It's time to see if the polls are right.
Previously: the voting megathread
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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UK Politics
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Labours majority is huge but vulnerable. It's clear that Reform bled millions of votes away from the Tories.
I don't see how that makes them vulnerable though. I can't see the reform voters going back to the conservatives so reform are going to continue to split the conservative vote forever.
Similarly to what happened with UKIP, the Tories will just take Reforms policies, bring in new further-right leadership and support will come back.
Especially after Labour (who just got elected on a fairly bland centrist manifesto) won't manage to magically fix things in 2-3 years. Conservative media will blame Labour for all the issues (even though most are the fault of the Tories) and Conservative voters will rally around the banner of "Labour out!".
Or Reform just eats the Tories, which seems a but less likely to me, but either way the split won't last.
I think that's right. Tories will move further to the right on immigration and force Labour to move with them. Populism isn't going anywhere.
But one of the main reasons that the conservatives are so unpopular is because they've been chasing the right and leaving the centralist politics basically defended, which is why Labour wandered over there, and they have clearly done well out of that.
They have done well but they only won because Reform stole votes from the Tories, and because of the voting system, those votes go in the bin. Labour barely got a third of the national vote.
That's my point really. Labour's biggest risk is that the Tories become moderately reasonable again. Then they'd actually have to step up.
I'm not convinced that the Tories downfall were their right wing policies, most people are thinking of partygate, Lizz Trusses disaster budget and the cost of living crisis in the ballot box.
I personally think that labour would have won whether they were trying to court centrists or not and labours biggest risk is that the the Tories will mop up the reform vote.
This election shows that the Tories still have a HUGE core vote, these are people that will never vote labour and I think chasing reform voters is a fools errand because it's likely they'll never vote labour either.