United Kingdom General Elections: December 12th, 2019

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It is pretty clear that unless they change something major and fairly soon* that we will start to see, and maybe this will even occur soon as in a decade, a major structural fall in Conservative support; something akin to the declines suffered by the Cold War People's Parties in German-speaking countries. Or, for that matter, similar to the decline in turnouts seen here as the Wartime Generation started to depart in the 1990s.

It is true that people become more conservative as they grow older, but this does not mean that they will automatically become more likely to vote for the Conservative Party. This was not the case with earlier generations, particularly. It has been with older people recently for very specific material factors which cannot and will not be replicated: teachers will not be retiring to golden handshakes and final salary pensions, for instance. That's before we consider the property issues.

Of course this will play no role in the present election.

_{*Which can hardly be ruled out: this is British politics.}

Great post!

Whilst it at present looks likely the Tories will win this election (of course that could change) sooner or later they will lose power for the simple reason that the electorate will be sick of them after a decade+ in power and that's before we even consider any economic downturns that may be on the horizon. When they do lose I believe it will likely usher in a significant period of left rule, probably led by someone more competent and likeable than Corbyn, in which the Tories are confined to an infighting irrelevance whilst the left push through transformational change (e.g. how Labour was in the 80s when the right was in its ascendancy).

Eventually the Tories will have to come up with a way to appeal to Millennial and Gen Z voters (and indeed ethnic minority voters) and if they do they will eventually return to power when Labour has run its course, probably led by a Blair-esque centrist looking person. If they fail to do this however they risk a party like the Lib Dems eclipsing them as the major party of the centre-right (the Lib Dems do appear to be moving in the direction of becoming the party of centre-right metropolitans with their newfound strength in Wimbledon, Putney, Chelsea, Wokingham, Esher etc.)

Of course we could get Proportional Representation by then which would completely realign the political landscape in ways that would be very difficult to predict.

The age distribution isn't simply young vs old though, Conservatives are winning voters from around the age of 45 onward, someone who is 45 will be voting for another 40 years on average, 50 year olds are on average voting pretty Conservative and they will be voting for around 35 more years. Conservatives can rely on voters in their 40's and 50's for decades to come.

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According to the Economist's General Election tracker, on October 30th the Conservatives had a 10% lead over Labour, on November 16th they had a 12% lead. So far there has been no narrowing but Labour still has 4 weeks left to gain votes.

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G. Elliott Morris is a leftist hack it seems, he looks at a model that shows the range of Tory seats between 326-388 and he says he foresees a hung parliament.

 https://twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/1196199682751565828

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That may be true.

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Some thoughts from Matt Singh on how swings are occurring nationally vs in the marginal seats.

https://twitter.com/MattSingh_/status/1196041829533323264

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https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1198360854959403010

Looks like turnout will be high this election as people consider it important.

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It's good to see a lot of voters in the Midlands and North-East finally recognised Labour doesn't like them and voted Conservative, it will be easier for a lot of these voters to vote conservative in the future as they have now voted conservative at least once, hopefully as time goes on, more and more working class voters realise Labour doesn't want them and the party closer to their views is the Conservative party.

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I’m not a corbynite but the corbynites are right that labour lost this election due to Brexit and the legacy of Blair, not Corbyn. If you look at the numbers, a lot of corbyn’s policies are popular, nationalisation of various things polls at 60-65%. In a lot of the northern seats, the disillusionment with labour began to happen under the neoliberal policies of Blair, to some extent this election is a result of Blair’s legacy. If Labour moves in a neoliberal direction they will be beaten even harder, their best bet is to keep corbyn’s economic agenda which is popular at least regarding certain aspects of it and make sure the next election is not about Brexit.

I don’t think Corbyn’s unpopularity mattered because if that was the case the swing should have been uniform, instead it correlated perfectly with the leave vote, the higher the leave vote was, the bigger the swing to the conservatives, this was a Brexit election, the next election won’t be, but labour won’t win it if they take a neoliberal agenda to it.

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Interesting article.

https://unherd.com/2019/12/not-all-remainers-are-liberals/?=frbottom

Basically shows when asked questions like whether gender equality has gone to far or gay equality has gone to far, Tory remainers are about as conservative Labour leavers or Tory leavers and on those  questions are actually somewhat more conservative than Labour leavers. 56% of Labour leavers say they have no confidence in the EU, 56% of Tory remainers say the same. Basically it seems Tory remainers are as culturally conservative and anti-EU as  Labour leavers, probably why Labour couldn't win them over in 2019 was because Labour became too socially liberal, to win over Tory remainers Labour will have to become less liberal on cultural questions.