Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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Some thoughts on the UK general election 2024

  1. If Labour receive less than 40% of the vote, as polls predict, this will mean their vote share in 2024 is less than it was in 2017. It will have won far more seats, with a near unprecedented majority likely, but it qualifies the likely claims about the extent of the ensuing mandate. The recent YouGov poll shows 48% of Labour voters saying their main motivation is getting the tories out. 45% of voters think Kier Starmer is doing badly as Labour leader. It’s hard to imagine how a weaker mandate for such a large majority could be possible. Particularly if turn out is as low as seems likely.
  2. If the Conservatives get 22% and Reform get 16% this doesn’t mean the right is defeated, it means the right is fragmented. Furthermore, it is fragmented in a way liable to radicalisation because (a) Labour now occupy what would have once been the territory of the Tory left (b) the link between vote share and seat share will be so weak in the next parliament it makes a mockery of representation. We need to prepare for a united radical right with 40% support a few years down the line.
  3. The success with which Reform have tapped into the radicalising dynamics of the manosphere are extremely concerning. Even if the conservativising effects of age have broken down in the UK because millennials struggle to get on the housing ladder, there are other drivers of conservatism. The leftward orientation of young people in the UK is a contingent fact rather than an immutable law, as can be seen in countries like Israel and Brazil (or the UK in the 1980s if I recall correctly!) when youth were the most conservative demographic. It is easy to see how these cultural forces driving young men to the right could increase substantially if, as seems likely, Labour fail to meaningful impact on the structural opportunities available to them.
  4. You can’t invest under these macroeconomic conditions without growth and you can’t get growth without investment. The likely tweaks they will seize upon (a new wave of private finance initiatives, increasing capital gain taxes, depoliticising international students etc) seem insufficient to solve the underlying problem. If you refuse on principle to upset the prevailing political economy of the UK, you will by definition be unable to make changes of the scope necessary to reverse the doom loop we are stuck within. They have tied their hands in a way which placates the media and the backers but which will leave them unable to address the vast problems facing the country, hence the increasing desperation with which they have sought to stop people investing any hopes of meaningful change in the next government.
  5. I’m increasingly convinced that the apparent direction of travel for Labour will lead to some moderate improvements but in a way which fails to address the underlying problems in British society. The result would be five or ten years of Labour government but with an ever growing far-right better able to exploit the politics of environmental collapse. What we’re seeing in France now is, I suspect, where the UK is likely to be a bit further down the line.

And yet I can’t help but take an immense primitive pleasure in the impending death of the Conservatives in their current incarnation 🥂

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