great British National Service a few weeks after it came out, as part of my semi-regular scan of the Onward website. My main impression was that it was a somewhat desperate copycat of the new French national service programme. (I also thought that the dark orange colour scheme was unusally energy-sapping, even for a think tank report.)

Sunak's proposal bears no resemblance to Great British National Service beyond the name and the existence of non-military volunteering opportunities. Largely the same rationale - young people are falling behind and missing out on opportunities - is offered for the two programs.

Everyone studying my subject at my university - it isn't history or anthropology - was emailed a link to the website of An Unknown Soldier a few months ago (presumably from the good of his own heart; not related to National Service). His website is mostly arguing that his discoveries will make the entire academic record of human history obsolete, but I do have some sympathy for the arguments About the Army - with the caveat that veterans of the US receive better post-service care, pound-for-pound, than almost any other's.

My line of thinking has always been that should I have any children, I'd like them to get their fitness up to a consistent level such that they can permanently join the armed forces upon finishing school, if they are interested in a substantial tour of duty. At worst, they'll care more about it than I ever did. At best, they will decide to finish university instead, complete officer training, do a generally good job and head up the ranks.

But I suppose the most likely reason for their enlistment would be if they ended up like Amelia from Derbyshire Staffordshire. (Jesus, that case study is two years old and was a fraction of a BBC live blog entry and I still remember it better than literally any A-Level results coverage other than the dreaded algorithm of 2020. For some reason, I had to remind myself that there was a sequel - a characteristic this saga rather inexplicably shares with The Princess Diaries and Gangnam Style.)

Ironically I would probably ask them to look at clearing instead as a first resort; you'd be surprised what you can bank with 112 UCAS tariff points, never mind 144, although I don't remember and I'll have to jog my memory once clearing returns around Election Day. Right, now if you'll excuse the fact that I've done this thread a rather international disservice...

[Steve from Lambeth]

The Conservatives say the scheme would involve 30,000 selective military placements where "the brightest and best" would get involved in cyber security, logistics, or civil response operations full-time for a year.

Everyone else would do 25 days, or one weekend a month for a year, with non-military organisations including the fire service, the police, the NHS or charities.

From a BBC article on this.

And how will they tell apart the wheat (of those worthy to be enrolled into temporary Army service) from the chaff (of those who have to spend 5% of next year milling around their local Cancer Research UK store)?

- Will there be an application form and if there is, how will they assess you?
- Do you have to get a reference from your Head of Sixth Form?
- Is the Government just going to look at your A-Level results and automatically enlist you if you get at least one A* in a mathematical or science subject (which records show about 19,000 students in England did last year)?
- If prospective military service member #30,000 asks to be enrolled in volunteering, how do they get replaced if at all?
- When do you start at university? (This is a serious question. Universities don't teach at weekends so the ~700,000 volunteers can fit their job around their lives. The 30,000 national defence interns will have to commit so much time that their internship is, for all intents and purposes, a state-enforced gap year. The UCAS deadline is October for Oxbridge, January for the rest, clearing on Results Day.)
- Further to the above: WHEN will they tell apart the wheat from the chaff? Results Day is mid-August; National Service begins September 2025.

Or do I have to wait for the Royal Commission to report back?

There's a genuine merit in having 'mandatory' voluntary work. If anything, retirees might get the most benefit in terms of wellbeing. It should fall on everyone to varying degrees.

Instead it's being used as a stick against the 'youth blob' with no payoff. You'll still have to pay student loans...

Anyway, the obvious solution is to exempt anyone who has ever served among The 30,000 of Thermopylae from paying tuition fees at any level. They're smart enough and they're tough enough (and - if my numbers are right - it should cost less than a billion a year). You also get to accuse Labour of being "soft on service skippers" if they ever try to universalise the policy.

[Steve from Lambeth]

I had a dream in which the Conservatives finished with 226 seats and 22.2% of the vote; Labour with 386 seats and 40.1% of the vote; Reform won one seat and 4.1%; the Lib Dems had 30 seats, the SNP massively underwhelmed, and people were congratulating someone else on almost successfully predicting that Labour would get less than 40%. Make of this what you will.

[Steve from Lambeth]

https://twitter.com/DerbysPolice/status/1797013089017106619

Wasn't voter ID supposed to prevent this?

[Steve from Lambeth]

WPB has 200 candidates? Wow; Galloway was only promising "dozens if not scores" a couple of months ago when every man and his pet labradoodle thought there was going to be an October election.

[Steve from Lambeth]

Rishi is currently campaigning at the Henley Regatta and being photobombed by Lib Dem rowers. Hilariously out of touch but if the Tories are this worried about Henley publicly... where on earth will they be sending the cabinet? Castle Point?

I mean, it is very "out of touch" of LDHQ when you consider that the boat was being piloted by none other than the Lib Dem deputy leader. The BBC's coverage admits this. I'll be the first to accept in relief that at least it was not the actual Lib Dem leader.

But seriously - this is just tacky and reminds me of when the freaking Democratic National Committee did a fly-over of the first Republican debate last year to refer to prospective GOP primary voters as "the extreme MAGA base." Both were examples of literal advertising, approved at the very tip of the organogram, disguised as grassroots activism by some hopeless slackers who may or may not even hold party membership.

[Steve from Lambeth]

Just to follow up on beesley's point, it looks to me like the Lib Dem strategy is to grab attention, and then pivot to Davey's biography and their big push for social care reform.

Davey's had the most comprehensive experience with social care of any politician of my lifetime (father dying when he was five, being a young carer for his mother until her death from cancer when he was 15, and now involved in round the clock care for his own disabled son, and wife with MS), and it's hard to think of a better messenger for that campaign.

I imagine we'll see a lot more like this from them: (Davey ad)

You call it big. I call it woefully unambitious. Free personal care is the law in Scotland, was proposed by Corbyn's Labour for England, and will probably be passed into English law within a couple of decades on the current trajectory no matter what Davey says.

I'm surprised that the Lib Dems are costing their promises to introduce free personal care and increase the carers' minimum wage by £2 - from £11.44 to an indicative £13.44 for over-21s - at a mere £2.7bn, funded by reversing Hunt's cuts to the bank levy.

Labour costed free personal care at £11bn in 2019. The New Economics Foundation and Women's Budget Group estimated that making all adult social care free would cost £19bn in 2022 money, and indexing carer wages to the Living Wage Foundation's Real Living Wage an extra £14bn; keep in mind that, in 2024, the National Living Wage is £11.44, the RLW is £12 outside London and £13.15 inside it, so a £2 increase would take the Carer's NLW above any RLW.

I do think that massively expanding the scope of all adult social care would be a net positive for the country, despite how much it would cost (the equivalent of four International Delivery Serviceses). As I've said, just promising free personal care strikes me as unambitious when it wouldn't be implausible to go even further on that front; a couple of left-leaning think tanks did, post-Corbyn at that.

I don't think there would be much of a point in designating a minimum wage just for carers: we don't have a minimum wage for supermarket workers despite the oodles of abuse they've faced since circa June 2020, for bus drivers despite buses being absolutely vital to the lives of certain rural communities, nor for healthcare workers for obvious reasons (and also because they are often salaried!). The principle today is that we're moving towards everyone facing the same minimum wage and the same pensionable age; there's no good reason to reverse that.

Apparently (I read this on r/ukpol as a disclaimer) the visas afforded to social care  and NHS workers is something like 200.000 in the last few years, yet the backlog is only reduced by 30.000. that means 170.000 people arrived to bolster the NHS and social care but ended up where exactly?

The UK has historically not imposed caps on visas (like the US has done with its Green Card per-country caps). The Conservative Party, and the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, have called for a "migration budget" that would introduce such caps but it's unlikely to pass for obvious reasons.

There’s an old clip of Starmer saying it’s “odd” he’s been made a QC, because he “used to campaign against the monarchy”, from the deleted scenes of the McLibel documentary.

Had a hunch it might resurface eventually, and per Politico, it’s become part of a Conservative online targeted-ad campaign, costed at over £15k, and aimed at scaring older votes into believing Starmer is a radical republican...

Had assumed we’d get a media round of “Starmer is a socialist, atheist republican” to scare the pensioners, but looks like it might be restricted to Facebook, who are basically the key audience for that message.

The Treason Felony Act remains valid English law and, about ten years ago, the Home Office had to remind people that the government had no plans to strike it down. I'm surprised he hasn't been strung up and taken to court for this.

On the subject of Politico, they're saying that the Labour manifesto will drop on Wednesday. No link because it's part of their Politico Pro subscription, which is available to you for the low, low price of... erm, they don't say. I'm assuming it's for enterprises only. Why you'd make an article about the Labour manifesto available to enterprises only, I don't know. I certainly haven't seen anything about it in The Guardian.

On the subject of The Guardian, however, they're saying that the Conservatives just want to double the High-Income Child Benefit Charge thresholds across the board. I honestly think that just scrapping the HICBC would be a better idea than this - it's a legacy of austerity and we moved past that circa 2018 when everybody was focusing on Salisbury and Chequers and Harry and Meghan instead.

[Steve from Lambeth]

I'll say it again - what I find so interesting about the UK elections this year is that Conservatives are rightfully being punished for things. Like, this is how things are supposed to work in politics - conservatives keep messing up, and voters are reacting to that rationally.

It's such a complete difference from the U.S.

The Conservatives have been in power for 14 years though which is longer than any party has been in power here since 1952

The last UK government not to have lasted "longer than any party has been in power here since 1952" was Labour in 1974-79.

[Steve from Lambeth]

I wonder if things could possibly have been worse if Truss was still leader.

I have persistently believed that Liz Truss would have dragged my beloved Conservatives to around 26-28% by Other-May Mayday Day. The reason I've never said this out loud is because I normally stick to discussing the American elections.

[Steve from Lambeth]

Warning about every poll etc but hilarious that the Tories are running a presidential campaign around someone so disliked

I'm curious what a "presidential" campaign means in a UK context. How exactly would the Tory campaign look any different than it is now if they weren't running one? Obviously you need to promote your leader, but would it be more policy-based rather than focusing on Rishi doing lots of appearances and meeting with voters in different constituencies?

Labour hasn't run a policy-centred campaign since Ed Miliband, the Conservatives probably not since the Invitation to Join the Government of Britain.

I expect we will get some window dressing (booting out the remaining hereditaries, age limits etc)

Hmmm. This is one of the predictions of all time.

NEW: Conservative MP Andrea Jenkyns has used a photo of Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage on her election campaign leaflet

Why was my first thought that Dame Andrea has greatly changed her hairstyle from the glory days of December 2019, a point of time since which approximately 105% of all human beings have decided to get their hair done?

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.

Especially given the body of parent-voters who, for their own benign or otherwise reasons, want to know where their child is and be able to contact at any given time. Even in school.

My parents called reception between Years 7 and 11, when it was fine to use your phone in the school playground. I resented their making me bring mine to my school's sixth form, when phones had been tacitly banned, advertisement of the actual ban buried under any number of fancy schemes at some point during Key Stage 4. (And keep in mind that I did not go to one of "the best schools." This was literally Cornwall.)

[Steve from Lambeth]

Pure curiosity: are there any 'star' (non politician) candidates running who people not in the U.K would be familiar with or a good chance they'd be familiar with (some BBC foreign correspondents have run previously.) Like any musicians, actors, football players, authors/famous academics, Richard Branson, J.K Rowling...

Niko Omilana.

[Steve from Lambeth]

The 7 Reform seats are :
Ashfield
Clacton
Exmouth and Exeter East
Great Yarmouth
Mid Leicestershire
North West Norfolk
South Suffolk

How is Reform winning Exmouth? Isn't that the same Exmouth which Claire Wright, not particularly well-known for being a populist firebrand, almost won in 2019? Can we please not get MRP polls where all the lines of questioning look like this?

Which of the following candidates standing in the Klondikeshire constituency do you intend to vote for in the July 4th General Election?

John Connor (Conservative)
Harry Potter (Labour)
Vito Corleone (Liberal Democrat)
Emma Bovary (Green Party)
Humbert Humbert (Reform UK)
Carrie Bradshaw (Workers' Party of Britain)
Homer Simpson (Independent)

[Steve from Lambeth]

Survation has the Tories on 0(!) seats in Wales. Is this a live possibility or another example of MRP oddities?

Realistic. I think they will hold Montgomeryshire but a wipeout is very plausible and Montgomeryshire is the only seat they are at decent odds to hold on current polling. Maybe Brecon at a push but Labour seems to have given the LDs a free run there so the LDs should win it with tactical votes.

And you don't even mention the obvious issue with the man us lot have put up in Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr. Good Lord.

[Steve from Lambeth]

i notice it also shows reform second in Truss's seat nearby

Did Ipsos ignore Bagge, the Independent Conservative, in their polling? Why do professional MRP polls fall into the same "every race in each nation is being contested by essentially the same parties"/"Labour wins Islington North by a huge margin" trap that everymen tinkering with Electoral Calculus and PrincipalFish do? At this rate, we might as well have OnePoll the world-famous novelty pollsters doing the MRPs; they're trusted by everyone from the Walt Disney Corporation to, erm, Equals Money.

This is absolutely disgraceful. It is also obviously rather stupid for other reasons and, I suppose, interesting for the level of panic implied.

Why was the first person to discuss this leaflet on anything approaching a noteworthy scale that guy from British Future rather than an actual Dudley constituent? (My apologies if the British Future guy lives in Dudley, though.) This reminds me more than anything of that one time last year when H&M in Australia were successfully accused by the (UK citizen, UK resident) founder of Mumsnet of putting out an advert that sexualised young children, without any major intervention from any Australians.

Also, Kashmir is a totemic issue for some - although far from all - Indians and Pakistanis in the Labour movement (the debate within the Conservative Party is close to non-existent), enough so that the Corbyn-era manifestos included a paragraph emphasising Labour's hope for a peaceful resolution to that dispute. It is universally considered not to be a political issue that will ever lend itself to dignity and, as memory serves, all past attempts to drag it out into the open during election campaigns have met with a similar reaction in principle (although not to the extent shown here).

[Steve from Lambeth]

It's a 2015 SLab redux.

Image link (for logged-out users)

[Steve from Lambeth]

If Mercer does hang on then it will likely be in vain as he will then presumably be unseated by an Election Court. Utterly bizarre stuff.

I consider myself fairly well-read on British politics, more than anything other than maybe football, but I don't actually know what an election court is or what it does. Imagine how much more our Americans must be suffering...

[Steve from Lambeth]

This Express article is a perfect demonstration of inept Tory campaigning, and I'm a Tory. Rishi Sunak here is going after Kier Starmer because he "didn’t just oppose Brexit. He voted to block it 48 times in Parliament and energetically campaigned for a second referendum with free movement of people."

Meanwhile, if Starmer wins the election, his Home Secretary will be Yvette Cooper. EU Exit Day was delayed multiple times - from March 31st to April 12th to October 31st to January 31st - in large part because Cooper, alongside the now-disgraced Oliver Letwin, repeatedly authored and rammed through Acts (sometimes with barely one day of debate in both Commons and Lords put together) to delay the deadline.

Why has Cooper's name not been mentioned by CCHQ once in this whole shenanigans?

As an interesting aside, in 2001, Tony Blair was going to deliver a speech to the TUC Conference in which he was going to outline the UK's roadmap to Eurozone membership. This would have worked out nicely had the speech not been scheduled for literally an hour after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. The Conference was cancelled and the speech was never delivered.

[Steve from Lambeth]

The funniest part is that looking over it is that it... broadly speaking checks out?

I'm surprised that Labour doesn't have more of a stronghold over ale drinkers. CAMRA abandoned their cask ale crusade long ago in favour of "live beer," which is essentially any beer with greater than a de minimis amount of yeast living in it. (For verification, see this article of theirs from 2019, before the most recent definition was issued.)

It's been tilting pretty heavily on DEI in recent years (this isn't related to the live beer shenanigans): at last count, the non-paywalled section of their Learn and Discover page included such articles as "Ukrainian Golden Ale," "Diversity, beer and cider," "Women and Cider," "What was the colour bar?", "An Introduction to Fire Brewing" (which, despite what you may have initially thought, leans massively on how women brewed beer using this method many centuries ago) - and, of course, "What is live beer?".

In April, its chairman Nik Antona rather openly bragged that Naked Ladies beer "was removed from eligibility for inclusion in our Champion Beer of Britain Competition in 2022, following complaints from members of the public." And the Hole in the Wall pub in Bodmin, after being awarded CAMRA's "best pub in Cornwall" award last year, was defrocked and removed from the national competition after Nazi uniforms were found on display there - despite the landlord arguing that they were more or less spoils of war and in no way an endorsement of Hitler and friends.

At this point, CAMRA has essentially given up being the defenders of cask ale that I imagined them to be even before I reached drinking age, instead choosing to be a general club of beer enthusiasts with nothing else, apparently including a membership active enough to enforce its hardline anti-misogyny rules, really going for it. It is also, far and away, the second-biggest non-brewery name in the world of British beer (Wetherspoons is #1). You'd think that ale drinkers, more than lager drinkers, would think that CAMRA - for all its newfound blazing social activism - still represents their interests better than anyone or anything else.