Labour won the election, but Starmer’s approval rating is already down to 27% after just six months. https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/dissatisfaction-starmer-reaches-.... That’s not surprising given that Labour got half a million fewer votes than it did in 2019, when it lost in a landslide, but won anyway because of infighting among the right wing.
That’s what I meant when I said nationalists have rendered ruling parties impotent even when they can’t outright win the election. Similar things have happened in Germany and France. In Germany, it took the right splitting and a stoplight coalition of greens, neoliberals, and socialists to cobble together a majority. In France, it took a coalition of communists, socialists, and centrists. It’s hard to actually govern when the winning side has little in common other than opposition to nationalism.
And any leftist/centrist coalition is fragile, relying on infighting among the right. If Tories became a strongly nationalist, anti-immigration party, they could probably win. Same thing for CDU. That’s already happened in the U.S. GOP.
There was an objective left-of-centre majority in the 2024 UK election if you combine vote shares of all left-of-centre parties. The combined right managed only 38% vote share.
Only if you - unlike most people in the UK - consider the Lib Dems, who have governed in coalition with the Tories - as a left-wing party. Something most of the UK left, and quite a lot of Lib Dems would find mutually offensive.
Also Austria. The phenomenon of bizarre unworkable coalitions forming to try and keep out right wing parties is found everywhere in Europe. The left and old right (now usually themselves centre left) would rather have no government at all than one that includes anti-migrationists.
But the UK doesn't really follow that trend. Labour isn't a coalition, it's a unified party with a large majority that can do what it wants. It's deeply unpopular but that doesn't translate to weakness.
> Approval ratings are stupid. The 27% on a ~65% turnout roughly corresponds to the % who voted for them
That’s the point! Labour can win the election under the UK’s rules but at the end of the day the Labour government is immediately unpopular it doesn’t have the support of anything close to a majority of voters.
“Coalitions” exist in politics regardless of the election rules. In the U.S., parties have to form internal coalitions. In Germany, parties need to form coalitions between multiple parties. In the UK and Canada, a party can win a majority of seats without anything approaching a majority of voters, but that’s not sustainable. Nationalism eviscerated the traditional Labour base, which is why they lost in a landslide in 2019. In the long run, a party can’t government with a sub-30% approval rating. What’ll likely happen is that you’ll get a game of ping pong where Labour just gets voted out in the next election.
And that's assuming these ratings last to the election and aren't a reflection on one thing, the budget. If the real economy improves then his approval rating will too.
This is nonsense. Labour have a huge majority, there is no coalition, and their fall from popularity is 100% their own making and largely down to their own left wing policies (increased taxation, lying about it, bungs to unions, increased workers rights) and perceived corruption due to freebies (clothes, glasses). Labour basically ignore the right wing as irrelevant, Reform are only currently a problem for the Conservatives, due to splitting the right vote.
Liberal democrats, who got 12.2%, aren’t a “left wing party.” They were in a coalition with Tories from 2010-2015. The current leader of the party served in the Cameron government.
From a left-wing perspective it does not feel correct to describe Labour policies as enacting "left wing policies". The Winter fuel payments are the biggest example, whilst the two-child cap and the stance on Israel are right up there.
This version of Labour has been against the left of their own party and trying (unsuccessfully) to court the right.
They would call it centrist "practical" "adults in the room" or whatever, while those 'left' behind simply see it as a slide to the right.
It looks like they want to be more like the Democrats in the US who are roughly where the UK conservatives used to be before everything shifted rightward.
(Of course left/right is a simplification we can substitute ordinary folk vs vested interests).
The Democrats in the US are still to the right of the Tories in the UK.
Your analogy is fatally flawed.
Ask a Democrat where they stand on gun control. Ask a Tory.
Ask a Democrat where they stand on nationalisation of George Washington University Hospital.
Ask a Tory where they stand on the privatisation of St Thomas' Hospital.
Right wing infighting is one reason. But not the only one. And claiming it is, is just distorting reality to make a political point. Turnout, Liberal Democrats and more, all those matter as well.
>Labour won the election, but Starmer’s approval rating is already down to 27% after just six months. https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/dissatisfaction-starmer-reaches-.... That’s not surprising given that Labour got half a million fewer votes than it did in 2019, when it lost in a landslide, but won anyway because of infighting among the right wing.
The "a million fewer votes" is technically true, but misleading. It's entirely driven by lower turnout, not lower popularity. Despite "a million fewer votes", Labour's share of the popular vote actually went up from 32.1% to 33.7%.
So in other words, whether or not you call it misleading, Labour has a massive problem, as replacing the historically unpopular Corbyn only caused Labour to increase 1.6 percentage point over the historically bad 2019 election.
No UK PM in modern times have had as little electoral support.
That’s what I meant when I said nationalists have rendered ruling parties impotent even when they can’t outright win the election. Similar things have happened in Germany and France. In Germany, it took the right splitting and a stoplight coalition of greens, neoliberals, and socialists to cobble together a majority. In France, it took a coalition of communists, socialists, and centrists. It’s hard to actually govern when the winning side has little in common other than opposition to nationalism.
And any leftist/centrist coalition is fragile, relying on infighting among the right. If Tories became a strongly nationalist, anti-immigration party, they could probably win. Same thing for CDU. That’s already happened in the U.S. GOP.