British Politics Guide

[Ares Land]

Congratulation to the Brits for getting rid of the Tories; I hope Starmer proves at least halfway competent.

[jcb]

So Farage becomes an MP.

Can somebody explain why Nigel Farage is leading the Reform Party now? Wasn't he leading UKIP a decade ago? Why did he switch parties? And doesn't the Reform Party basically want the same things that UKIP wants?

[Ketsuban]

For all intents and purposes, Reform UK is UKIP. Farage jumped ship because once they got what they wanted - the UK is formally independent of the European Union - UKIP has no real reason to exist. It might as well be a rebrand as far as he's concerned.

[Raphael]

This would be more fun if Starmer wouldn't be a transphobe.

[Raphael]

The TUV gained a seat over in Northern Ireland? Not fun.

[MacAnDàil]

Anyway, the main story in terms of actual votes seems to be Conservative voters moving to Reform.

A bit, but more moving to Labour.

[Raphael]

Anyway, the main story in terms of actual votes seems to be Conservative voters moving to Reform.

A bit, but more moving to Labour.

Huh? Labour's share of the vote hardly went up. In constituency after constituency, Labour's vote didn't change too much, Reform's vote went up a lot, and the Tories' vote collapsed.

[zompist]

Anyway, the main story in terms of actual votes seems to be Conservative voters moving to Reform.

That's part of it, but the Conservatives lost more (19.9%) than Reform gained (12.3%). So the right wing in total lost 7.6%.

But the raw vote total kind of doesn't matter, because FPTP plus the extreme regionality of British politics means that raw votes tell you almost nothing about seats. The Labor share of votes is 33.7%; its share of seats is 63.6%... almost double. (Compare the 2020 US election, where Democrats won 50.3% of House votes, and 53.4% of House seats.)

If you felt like going through 650 constituencies, you could do some alternate-world analyses based on the Conservatives getting all the Reform votes
... but that wouldn't really mean anything, because an election only tells us about the world it's run in. In that alternative world, is Nigel Farage popular, and happy to support Sunak? Would the 3.5 million LibDem voters, in the face of a united right, be quite so eager to skip over Labour? Who knows.

[Raphael]

But the raw vote total kind of doesn't matter, because FPTP plus the extreme regionality of British politics means that raw votes tell you almost nothing about seats.

True, but I'd argue they do tell us something about why things happened the way they did, and also how much the various people involved should worry about the future.

[Raphael]

I'm starting to wonder what's going on.

[Jonlang]

Many in Wales are celebrating the fact that we no longer have any Tory seats in Wales, which is true of Westminster, but not of Cardiff. The Senedd still has 8 Conservative seats for at least two more years. Saying that, Welsh Labour have been abysmal in Cardiff and though you may think having a Labour Government in Wales and now in Westminster they'll be able to work together. The problem is Welsh Labour (and Plaid Cymru) are far too interested in identity politics, and "progressiveness" that Welsh people are getting seriously pissed off with real problems not being addressed. Vaughan Gething, our current First Minister, is a repugnant individual with a serious victim mentality - he and Lenny Henry would get along great. Voters aren't interested in having the first black something, the first trans something, they want to be able to see a doctor, they want to be able to see a dentist, they want jobs, they want better infrastructure; but what do they get? – 20mph speed limits because one of the minister's cousins was hit by a car in 1973 and had he been driving at 20mph his cousin may have survived. So Wales is going to be stuck with the same incompetent buffoons in Cardiff regardless of who sits in Westminster.

[sangi39]

One takeaway is that Labour's actual absolute number of votes during this general election is down 557,040 in comparison to the 2019 one, despite the comparative 1.7% rise in proportion of total votes

The Lib-Dems had a similar result, with absolute votes falling by 195,379 from 2019, but seeing a 0.6% rise and a pretty big gain in seats (especially compared to the number they held in after the election in 2019)

The SNP vote almost halved (I think largely going to the Green and Labour parties, but not 100% sure at the moment), and it lost 80% of its seats.

I haven't seen anyone looking into why this might be, but I've seen suggestions that voter apathy might be one influencing factor, while the new requirements for voter ID might be another (apparently polling stations might have been asked to keep count of how many people they actually turned away, but I haven't double-checked that yet, but it would be interesting to see the impact if any figures do get published. I definitely know people who voted in 2019, but didn't this time around, because (for whatever reasons) they didn't have a valid form of ID

If you adjust the current vote totals to account for the lower voter turnout, Labour and the Lib-Dems get a 6% rise each, Green and Reform(assuming Reform is the successor to the Brexit Party) increase their respective voter shares by 2.5 and 7 times, and the SNP and the Conservatives are almost halved

Just throwing numbers at the wall, let's assume that every single new vote for Reform, and for the Lib Dems (again, adjusting for voter turn-out) came from the Conservatives, that still only accounts for 67% of that loss (Reform on their own manage to take 63% of that loss though, so it's definitely a chunk). Now, if all of those remaining lost votes went to Labour, that's too many if we take for a moment that Labour had no vote losses at all, by around 1.5 million votes. The Green party increase (adjusted) is around 1.2 million votes, which could potentially suggest a chunk of Labours previous voters (especially from the Labour left) went ahead and switched over to the Green party this election, and the numbers were made up by migration away from the Conservatives

This does seem to fit the suggestion that Labour has moved steadily towards the centre, adopting more right-of-centre voters who are disillusioned with the Conservative Party, who have been attempting to move to the right, albeit unsuccessfully, hence the rise of Reform


All of this does, though, point to what Zompist mentioned, that it's at least somewhat irrelevant because FPTP heavily suppresses parties that get a smaller portion of the vote (especially where that voting pool is quite widespread, as opposed to the regional concentration of parties like the SNP and Plaid Cymru) and allows for very disproportionate gain and losses amongst parties that get a higher portion of the vote, especially when votes end up getting split like they have this year

Labour's monumental gain almost entirely comes from the Conservative party's failure to maintain its voters, rather than from any real drive to see a Labour victory, i.e. "Tories out, no matter what", which is pretty meh, really

[alice]

Andrea Leadsom, who was a minister in the Department of Health and Social Care under Rishi Sunak but stood down at this election, says the strong showing of Reform UK so far suggests "perhaps it's that we've not been conservative enough".

Uh sure, lady, that's the problem.

If you can stomach it, visit Conservative Home and look at the comments. It is a truth universally acknowledged that any conversation there will devolve into a vitriolic argument between the following not entirely compatible viewpoints:

1. The Conservative Party would have won the election if only it had moved to the centre and not been so frightened of losing votes to Reform.
2. The Conservative Party would have won the election if only it had stopped being a LibDem tribute act and embraced proper conservative policies like those proposed by Reform.

[zompist]

One good thing about the UK system is the fast transition. Election Thursday, new government Friday.

I'm curious, though: this morning Sunak went to the king and resigned, and an hour later Starmer dropped by to be invited to be prime minister. So for an hour there is no government. What if something comes up? Who can fire the nukes? The king?

(For reference, it appears that here, presidential power is transferred when the president-elect takes the oath of office. Of course the actual administrative transition is more complicated, starting soon after the election.)

[masako]

One good thing about the UK system is the fast transition. Election Thursday, new government Friday.

I'm curious, though: this morning Sunak went to the king and resigned, and an hour later Starmer dropped by to be invited to be prime minister. So for an hour there is no government. What if something comes up? Who can fire the nukes? The king?

(For reference, it appears that here, presidential power is transferred when the president-elect takes the oath of office. Of course the actual administrative transition is more complicated, starting soon after the election.)

The seamlessness in the US is because the POTUS is the head of the military, in the UK The King is the head of the military, at least in name. I'm sure he has generals/admirals that would advise him, but the PM is not - by position - in charge of the military.

[Civil War Bugle]

The Cabinet Manual has a few interesting comments although I didn't notice that it specifically says when a prime minister's resignation ordinarily takes effect, which seems relevant in any circumstance to which the question applies. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... manual.pdf
I think, specifically regarding nuclear policy, that the members of the military who have the capacity to launch missiles (submarine captains, people like that) are given standing orders by the sitting prime minister on what to do in the absence of other orders, and that these are effective until new orders are issued.

[doctor shark]

One good thing about the UK system is the fast transition. Election Thursday, new government Friday.

And even in the aftermath of the recent times a coalition/confidence and supply agreement was needed, it was concluded rather quickly: in 2010, for example, the election was on 6 May and the government agreement by 12 May. It took a bit longer in 2017 for the confidence and supply agreement, but, still, you had the election on 8 June and the agreement reached on 26 June. Though I think this is really a function of the swing-y nature of the FPTP system in the UK...

In contrast, the proportional system in the Netherlands led to a government formation that took about eight months... and it's already devolved into fighting, but that's maybe for a different thread.

[sangi39]

This could be a "strictly speaking, but", but the MP in my constituency announced, on the day the election was called, that parliament has been suspended, and that, within the confines of the law, he was only an "acting", MP, not an actual Member of Parliament, meaning that, for those forty some odd days, he could only really deal with emergencies

I don't know how much this might be the case in the US, but in the UK it seems to be the case that, beyond things previously established (like paying people) and emergencies, the government and its machinations just kind of don't exist? Like, our general elections, from what I can remember, have an upper bound on campaigning (I think it's like 2 or 3 months), so a short term temporary shut-down of government is just sort of the thing, whereas in the US, at least for presidential elections, you've got like a two-year build up. You can't shut down governance for that long every four years

The "quick turn around", then, I imagine, is literally because a) things already half shut down, and b) pretty much every party leader is poised to win (as Masako said as well, we have the odd situation of having the fact that people need to ask someone else to form a government that exists outside of that system). I'm fairly certain, although could be wrong, that there's also a two-week-long limit on "forming a government" that the Commons accepts? So that might speed things along a tad

[Raphael]

I don't know how much this might be the case in the US, but in the UK it seems to be the case that, beyond things previously established (like paying people) and emergencies, the government and its machinations just kind of don't exist?

In the US, there is always a Congress in office (it never gets dissolved, just newly elected) and a President in office.

[Raphael]

Do I get this right that 9 out of these 14 years of Tory rule happened because too many people thought Ed Miliband looked weird when he was photographed eating a ham sandwich?