happy Tories Out day! the UK general election went swimmingly and the centrist Labour party won, in a landslide, with the largest seat majority since 1832!
it's not a left wing party winning but it's a helluva lot better than the Conservatives
if you're interested in how Labour won when the Tories have been comfortably in power for 14 years, user MedhaosUnite over on r/OutOfTheLoop has given a pretty good rundown that should make sense even if you're not familiar with UK politics:
Answer: Buckle in. This is gonna be a long one.
The Tories weren’t like super popular, but they were viewed as the better option across almost all of their elections:
They came off the back of Labour becoming unpopular off the back of 2008’s financial crisis and won in 2010.
The Lib Dems took the brunt of the flak and Ed Milliband made a few gaffes, most notably with a bacon sandwich in 2015
Theresa May calls an election from a very big lead, and then fucks it up by running a very shit campaign, luckily for them the controversial, albeit well-meaning, left winger Jeremy Corbyn couldn’t turn it around in time which led to the Tory minority government in 2017
Popular political funnyman Boris Johnson ran on a “I will get Brexit done” pledge against Corbyn, and thrashed him soundly, leading to Corbyn resigning and the previous majority. Corbyn resigns and is replaced by Keir Starmer
So what went wrong?
There were a number of scandals surrounding Covid and the party, such as Dominic Cummings going to Barnard Castle, but the first domino was the Owen Paterson lobbying scandal, where a Government committee recommended that a member be suspended for lobbying, and Johnson whipped MPs to let the guy off.
Partygate then came out, where it came out that numerous Tories, including Boris Johnson on more than one occasion, had been partying when Covid rules expressly made that illegal. During the inquiry, all sorts of photo evidence came out and the various lies that Johnson told to weasel his way out of it began tanking their popularity (it went from “nobody partied” to “as far as I know nobody partied” to “actually we partied”
Johnson then got caught shielding an MP who was a sex pest (Chris Pincher) and lying about that. This led to his cabinet walking out on him and being forced to resign. Cue a leadership election.
Liz Truss wins the election, beating Rishi Sunak. She and her chancellor put out a “mini-budget” that has a huge number of unfunded tax cuts and she outright says that we’re going down the trickle down economics route. The economy reacts terribly and crashes, forcing the Bank of England to intervene and tanks their popularity even further
Liz Truss fires her chancellor, brings in a new guy (Jeremy Hunt), and then ends up resigning shortly after, famously not outlasting a lettuce that was put up by a newspaper. Rishi Sunak is effectively crowned leader unopposed and is there to try and rescue it.
Rishi Sunak becomes PM and doesn’t really endear himself to anyone. Their popularity isn’t going up and Keir Starmer is playing everything extremely safe to not give anyone any attack lines. Sunak comes across to the public as very entitled and out of touch.
Sunak calls an election in May out of nowhere. He then proceeds to make numerous gaffes, including abandoning the D-Day anniversary commemoration to go record an interview, gets photographed looking like an absolute idiot, comes across as tetchy and out of touch person on interviews (answering “Sky TV” when asked “what did you have to go without as a child?”) and somewhere it’s revealed that his aides suspiciously put bets on the election date when nobody was reasonably expecting it.
At the same time, popular Brexit man Nigel Farage comes out of the woodwork, retakes the leadership of Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party) and starts making the party more popular.
Cue the biggest anti-Tory sentiment ever, an emphasis on tactical voting from the left parties (Lib Dem/Labour) and a significant amount of vote splitting (from Reform and the Tories) and you have a big landslide for Labour.
