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UK General Election: Keith, Brandon and Einstein's Definition of Insanity [1]

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Date: 2024-06-12  

The UK general election doesn’t have much in the way of “cut through” on this site, despite it being relatively exciting. The big picture is that the Labour party is very far ahead, whether you look at fancy models, or old-school poll averages or the ultimate old-school stat of by-election results.

This is even more remarkable when you take into account that Labour hasn’t been campaigning all that effectively. Labour spent much of the first week fighting its own hard-left faction’s wrecking move, and then its leader, Keir “Keith” Starmer was poor in a TV debate. The driving dynamic is simply that the Conservatives have been historically ineffective in government for the past 14 years, and Starmer’s Labour has captured the typical voter on basically every issue. To use a strange British sports analogy, Starmer is a mediocre driver who has built a really fast F1 car.

With that lead, in, I wanted to point. to a recent NYT article about a “red wall” parliamentary constituency called Bolsover.

Ms. Fleet is on track to win back the parliamentary district of Bolsover for Labour, which in 2019 it lost to the Conservatives for the first time in almost 70 years. Her appearance at the D-Day commemoration was a telling contrast to the Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who skipped out of D-Day ceremonies in France the same day to return to London, drawing a torrent of criticism.

In 2019, the Conservatives won this constituency, and a lot of similar ones that are older, more socially conservative, and less educated, from Labour, which had put forward a bloated, hard left policy manifesto that included a broad spectrum of nationalisation and a shift away from home ownership. Now Labour is back, and a new far-right party, Reform, is soaking up culture war obsessed voters. As the times comments:

Political analysts have likened these towns to parts of the American Midwest where people once reliably voted for Democrats, before drifting toward the Republicans in recent decades. But while many of those converts now seem locked into their party preferences, the British electorate has become more volatile, with declining party loyalty and an openness to insurgents.

I do think that something is missed here. Now that I have been away from the US for a long time, it is more clear to me that Democrats and Republicans sort of run the same campaign again and again. The notable exception would be the Republicans putting forward Trump in 2016 instead of Marco Rubio or another Romney clone. It’s not that the electorate that is stable, but the parties. Further down in the article, we get this:

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