The weekly export puzzle:
I squeezed in a 1 degree morning walk/jog early on Friday morning, but the trials I went through, bone-chillingly nightmarish though they were, were nothing compared to what the UK Conservatives had to go through. Let's talk about the election! The exit poll foretold the landslide everybody predicted and, sure enough, it was almost bang-on, missing only in overestimating the Tories and Reform by around twenty and ten seats each respectively.
The right-wing parties underperformed even the already-dismal polling for the Tories, and on just four seats, Reform adds practically nothing to the right-wing bloc in Parliament. However, my hot take is that this election actually represented (even if it doesn’t directly cause) a swing to the right in British politics. This may sound counterintuitive, but let me point to an analogy to explain what I mean.
In the recent South African election, as I've discussed, the country turned left to go right. A third of the centre-left ANC's voters broke away for MK, further to the left. Yet as a result, the country now has an ANC-DA government further to the right than before. The DA barely won any more votes - they improved by a scant 1% or so - but they were the "winners" compared to the previous election. Yet all the movement was happening on the left.
Just look to the previous election in 2019 to see how this logic applies here. For all of Boris Johnson's racism, he espoused an interventionist economic vision on the left of the party, pledging levelling up by investing government funds into communities left behind, like the HS2 transport link. This was his key pitch besides “Get Brexit Done”, admittedly a right-leaning position but a commitment to resort to radical measures to break a long-running deadlock rather than a pledge to throw the country into a Eurosceptic referendum in the first place.
He ran against Jeremy Corbyn, who, of course, love him or hate him, we would all agree was the most left-wing Labour leader since Michael Foot in 1983. The Liberal Democrats placed the issue of Brexit, which cut across party lines, over traditional alignment on the bread and butter issues, and got slaughtered for it. The Scottish National Party ruled with an iron fist as a clearly progressive outfit, and, like in other secessionist regions like Catalonia, independence was coded as left-leaning and unionism as right-leaning.
In short, though the Conservatives won a landslide against leftie Labour, Corbyn's successful campaign in 2017 had in many ways set the table for the debate, just as the Conservative victory (and backlash to Johnson and Sunak’s big spending during COVID) flipped that table and started anew. This year, the Conservatives have been led by their hard-right tail on issues like immigration, the SNP have been thrashed, and Labour have run close to the centre even if their manifesto is more ambitious than Tony Blair's.
Voters have turned to Labour not because they’re inspired by a step to the left, but because they can trust Keir Starmer not to raise taxes or spend a lot more: this is change for the sake of better management, not a bold new direction. The LibDems kind of frustrate my theory. However, I’d argue that, given so much of their success came in Conservative-held seats, they similarly set an overall centre-left direction but won votes primarily by promising to be the common sense adults in the room over any specific ideological commitments.
The left bloc hasn't actually gained votes on net. They've simply redistributed them more efficiently, navigating Britain's archaic FPTP system with excellent strategic nous. Labour fell to 32.1% in Jeremy Corbyn's crushing defeat; now they're at 33.9%, and double the MPs, falling only six short of Tony Blair’s historic high water mark in 1997. Bizarrely, this popular vote result is several points short of how well Jeremy Corbyn did in 2017, even though he was still defeated due to a less “efficient” distribution.
The Liberal Democrats have slunk from 11.6% to 12.1%, yet now they have 60 more seats, a new record! The SNP have slid from 3.9% to 2.8% across the country, but that’s a bit of a fraud stat - in Scotland, where it matters, they’ve fallen from 45% to 30%. Only the Greens have gained big, from 2.9% to 6.8%, and little in the way of seats to show for it at just four. Other minor parties are on marginal amounts of the vote, notable only for specific regional wins like Sinn Féin overtaking the DUP.
Labour would surely have been on track to win this election regardless, given how utterly their campaign outclassed the Tories and their mountains of governing deadweight, but the real movement in this election that produced a landslide was not the Lab-Con head to head, as it was in 1997. (Labour was certainly helped by racing red across Scotland, just as the Conservatives were hindered by being booted down to the last man out of Wales.) It was all on the right. In 2019, Boris Johnson won 43.6% of the vote. This time, they sit on 23.6%. If the left bloc has grown so little, where did it all go?
There are dribs and drabs to other parties or simply staying home, but three fifths of that change can be attributed to Reform UK, who have swelled from the Brexit Party’s 2% to 14.3%. Their primary goal wasn't a big caucus: it was stealing enough votes to cause Conservatives to lose in droves, a sign that the party could not fail to move to the hard right or Nigel Farage would make them unelectable. And so he has: the Conservatives have lost two thirds of their MPs, including half of their Cabinet. It's staggering.
That is at the crux of my diagnosis of this election as a shift to the right - Farage's arguments in the vein of the continental far right worked beyond his wildest dreams, far better than they have the last seven times he has run for Parliament. Even Northern Ireland voted out Ian Paisley Junior as insufficiently conservative in favour of the Reform-aligned TUV. Now the new government come in not only hemming themselves in on budgetary constraints, but also dancing to a conservative tune on social issues, from a commitment to "Secure our borders" to the baffling British groupthink against trans rights.
The election excited, and I thrilled to see the Tories punished for their shocking behaviour. In particular, it was a storybook moment to see Jacob Rees-Mogg's defeat - which I assumed would slip from Labour's grasp - be the clincher that tipped Keir Starmer over the top, which would have been a storybook moment if he didn't ruin it with an exceptionally bad speech. I don't blame anybody involved - all these people had to stay up late into the night and a moment like that is high pressure. His speech, deep in the vein of an already-overdisciplined campaign, had clearly been chopped and changed time and again until he found himself returning to and repeating the same phrases later in the speech after they had already been seemingly resolved.
Yet I don't have high hopes for the new government. Keir Starmer doesn't inspire confidence. Labour's leadership have not convinced me that they understand where New Labour went wrong, let alone how they intend to avoid it, simply promising to be a bit to the left of New Labour and that'll fix it all. (I mean, fair enough given the state of the country to say that simply fixing things is a full enough task for their first term.) Yet we saw with our landslide here how bitterly the public can punish a party handed the power to deliver us from a crisis, who then sit on their hands and can't really explain why they're doing so little. They must achieve visible improvements and put, to lean on a cliche, hard decisions ahead of comforting avoidance of short-term political risk.
The Tories, meanwhile, face absolute hell in Opposition. There's no way they're mentally prepared for losing the levers of government, after the years of entitlement and refusing to apologise. The party has already been ripped to shreds for years now by internal arguments, and frankly I think their only saving grace in terms of avoiding that is how quickly the hard-right will overpower the moderates, left to drift aimlessly around the political scene and sustain Labour and the LibDems.
Above all, we will have to see if the long shot of Nigel Farage merging their parties, with himself as leader, comes true. Even if it doesn't, he is well on track to accomplish the disaster we have seen in other countries like France, where the traditional major party on the right is hollowed out and crippled by their far-right neighbour to be gradually overtaken. However hateable the Tories have been for Brexit, Partygate and Lettuce Truss, better Winston Churchill than Oswald Mosley.
One final surprise rounds out the election. While I invoke the first rule of the blog as per usual to avoid dissecting violence I can't stop myself, the killings in Gaza are also relevant to Western countries insofar as they inspire political movements that call out parties for not doing enough to defend Palestinians. I have been a sceptic of these movements simply because, by a similar logic to how our foreign policy struggles to affect other countries, most voters would think the same and so place humanitarian crises abroad low on their list of priorities.
I didn't adjust enough for two things - one, in countries that aren't New Zealand, they can actually have a significant foreign policy impact on the world; two, whereas the example I'd been thinking about previously was how the Arab American community in Michigan will struggle to swing the presidential election, some British electorates are considerably smaller and thus a far higher percentage of their voter base is those who feel a direct stake in the Gaza war: Muslims.
As always, my mantra is that not every person top priorities a certain issue because their own identity happens to correlate or coincide with it, but a lot of Muslims very keenly feel the fellow humanity of Palestinians and are aghast or outraged at the typical lean of Western parties towards supporting Israeli policy over Palestinian lives. That dynamic played out across several electorates in the UK - which, of course, has a mind-boggling 650 electorates, far too many for me to ever be able to truly track a nationwide election - and, overall, saw success. Indeed, they almost toppled Wes Streeting, one of Labour’s top MPs!
George Galloway lost narrowly, which I'm glad about. Aside from his repugnant views on other issues - I can understand somebody thinking "I'll sacrifice trans rights here for Gazan lives abroad", especially given that Galloway's not going to be the tipping point on the former whereas he's a lonely voice on the latter - Galloway is personally very obviously a repulsive grifter who palled around with Saddam and Muammar. He's a tankie in the true sense of the word and he doesn't deserve taxpayer dollars.
If you'd also like to argue that we should treat Western leaders who frequently pal around with more acceptable dictators as unelectable, consider Galloway's deposal a start. I’d also note the difference that many of those Western leaders tend to help his constituents; I can’t identify what Galloway has achieved at any point in his career as he’s bounded into Parliament then shortly back out again, much like Winston Peters here.
Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, made it back. I'll be keeping a curious eye on him. He's clearly well past his days of greatest influence, and essentially lost the argument over whether he'd been complicit in an anti-Semitic culture in the Labour Party, but there's still something unusual about the exiled ex-leader of a major political party making his way back in on his own. For all that he has an ego and a refusal to take responsibility, his constituents clearly see something in him that the wider public and I don’t.
The biggest surprise of all came in my beloved city: Leicester! Leicester West didn't surprise, but Leicester East and South - both held by Labour since 1987, save for one LibDem year in the latter - were different stories. A pro-Gaza campaign carried an independent to power in Leicester South. And in Leicester East, we saw the unlikeliest outcome of all: the LibDem candidate ate into Labour's vote by campaigning for Palestine, and thanks to this split, Leicester East became the only electorate in the country to flip FROM Labour, TO the Conservatives. I don't have a moral of the story here; I just think that that's funny.
I’m breaking this out separately from the actual election analysis, but I thought it’d be fun to take a look at how this election would have played out under MMP. Of course, the math gets complicated and I’ll have to simplify things down for the sake of this thought experiment, so apologies if the results don’t 100% line up. I’m also acting as if MMP would affect none of the election dynamics itself, i.e all these minor parties and independents still outright win individual seats, making the threshold irrelevant and adding some overhangs. That’s 28 in total, with the vote for successful minor parties + the Workers’ Party (who made it onto the stats sheet I’m working from) outside the “Big Six” consisting of 3.9% or so. We’d be looking at something like:
Party | Seats |
Labour | 202 |
Conservative | 142 |
Liberal Democrat | 73 |
Scottish National Party | 14 |
Sinn Féin | 7 |
Independent [i.e no party] | 6 |
Democratic Unionist Party | 5 |
Reform UK | 85 |
Green | 41 |
Plaid Cymru | 4 |
Social Democratic and Labour Party | 2 |
Traditional Unionist Voice | 1 |
Alliance | 1 |
Ulster Unionist Party | 1 |
Speaker [i.e in the UK, the Speaker runs as an unopposed independent] | 1 |
As I said, the math isn’t quite clean - we end up with 585 seats in Parliament here, probably because I’ve failed to appropriately adjust for the wasted vote - but this gives us a broadly useful overall picture of a proportional Parliament in the UK. Labour's caucus would actually be smaller than what they had after their landslide defeat in 2019, while the Tories would wind up closer to where the exit poll showed them, though certainly this would still be a collapse for them. With the Liberal Democrats bang on target and the SNP getting just a few more MPs, the enormous change here is for Reform and the Greens, who would gain huge numbers of MPs that they have been denied by FPTP.
If we kept the original magic number for a majority (326) this Parliament would be in serious trouble, but if we adjust for my maths errors and just call it 293, there is one pretty clear pathway forwards: together, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens form a left-wing government with 316 seats, certainly not a huge majority but not thin as a wafer either. You could argue that this puts the lie to my "step to the right" argument, but at the end of the day this would still be a world where most of the left bloc hews closely to the centre and two fifths of the right bloc has stepped sharply to the right from 2019. I do enjoy a good counterfactual, even if it’s taken in isolation.
This week's recommendation for what to keep up with is The Rest is Politics. They were brought to my attention by a GOAT debater recently, and I've found them very useful for keeping up with the British election and possessed of an interesting archive besides. Alastair Campbell, former hatchet man for Tony Blair, and Rory Stewart, the Tory who ran against Boris Johnson for the premiership and lost, team up for Britain's most popular podcast. I was really surprised by how easy and interesting the pod is to listen to.
I'd always thought of Campbell as a scowling, sinister eminence grise and assumed Rory would be unbearable - both certainly have a lot to answer for in their careers. I think there's something exceptionally strange about people who define themselves as truly Tory in the sense of play-acting at aristocracy in the 21st century, rather than simply being right-wing. Given their opposite political affiliations, I also thought they'd scrap plenty, which I can't stand. Instead, they're fast friends and it's extremely rare to hear them truly argue, which makes it amusing rather than grating when it does happen. By and large, they have a lot of insights to share from their experiences and stature which feel light-hearted and informative rather than an unsettling peek behind the curtain.
They're down to earth and have really meaty conversations instead of repeating hack talking points, even if they are a little too keen on rabbiting on about Europe. I agree with them, but stop trying to make it happen. It's not gonna happen. All that being said, if you're looking to at least brush up on what just happened in the UK election, check their most recent episodes out! (Or Campbell bickering with Nadine Dorries on live television into the wee hours, that was pretty funny too.)
The answer is Eswatini! Formerly known as Swaziland. I've never known much about the nation, but it's one of those where human history can date back to the very earliest days. Swazi people migrated there in the 1700s, and the Kingdom set up managed to negotiate recognition by the British in 1881 & 1884, followed by having to cede two-thirds of triumviral control to the British and to the Boer Republics. I assume its precarious independence was because neither the British nor Boers dared invade and risk tipping the local balance of power against the others; this, of course, became a moot point when the British crushed the Boers, but so long as indirect rule was working for Britain in the protectorate, they hung onto them separately anyways until independence in the 60s.
The traditional monarchy faced internal pressure to reform through the 90s which culminated with change in 2005 and elections in 2008. They renamed in 2018 to eSwatini (the Swazi version of its English name). Most recently, in 2021, protests, riots, and brutal crackdowns broke out, but the monarchy has yet survived. I'm afraid I don't know much else that I can tell you. They're small, they have one of the lowest life expectancies and youngest populations in the world, they're tied to South Africa in trade and even currency pegging. If you need the pub quiz fact, above all, they remain the last absolute monarchy in Africa!
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