The Left didn't really "win big" in 2024; Starmer's Labour got fewer votes than Corbyn's 2017 bid. Labour swept parliament purely due to the Right splitting between Tory and Reform, and the spoiler effect of FPTP.

The right didn't split. Reform hardly existed at that point because the Tories called a snap election with nearly no notice specifically to stop Farage organizing in time.

What happened is simply that conservative voters stayed home. Massive vote abstention.

Thought I'd check, seems the right wing lost about 25% of their votes (though from a high starting point) and the left wing stayed about the same (gained 5% if you count the Greens). Votes for each party, change 2019-2024 (based on aggregate vote counts from Wikipedia):

  - Labour lost 0.5M votes (2024: 9.7M)
  - Conservatives lost 7.1M votes (2024: 6.8M)
  - Reform (new party) gained 4.1M votes (2024: 4.1M)
  - LibDems lost 0.2M votes (2024: 3.5M)
  - Greens gained 1.0M votes (2024: 1.8M)
  - SNP lost 500k votes (2024: 0.7M)

I suppose anyone counting Reform on the right should also count Green on the left, so the "left group" (Labour+Green) got more votes than the "right group" (Tory+Reform). The split vote is what caused the massive change in parliament though, a proportional result would be about even left/right with LibDem as kingmakers.

Tis a silly place.

Funny thing is UK companies are offshoring like crazy right now. So hirely talent cheaply is out making things look terminal.

The bull case, given the US betrayal* of the notion of an order that includes Europe, is that the UK establishment will figure out their way to leverage their middle position between Europe and the US to act as a middleman for the U.S. looting the vast quantity of unsecured wealth in Europe and find a way to do this profitably enough to account for their uncompetitive resource import costs without giving cause for the U.S. to cut out the middleman. Like Hong Kong was for China in the 20th century, but with more extraction. Taxes are a red herring.

The workforce and legible but only occasionally officially perverted legal system are valuable, sure, but it's the 2020s. Plenty of places can offer that. As for the pivot to the right, it's a net gain for all UK citizens who don't outwardly present as a minority or can hide it, since they can suck up to one of the few big petroleum and food exporters at a discount.

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* footnote: It should go without saying, but Trumpism is just an expression of pre-existing vast sociocultural forces.

Labour is no longer a leftist party, it is better described a corporatist party. When capitalism is in decay like it is now, a corporatist (liberal, right, whatever) party won't push back against exploitative companies. The people notice the ineffectiveness of the incumbents and vote for whatever the 2nd most popular party is. We'll see if "Your Party" can break the cycle

Agreed. I lean left on the UK spectrum and it was the first time I voted other than Labour in a GE. The walk-back on stuff like tuition fees and childcare was untenable, as was ordering MPs to stay away from picket lines. The nightmare continued with winter fuel payments, welfare "reforms" and a lack of leadership over small boats (which are not a pressing matter despite the frenzy being whipped up by Reform).

The UK has a lot of problems, but taxing the rich too much isn’t one of them. This is a shallow analysis.

If I had to pick one obvious economic problem with the UK it would be the vast economic disparity between London and most of the rest of the country and the unwillingness of successive governments to invest any significant amount of money in tackling it.

There is no cheap solution. Cutting taxes on the rich won’t magically grow the economy. That requires actual investment. However, as Liz Truss showed while trying to do something different, it’s very hard for the government to invest when any increase in borrowing leads to panic and a crash in the markets.

The Truss event was due to crap regulation and bad moves by the BoE. The UK bond yield is now higher than it was during the Truss spike which according to Labour "crashed the economy". Actual cause of the problem was a 2008-style blowup in pension related securities.

> Actual cause of the problem was a 2008-style blowup in pension related securities.

Any recommend readups like that? The Big Short certainly both entertained and horrified me with the insane games these sort of gamblers find.

I don't have a recommend read but a quick search showed this:

https://www.pensions-expert.com/investment/ldi-and-the-liz-t...

Fundamentally it was due to Liz Truss ignoring all the experts who told her exactly what was going to happen.

However, I think the episode illustrates how economic policy can be overly constrained by the short term reactions of markets. Though I think Liz Truss's economic policy was stupid, she was PM and should have been able to execute it. It's good that the policy was reversed, but this happened for the wrong (undemocratic) reasons.

This is flatly false. The Truss/Kwarteng event was plainly and simply that radically uncosted policies put forward by two fucking idiots terrified the market.

But keep talking like this and maybe they will join Reform so you can try them out again.

And yet Labour have blown through all the spending and borrowing levels they proposed without "terrifying the market"?

No, go read up on it. There was a chain reaction in the pensions market caused by over-leverage. Similar issue to 2008. Truss wasn't aware of it.

Now that doesn't excuse over-spending. Of course she should have been cutting costs rather than just lowering taxes. But apparently there aren't any British political parties willing to lower costs. Eventually the IMF will have to force the issue.

Truss wasn’t ‘aware’ because she ignored the warnings that she received.

Why hasn’t the same thing happened under Labour? For various reasons, (not least that their economic policy isn’t stark raving bonkers), but largely because they’ve taken very explicit care to reassure the markets and make sure that no-one is surprised or alarmed: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/18/infrastructu...

She wasn't given any warnings about the LDI crisis, by universal consensus. She has also written about how the the first thing anyone told her about the risk buildup in the pension sector was the moment it happened.

Same thing hasn't happened under Labour because steps were quickly taken to end the crisis in the pensions sector. But the underlying problem remains that high spending isn't viable forever.

FWIW, Labour's economic policy is much worse than Truss' ever was. UK is heading for a massive crisis that makes the mini-budget LDI blowup look like a storm in a teacup. Labour have not only not reassured the market, they are actively antagonizing it as can be seen in the yields that are now persistently higher than during Truss. Labour backbenchers won't let the UK cut spending and bondholders are starting to think they won't get their money back. They are right to worry.

Lots of people told Liz Truss that the budget would lead to a crisis in confidence in the markets. Even more people would have told her if she hasn’t decided to go ahead without an OBR assessment.

Whether or not someone was able to foresee the exact specifics is irrelevant. Everyone who knew anything knew that the budget would have catastrophic consequences.

You don’t have to like Labour’s economic policy, but it’s rather a weak argument to insist that it will eventually lead to an even bigger crisis that the Truss-induced crisis that has actually happened. So far it hasn’t. Isn’t economic policy essentially the art of delaying crises, in any case?

> Reform UK is highly likely to win the next election.

No it is not highly likely at all.

People who say this simply do not understand the depth of the structural challenge involved in getting from four MPs to 326 (or 325 or so if you delete the odd non-active MP).

Even if they get close but no cigar and secure a coalition it would be with the Conservatives, whose failures will not be forgotten soon.

I think it is wholly possible, alas, that Reform will see a hundred or so MPs and be the official opposition. But it should not be overstated that the Liberal Democrats will sooner offer to be in a coalition with Labour, and the country tolerate that again from them, than allow Reform the chance to undo Labour's work.

And that is before you consider that, ahem, the shine is off Reform's chums in the USA already and that situation is not going to get better soon. Reform would need a massive amount of money -- Musk money and sketchy crypto money, basically -- to get anywhere, and Trump's orange thumb on the scale with US social media firms. And we don't like that stuff. I cannot stress enough how badly that kind of intervention would go for them.

There are not many people in the UK who would say that Starmer's win was a "huge win for the left". Especially Labour voters. The "left" doesn't have much to do with it. Centrism, sanity, and the hope for an end to grift and stupidity and cruelty do. The failings of the right -- of idiots like Liz Truss and Brexit -- have more.

Reform fielded a candidate in essentially every constituency in 2024 and got five elected. One of them is sitting as an independent already because he's under investigation for corruption.

Yes, Reform got a huge swing in the local (council) elections, and some people think that is predictive. But historically it's nowhere near as predictive as Reform voters would like.

You might be behind the times. Current polls show Reform gaining a huge majority and the Conservatives dropping to a few dozen seats if an election were held tomorrow. Labour would also be slaughtered.

This is predicated on something the polls do not and cannot convey: the selection of electable candidates. This is imaginary.

Reform fielded candidates in essentially every constituency in 2024 and only five of them were elected. One is already sitting as an independent because he’s being investigated for pretty serious fraud and the party will not stand by him.

Again: the polls do not and cannot reflect just how difficult it would be to get from four MPs to 326.

Candidates don't matter much. Labour routinely put forward absolute loons and they get elected anyway. The lack of seats in 2024 is because the election was called with three weeks notice and Reform didn't even exist at that point. Getting any MPs at all was remarkable. Since then Labour have messed up so badly that people are saying they will vote Reform without even knowing who the candidates are.