This is very true, I chatted at length with my neighbor who lived his entire life in the UK(up to a few years ago) and was shocked how stratified the society is. Basically there is small group of people(who went to Eton, are lords or knighted, from famous families) that form a clique that runs everything in the country. No matter how much money you make or how successful you are, you can never join that circle.
An example was told to me that even David Beckham (famous soccer star) is looked down upon by that segment and does not associate with them and could never join that part of society.
Your mate is also massively over-egging how bad it is, there is still an Eton clique (the present/last government being a good example), but we've had a range of recent prime minister's educated normally, outside of the Eton clique. Brown, Blair, even Thatcher just went to a Grammar school (generally a better school you have to pass exams to qualify for, which is semi-meritocratic, though gamed by the rich)
Our election system is even worse than America's though so we keep getting conservative governments who win 40-45% of the popular vote but somehow get landslide majorities.
Also, what do you mean by "small", it's got 70 million inhabitants. At worst a country with a population of a size of France and Germany might be called "medium".
In the UK, I think Eton is more a symptom than a cause. The problem is, London is a world-class city that concentrates the entire political and financial establishment. It's also a city with very obvious parallel worlds, where if you move in certain circles, you meet the same people, so while it is a massive city, it sometimes feels quite small.
To me, the worst part is not that both Johnson and Cameron went to the same school, the same university, or even the same exclusive dining club - the bad bit is that because any given person with political, social or economic power in the UK is so closely connected with any other, there's a real incentive not to rock the boat. You get an enormous amount of cohesion, because if you go around making enemies, you're ultimately making things awkward for a lot of your friends and acquaintances.
On top of that, the fact most people in this world have similar backgrounds makes a lot of them 'on the same page' by default.
While the Bushes, Kennedys, and Trumps came from wealthy backgrounds, the rest of the recent presidents came from lower-income brackets.
Ronald Reagan grew up poor in Illinois. Bill Clinton grew up poor in Arkansas and went to college and law school on scholarship, and his wife grew up in a middle-class family in Illinois and attended public schools.
Obama and his wife grew up middle-class in Hawaii and Illinois, respectively. Biden also grew up middle-class, in Pennsylvania; his second wife came from an upper-middle class background.
In a system with four major parties, 43% is an absolutely huge popular landslide. How can you describe it as anything else? Ten percentage points above their nearest rival? How much more of a majority do you think it could possibly be?
Perhaps you've heard of the problem of "vote splitting":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting
> How much more of a majority do you think it could possibly be?
Well, try 51% for a start.
What vote do you think is being split? Some kind of generic not-Conservative vote? People vote for other parties - they aren't split among a vote not for the Conservatives.
If it really were simple vote splitting then coalitions would form, and they don't - because the other parties aren't a simple platform of not-Conservative and they disagree with each other as much as they disagree with the Conservatives. In fact one of the only two parties to successfully coalesce was the Conservatives!
As a concrete example - the second choice in most parts of Scotland isn't Labour, it's Conservative. Are the Conservatives and Labour splitting the not-SNP vote? If you think that then is any party that stands except the ruling party a vote splitter? Seems a silly definition to me.
> Well, try 51% for a start.
An absolute popular majority? I don't think that's realistic and it would be extremely unhealthy if that was the case.
The left would clearly win the last election, but because of FPP and gerrymandering in the UK, that's been going on for decades, they don't.
It's one of the reasons they don't sort the house of lords, as the likely solution would be representative which would basically permanently end the Conservatives being elected for anything.
I've voted Red, Blue and Yellow over the years, so this isn't bias, I'm just tired of the latest batch of blue as they are utterly incompetent and part of the reason is the present, completely stacked, British electoral system.
If they could do this they'd form a coalition and form a government, but they don't.
Why do you think that is?
Because they don't really share many ideals, principles, or policies. You can look at them and call many of them 'left', but other than that they're not really compatible. Some are nationalist, some are unionist, some are progressive, some are regressive (often within the same party!) What do you think they have in common? What direction would they work?
For example are the Liberal Democrats part of your left block that would win? But when given the choice they coalesce more readily with the Conservatives in practice.
> If they could do this they'd form a coalition and form a government, but they don't.
In order to form a coalition, parties need to collectively have enough elected MPs to hold a majority in the House of Commons. A major point we are making is that the electoral system in the UK allows the Conservatives to gain a disproportionate number of seats, unreasonably preventing the other parties from being in a position to form such a coalition.
As the House of Commons Library itself explains[0]:
"In 2019 the Conservatives got one seat for every 38,264 votes, while Labour got one seat for every 50,837 votes. It took many more votes to elect a Lib Dem (336,038) and Green MP (866,435), but far fewer to elect an SNP MP (25,883)."
(Note that the fact that the SNP are over-represented in Westminster is little comfort, given that they only field candidates in a minority of Commons constituencies, and I have covered the strength of their support in the Scottish parliament elections, with its different voting system, in another comment. Also, the SNP are principled enough to oppose FPTP despite the fact that they benefit from it in Westminster[1]).
To steelman your position a little, perhaps by "form a coalition" you mean some sort of electoral pact before an election. I mentioned in another comment that this has been tried in a few cases, but there are severe political problems with the idea of parties telling their candidates not to stand in specific constituencies, hoping that their voters will still bother to turn out and support the "second best" alternative. Not only is there no guarantee, under FPTP, that this strategy would work, but it would start to make a mockery of the idea of having political parties at all if some of them are actively avoiding standing candidates.
> You can look at them and call many of them 'left', but other than that they're not really compatible.
It's true that there are as many policies which divide these parties as unite them, but it's more accurate to say that a Principal Component Analysis would detect what we call the "political spectrum" of left and right wing parties as the most significant dimension of political opinion.
Just because you would need millions of political parties to fully capture all the individual political positions of every voter doesn't mean that there aren't broad trends, and in particular it is possible that a (weighted) random policy picked from a non-Conservative party could be on average more popular with the electorate than the equivalent Conservative party policy.
Ideally I would express this as candidates, parties, and voters in an n-dimensional space, so we could talk about drawing hyperplanes to define parliamentary majorities, but that's probably too abstract to be helpful. If you haven't played around with Nicky Case's "To Build A Better Ballot"[2], which helps visualise something similar in two dimensions, I highly recommend it.
> For example are the Liberal Democrats part of your left block that would win? But when given the choice they coalesce more readily with the Conservatives in practice.
We really only have one data point for how readily the Liberal Democrats form coalitions with different parties, and the specific political environment in 2010 is really not helpful to extrapolate that point from. Not only would Labour and the Liberal Democrats not have had enough MPs to hold a majority at the time, but the reputational damage of the coalition with the Conservatives has no doubt changed the political calculus that the Liberal Democrats would apply if a similar situation were to happen again.
[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/general-election-2019-t...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/snp-would-vot...
I think there are a few factors that make things more nuanced than "People vote for other parties". As I mentioned in another comment, FPTP leads to constituencies where people feel that their vote doesn't count, so they either don't vote at all or vote for the "lesser of two evils", which both inflates the support for the Conservatives and also prevents new parties from gaining traction.
> If it really were simple vote splitting then coalitions would form, and they don't
That's a great point, but actually the UK has seen informal coalitions with parties standing down candidates in specific seats. This idea is so entrenched in British politics that it even has its own Wikipedia article.[0] The fact that the Conservatives have been the only major party since WW2 to form a coalition government is mostly due to the fact that in other general elections, the party with the most seats hasn't needed to form a coalition (perhaps with the exception of 1974), and it would make even less sense for the opposition parties to form one.
> Are the Conservatives and Labour splitting the not-SNP vote?
If you look at the 2016 Scottish Parliament election[1] (which uses a voting system that rewards honesty better), the Conservatives and Labour received 44.6% of the constituency vote, combined. That is less than the 46.5% that the SNP received. Even if you add the constituency vote share of the fourth largest party (by seats won), Scottish Green, they still don't match the success of the SNP. In any case, vote splitting is not such a concern under the Additional Members System.
> An absolute popular majority?
I apologise if my "51%" comment was unhelpful. You asked "How much more of a majority do you think it could possibly be?" and I wanted to highlight the fact that 43% isn't any kind of majority at all, but maybe you meant "plurality". In any case, I agree that it would probably be a bad sign if a party had a majority of the popular vote, and I would say it can also be a bad sign if a party gets a majority of seats without a majority of votes. Big parties effectively tend to be coalitions within themselves anyway, so I would prefer if the dynamics of those coalitions were played out on the national political stage, rather than as internal party scheming.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_alliance_%28UK%29#...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Scottish_Parliament_elect...
If we had a popular vote then UKIP would've had nearly 70 seats back in 2015, with a huge swath of representation for London. Somehow that sounds even worse than what we have now.
My neighbors wife knew Eddie Redmayne and his brother(I think both went to Eton) and although she said they were nice, they were in a totally different world and only really associated with people who also went to Eton/had large trustfunds. In England you would never see people like Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs etc who came from middle class families move to the highest strata of society and be accepted by those in that highest strata.
I am by no means bashing England, I think the country is awesome and have family that lives there, I am just not keen on the stratified nature of its society.
Old money vs new miney strife is an age old thing and I can assure you none of the tech barons is rubbing shoulders with former barons let alone American gentry.
There isn't "the" Man. Why would there be when even positions of petty power are contested for so tightly and dirtily and there are so many striving to rise? Consequences are not a strong deterrent - if they were the world would look very different.
Wealthy individuals may have power but nobody has control over the a process of contention across all layers with nominal goals served imperfectly with cargo-culting and skewed priorities.
All of this and there is nothing inherently special about the people - human nature and control oppose each other.
Can you explain more about this? Is the UK heavily gerrymandered?
EDIT: It's an honest question. I don't know anything about UK politics, other than that it's a parliamentary constitutional monarchy.
No it isn’t gerrymandered. And if it is very slightly accidentally gerrymandered in some places, that works against the Conservatives - Labour MPs often have smaller constituencies.
So no that’s not relevant or part of what is being talked about here.
The reality is that 43% popular vote for a single party in a system with four major parties, 10 percentage points more than their nearest rival, is nothing but an enormous popular vote landslide. The Conservatives are popular amongst broad sections of society, incomes, ethnicities, regions. All other parties serve limited niches so are fundamentally constrained.
Why don’t they form a coalition? Well I’m not sure they really have deeply shared values to do that. Many struggle to share values internally!
You're right that there is comparatively little gerrymandering in the UK, but the political decision of how many members of parliament there should be does have a partisan bias. The Conservatives had planned to reduce the number of seats in parliament, which would have the effect of making each constituency (district) bigger and thus more rural. They had to abandon that scheme, though, after enough of their own MPs feared that their constituency would disappear from the map. There are still other controversial redistricting plans in the works though.[0]
> The reality is that 43% popular vote for a single party ... is nothing but an enormous popular vote landslide.
As I responded above, this is more attributable to vote splitting between parties that are much more similar to each other than they are to the Conservatives, and that collectively enjoy a greater share of public support, not to mention the feelings of tactical voters and non-voters who feel disenfranchised due to living in a "safe seat".
A more meaningful figure would be that the median Conservative MP was voted for by only 37% of eligible voters (in the 2019 general election), although both that number and your 43% are less than the popular vote share received by the loser of the 2020 US presidential election.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/02/uk-governme...
Long story short; it’s complicated.
It’s not entirely related wealth or education but they are big factors.
You can’t join the aristocracy via wealth alone.
At best you’d probably end up upper middle class if you were educated i.e. Public School followed by Oxford or Cambridge. Maybe your children or grandchildren could if you really have enough money. Becoming an MP would probably help you turn money into a title.
“Public” schools, like Eton, are the fee paying alternative to a “private” tutor. They’re not be confused with schools “for the plebs”.
You’ll certainly need land if want to join the Gentry.
Traditionally, the difference between a Forest and a Wood is that the Forest was once land populated by Commoners (that’s the middle and working class) that someone in the Aristocracy put a fence around and claimed exclusive right to hunt deer on.
To this day councils have to pay people to walk the ancient Footpaths and Bridleways every year to stop would be aristocrats claiming the as part of their land.
And if you wear brown shoes and a white shirt to the wrong interview in the City you’re not getting the job.
As I said, it’s complicated. Complicated and silly.
This is why when britain passed 100,000 coronavirus deaths, with the worst death rate in the world, nobody resigned, and nobody called for anybody to resign.
The BBC is part of this kind of tight, teflon kernel that's at the heart of why the UK is such a dysfunctional country these days.