Guest Post – Tony Jay: UK Election 2024 Catch-Up, Part III

Wrapping up the trilogy.

… Looking over the vote tallies in constituency after constituency, a pattern emerges that will be causing major shrinkage in the corridors of Government – apart for those parts of it who see in it an opportunity for more Drang Nach Rechts energy – because of how thin and ephemeral it makes newnewlabourinc’s victory look. Time and again newnewlabourinc picked up seats because the Tory vote halved and split, but despite all the Lefty-punching and the sucking up to Tory-friendly media by dropping every progressive policy in the manifesto like they were sand-ballast from a soaring hot-air balloon captained by a man who’d just bet his house, his family and his beloved horse Monty on reaching the Moon ahead of the French, those ‘hero voters’ Der Starmerpartei had been pursuing relentlessly since 2020 didn’t necessarily swing their way.

In most cases it looks like a few might have, but not many, while the furthest Right Tories jumped ship to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, splitting the righty vote and letting scores of centrally selected newnewlabourinc candidate-drones squeak in on a plurality with majorities thinner than a Trump intern’s resumé. Back in 2019 the opposite happened, when Farage and Flobalob reached an accommodation that saw the Froggy Fascist’s Brexit Party stand down in Tory held seats while running well-funded candidates in seats where Labour held the minority in the hope they could pick off ‘culturally conservative’ (read fucking racist) Labour voters who they thought would never vote Tory. There’s still disagreement over which side that strategy helped more, but this time around Farage definitely fucked the Right, not the Left, and absolutely crippled the Tories nationwide.

It’s also undeniable that the Labour vote went waaaay down, even though voting against Tories is pretty much the meat and potatoes of being a Labour voter. I guess all those sneering attacks from the Party’s Right painting left-wing, ‘urban’ voters (the Party’s most reliable) as childish emo-brats who didn’t understand politics and should fuck off to found their own loser Parties if they didn’t like the taste of the Plastic Peer’s netherglobes seems to have had the oh-so-unforeseeable effect of causing many left-wing, ‘urban’ voters to either fuck off to found their own Parties or just not vote at all. When the leadership of the Party you usually vote for repeatedly tells you that your priorities (more social spending, fixing the brutal welfare system, repairing the local government funding streams that the Tories broke, cutting off support for Israel and other rogue states, rebalancing inequality in education, etc) are too expensive and anathema to the voters it really wants (economically anxious about immigration, turgid for a strong military, flag-shaggingly pro-Monarchy) their demand that you shut your whining mouth and hand over that vote you don’t deserve but they let you have is… not conducive to enthusiastic turnout. Across the nation turnout was historically low, in Labour areas it was a full 5% lower.

Now, in many tight constituencies where either Labour or the Liberal-Democrats were the main challenger to the Tories, there was a ton of tactical voting. Anything to get the Tories out (and keep Reform out) was one of the mantras in this Election I could really get on board with. The Lib-Dems didn’t pick up a single seat where there was a Labour incumbent, their 64 new MPs (giving them 72 in total) mostly coming from beating Tories around the head and neck with lukewarm abandon, and they were pretty concentrated in their heartlands of the South and Southwest. Labour picked up a good 50% of the seats the Tories lost, mostly across the Midlands and the North, with a swathe cutting out from Labour London (where Mayor Sadiq Khan actually increased his majority despite the hostility from the paranoid cultists down at newnewlabourinc central office) across Essex and Kent and a chunk in the more populous areas of the Southwest.

But, by the mesmeric balls of Hrungulug the Squatter Over Mirrors, the undemocratic nature of it all! Just look at these figures.

newnewlabourinc got 33.7% of the vote but 63.2% of seats at 411 MPs
The Fucking Tories got 23.7% of the vote but only 18.6% of seats at 121 MPs
The Lib-Dems got 12.22% of the vote but 11.1% of seats at 72 MPs
The Greens got 6.39% of the vote but only 0.6% of seats at 3 MPs

But get this:
Reform UK got 14.29% of the vote but only 0.8% of seats at 5 MPs.

That’s right. The Fascist Frog Party got more votes than the Lib-Dems (nearly 600,000 more in point of nauseating fact) but 67 fewer MPs. I mean, fuck the fascists with an endless line of ungreased Hakenkreuz, but that’s unsupportable. You fight the election on the rules as they are, blah blah blah, and all that, but the UK’s electoral system is obviously unfit for service and completely unsuited to the political realignment currently taking place. The two biggest parties got historically low proportions of an historically low vote percentage but between them gobbled up over 80% of seats. The three next largest parties got almost a quarter of the votes between them but got less than 3% of seats. The Lib-Dems themselves got 15 more seats than in 2010 but with roughly half the votes.

In a country where millions and millions of people are coming to realise that they’re locked out of a system usually geared towards schmoozing a few media oligarchs and buying off voters in a handful of target constituencies every five years, it’s very unhealthy and downright dangerous to put a rhetorical weapon like this in the hands of the Far Right. Because if anyone thinks Farage and his billionaire backers aren’t going to blitz right-wing voters with their own version of the Stolen Election myth, I’ve got a couple of bridges and an authentic Da Vinci or three to sell you.

Anyway. Not many laughs in there. Let’s summarise. Remember these are purely my opinions, strongly coloured by my own biases. But I’m also always right, so shake your salt however you like.

Starmer’s newnewlabourinc boosted their percentage of the vote from 2019 by a measly 1.7% while losing hundreds of thousands of traditional voters, but still gobbled up hundreds of seats because the massive, obnoxious, unbearable vileness of the Tory Party drove huge numbers of people to vote tactically to get them out, and the Tories also had the vote-drain of Reform sucking away on their Right like a behind-on-her-rent college student in those films Pastor Mike tells his son about. Come next election newnewlabourinc are going to have been the Government for five years and with their enormous majority of identikit MPs will have been expected to make serious progress on fixing the messes stemming from 14 years of Tory mismanagement piled on to the disaster of Brexit.

I have many, many doubts that this shower are going to do any more than tinker around the edges while Shadow Ministers scheme in the background to establish their own individual fiefdoms in expectation of a leadership election before 2029. Starmer went into this election unpopular, I posit he’ll be even more unpopular before the next one and will be ‘encouraged’ to stand down so that a more media-friendly figurehead can ooze into place. The UK is a severely damaged country, having the national purse strings in the hands of a gimlet-eyed Emo Phillips lookalike with a degree in squeezing the undeserving poor while lavishing doe-eyed come hither and delve into my deep bag of goodies looks at the Titans of Industry is a recipe for fixing fuckitty-all.

Meanwhile the Tory vote itself split down the middle. Thanks to years and years of them being fed increasingly dehumanising crank misinformation from the Great and Good of British Conservatism. Farage’s Reform UK swallowed up the majority of the exodus, but lots of other Tories just turned up the volume on Classic FM to Wagnerian levels and stayed home with a cheeky little bottle or three of Chianti, grousing about pension funds and waiting for their Party to become less of a reeking embarrassment. In the slow-motion Tory leadership squirm that’s currently taking place to replace Sunak (no results until September, probably) most of the candidates are on the Hard Right, with a couple claiming to be centrists and Mel Stride (Who the fuck is he? Sounds like an Australian DJ) trying and failing to straddle both flanks of the beast while looking like a chubby 80’s gameshow host with a Rodeo kink and mobility issues.

Farage is out there in the muck, bulbous eyes barely above the surface, waiting his moment to feed. We all know he wants to be the Leader of a Nationalist Conservative Party for the next election, and chances are he’ll get what he wants. Whether it’s from a Tugendhat or Cleverly victory allowing him to peel off defecting Hard Right Tory MPs to his own Reform UK Party while the Tories sink into 2000s era irrelevance, or one of Badenoch, Patel or Jenrick winning and entering into negotiations to go into the next election on a joint slate. They’ll all be looking at the 2024 results and seeing how many seats the Right – could – have won if their voters had been united under a single banner. It’d just be a matter of which leadership blinks first and takes a back seat. Will it be a Conservative Reform Party or a Reformed Conservative Party?

Does it even matter? No, probably not. The Right will have a shit-ton of money and five years of newnewlabourinc austerity and stroppy ineptitude to run against with, as usual, the backing of most of the UK corporate media.

I could go on. No, honest, I could, I don’t have to be this terse and stingy with words. But I wouldn’t want to outstay my welcome, not when you’ve got all that Harris/Walz momentum and excitement to get back to basking in. What I wouldn’t give for a potential future where power was invested in decent people with a positive, progressive vision of their country’s future and the drive, determination and basic decency to bring people along with them to make it happen. Sounds amazing, but that’s not on the cards for the UK. We get the Light Blue Meanies with their spiteful vendettas and their blinkered obsession with ‘proving’ that 2010’s era fiscal conservativism is always and forever the only ‘adult’ way to run anything.

And when they fuck up, as they always fuck up, we’ll get Frog Fascism and the kind of broad social unrest that’ll make the recent White Power Riots look like chilled-out flower-plaiting sessions at Woodstock.

In all honesty, we’re fucked. Think I may stay up here on this Island and get a job smoking fish.

It Is Finished