The left-wing party in the UK has only just won its largest majority in history and we don't have another election for 5 years.
That is largely because the right has split into populist right and centre-right parties though.
That is largely because the right has split into populist right and centre-right parties though.
Opinion polls already have Labour and Cons at an even tie with Reform UK doubling their overall popularity in just 6 months.
All this to say I wouldn't want to suggest that the trend towards nationalist politics ended with a Labour majority but rather that the Conservative Party wasn't sufficiently nationalist enough to entice public sentiments away from Reform UK
“Membership is primarily made up of middle-class professionals and the party's composition has a higher proportion of university educated members than the other major political parties of the United Kingdom.”
These folks are far afield of the traditional Labour working class base, many of whom have defected to Tories or Reform. They are what we’d call the “Acela Class” in America.
Luckily for Labour, they don’t have to make any policy concessions to these voters.
Sure they are. No election for about 4 years. Left wing party with 100% of the actual power.
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.
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.
Left-wing parties got 62% of the vote.
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).
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.
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%.
No UK PM in modern times have had as little electoral support.
Labour aren't impotent due to the 'excellent' nature of our system, they have all of the power.
And as much as Musk blathers, there won't be an election for several years.
And Labour aren't a coalition, it's one party. It's the right that would be fragile if it decided to coalesce.
Reform took from Labour as well, there's no guarantee that an extremely fragile Tory-Reform coalition would work.
Plus Reform have almost no seats, they'd need something way more formal than an a coalition - they'd need to agree not to stand in the same seats.
If the voting priorities changed then not only would Reform get more seats, but so would the actual left wing parties.
In short, you haven't got a damn clue what you're talking about.
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.
Labour won 3 terms in office and got elected repeatedly with Blair on similar rating:
https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/cf_images/2007...
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.