Keir Starmer Elected Prime Minister of UK | Hacker News Reader

Keir Starmer Elected Prime Minister of UK

bbc.co.uk

27 pointsupmind24 comments

Labour won 33.7% of the popular vote and 63.5% of parliamentary seats. The British political system is just as broken as the US one. In 2019 Labour won 32.6% of the popular vote so they have actually not grown that much. It is the Tories that has shrunk due to competition from other right-wing populist parties.

cope.

Voter turnout is also estimated to be much lower than the past few elections. Even Labour has shrunk, everyone else is just shrinking faster.

The Conservatives had a chance to reform things in 2011 with the Alternative Vote referendum but they opposed it. Not only did they water down the original proposal of a referendum on proportional representation, they actively sabotaged their coalition partners at every turn with exploitative and misleading campaigning and, as we learned later, underhanded tactics directly targeting the Lib Dem leader with the support of the PM himself.

Ironically the Alternative Vote system would of likely prevented the Tory parties from having such a bad loss this election (and potentially a majority).

Interestingly, the Tories had the opportunity to fix this, but screwed it up (unsurprisingly, as traditionally they're the main beneficiary of this dynamic).

(Mind you, if they had, they'd probably be looking at a Labour/Libdem coalition or something, which they mightn't like any better)

It's funny to observe that this election is somehow a crushing defeat for the incumbent Tory party and also means absolutely nothing for political change. Since ousting Corbyn, Labour have become hard to differentiate from the Conservatives.

My hope for lasting consequences out of this election is that the Conservatives will continue to shrink into irrelevance.

One has to be completely ignorant of reality or an absolute tankie to make this sort of statement. Labour will be mildly hamstrung by the costs of a decade and a half of Tory failure, but to claim some sort of false equivalence between the two is foolish. The Corbynistas were rightly pushed aside because they, and the tiny leftist rump the represent, have no chance to get elected. Hopefully, now they can disappear into the irrelevance from which they sprang and let the rest of us get down to repairing the damage caused by the previous five years of pain their incompetent campaigning brought about.

Well, they had no chance to get elected except that Labour got fewer votes this time than they did under Corbyn in 2017. So Corbyn apparently could have won an election. He drummed up more support. He didn't win because back then conservative voters were still willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to their party, but the Tories chose to betray their voters and the voters withdrew their support as a consequence.

To put this in perspective, never in British history has a party won so many seats on the back of so few votes.

But you need to get the right people in the right constituency. Reform got 4 million votes.

One likely reason for the voter apathy is that this outcome was seen as such a sure thing; in a more competitive election, like Corbyn's, you naturally expect higher turnout.

(This isn't great, but unfortunately it's the way it goes; if the outcome is essentially inevitable, a lot of people on all sides just don't bother voting. This is particularly the case in FPTP systems, where the outcomes for most constituencies are essentially predetermined.)

It's quite easy to be a tankie since the word has no inherent meaning.

Just because they aren't diametrically opposed, doesn't mean they aren't different in terms of character and policies.

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