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A comment on U.K. 30-Year Yield Tops U.S. as Pressure Mounts on Government Borrowing. Parent comment

Re:U.K. 30-Year Yield Tops U.S. as Pressure Mounts on Govern... by HPsquared on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @10:48AM (#44952174)
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.
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Re:U.K. 30-Year Yield Tops U.S. as Pressure Mounts on Govern... by qcnguy on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @03:35PM (#44955425)
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.

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Re:U.K. 30-Year Yield Tops U.S. as Pressure Mounts on Govern... by HPsquared on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @06:30PM (#44956861)
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.

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