TLDR Explains: The Election Results Don't Match the Voters

In this video, we discuss the results of the 2019 general election further as well as examining the system of election used in the UK. The results of the First Past the Post system don't seem to be pleasing a percentage of the electorate, so other alternative systems are being proposed. We talk about what they could have meant for this election and ask you what you think.

TLDR News: What Johnson's Win Means for Brexit & Britain's Future - Explaining Brexit

So the UK voted and chose to elect a Conservative government. In this video, we examine the result, the winners and losers. We also discuss how Johnsons win will affect the UK going forward as well as the Brexit process.

UnHerd: How Boris can cement his new coalition

Brexit, rather like immigration in the past couple of decades, has become an “emblem” policy. Support for Brexit is not so much about the details of EU regulation, rather it has become part of a wider, defensive reaction to the radicalism of the post-Cold War “double liberalism” of free market and cultural opening, represented in the EU by the two central post-national policies of the Euro and free movement. [...]

There will also be genuine conflicts of interest between different parts of the new Tory coalition. The small-state, low-tax Toryism of the affluent suburbs has hardly been in the ascendancy in recent years. But it will have to concede further ground to the new Tory voters who want quite high public spending and good public infrastructure. How much ground it will have to concede will be the stuff of battles to come. [...]

This election result is a big blow to the confidence and cultural power of educated, left-liberal Britain. A new coalition of people from many different backgrounds, by no means all Tories, now has an opportunity to push back against the extremes and pathologies of that cultural hegemony.

read the article

The Guardian: Tactical voting was set to be Remainers’ saviour, so what went wrong?

Why so few successes? It was not the fault of Deltapoll’s data. Almost everywhere, they identified the correct challenger. Most dramatically, they showed rightly that the Liberal Democrats were snapping at Dominic Raab’s heels, despite the foreign secretary’s apparently impregnable 23,000 majority. [...]

Deltapoll’s data showed what tactical voting was up against. Lib Dem supporters were reluctant to help Corbyn become prime minister. Likewise, Tory Remainers feared voting for a badly led Lib Dem party that might support Corbyn. These Tories preferred a Brexit Britain governed by Johnson to a stop-Brexit government led by Corbyn.

The big lesson is that tactical voting needs not just a common enemy, but a broadly common vision, shared by the Labour and Lib Dem leaders. This was the case with Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown in 1997; it was not with Corbyn and Swinson last week.

read the article

Politico: The Labour civil war has already started

The Labour left was not scrabbling to save the blushes of Corbyn. Rather, it was seeking to frame the inevitable battle for the soul of the party in its own terms. For decades, the left longed to hold the levers of power in Labour, and it will not release its grip without a fight.

Blaming the historic drubbing on anything other than the left-wing leader and his policy platform was a no-brainer. The Labour left needed a scapegoat, and Brexit, an obvious factor in the defeat but far from the whole story, was it.

After the 2017 election, in which Corbyn deprived Theresa May of a majority, many critics of the leader in the centre and centre-right of the party sucked up their differences and put on a united front. Despite splits over Brexit deepening the rifts in the shadows, Corbynism became a vast umbrella under which various factions could sit, claiming to be represented by the squirming, triangulating positions the Labour leader settled on over different issues. [...]

The difficulty for the contestants is that Labour is an unpredictable beast. The 500,000-strong membership, many of whom joined the party in 2015 specifically to elect Corbyn into the top job, is pro-EU, pro-left and pro-Corbyn.

read the article

statista: An election battle drawn on Brexit lines

As this infographic shows though, parties whose stance was either anti-Brexit or pro-second referendum actually won a majority of the votes - 51.2 percent. The parties looking to 'get Brexit done' - based either on conviction or the desire to honour the referendum - garnered just 46.8 percent. That though is of course irrelevant in practical terms and something which will be made very clear in the coming weeks as Boris Johnson and the Conservatives press on with their now large parliamentary majority.

see the graph

Europe Elects: Alliance Party of Northern Ireland | APNI | UK, Parliament Election 2019

This is the YouTube service of Europe Elects. Poll aggregation and election analysis for countries in the European Union. Europe Elects introduces the main political parties ahead of the 12 December 2019 parliament election in the UK.

Europe Elects: Sinn Féin | SF | UK, Parliament Election 2019

This is the YouTube service of Europe Elects. Poll aggregation and election analysis for countries in the European Union. Europe Elects introduces the main political parties ahead of the 12 December 2019 parliament election in the UK.

VICE: Boris Johnson Constantly Gets Away with Lying – This Is Why

Today, the problem is of a different order: we are no longer dealing with mistakes. We are dealing with a conservative political elite whose core strategy is falsehood. And – as Marr's interview showed – the normal journalistic strategies are not working.

The authoritarian right now speaks to us through a carefully constructed echo chamber, where partisan amateur news websites, right-wing tabloids and shady "think-tanks" take any given lie, amplify it until it becomes accepted and then force reputable news outlets to respond to it as if it were true. [...]

If they were, Marr would have said to Johnson: "I'm sorry, Prime Minister, you are systematically lying to me in this interview and I am going to read out the facts..." And the next news bulletin would have started: "The Prime Minister lied four times today..." [...]

Even so, there's a lot of room for talented people to move through that system on one condition: you do not rock the boat. People who rock the boat do not get promoted; they are accused of "having an agenda"; their journalism becomes a percentages game: how much crap do I have to produce to get away with one good exposé? And because the pay of senior onscreen journalists – and their managers – is spectacularly good, there is always a lot to lose.

read the article

Wired: Inside Momentum's data-driven march to put Corbyn in Number 10

“Almost every constituency Momentum targeted, we won,” Jeremy Parkin, an organiser with the group, told The New Statesman after the election. Labour lost five seats to the Conservatives, but won 28 from them, as well as six from the SNP and two from the Lib Dems.

This time around, Momentum’s ambitions have grown: they want to paint the electoral map red and put Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10. To do so, their strategy has become smarter and their digital tools sharper. “Politics is inherently digital, and tech is inherently political,” says 25-year-old Jan Baykara, a software engineer for Momentum’s technology team. He’s one of the people who built the group’s new organising tool, MyCampaignMap (MCM). To date, the tool’s been accessed 1.4 millions times (compared to about 100,000 times for MNM in 2017) and used to set up more than 21,000 canvassing events. It’s the centrepiece of the group’s updated mobilisation strategy. [...]

Momentum has explicitly sought out volunteers with technical skills. While Baykara is only one of two permanent staff members in the tech team, up to 50 volunteers have signed up to its Slack channel. Momentum’s flat hierarchical structure means that everyone’s input is welcome. The team has been giving volunteers access to the repo where the code is, encouraging them to constantly propose tweak and changes to the tools themselves. Suggestions can range from whole features to little fixes and performance improvements.

read the article

The Guardian: ‘Completely bizarre’: Grieve campaigns to overturn his Tory majority

The former Tory MP, who was stripped of the Conservative whip by Boris Johnson for trying to stop a no-deal Brexit and in effect barred by his local association from standing for the party again, is not going quietly. To the horror of Conservative HQ, Grieve, the articulate and charming former attorney general, is contesting as an independent the normally safe Tory seat of Beaconsfield, which he has represented for his former party since 1997 – and he seems to be in with a chance. The constituency has included Marlow since 2010. 

The challenge is not a small one, and the mountain he has to climb is partly of his own creation. In 2017, he retained the seat with a huge 24,000 majority over Labour. “This area is Tory, Tory, Tory,” says one of his helpers, Katie Breathwick. “But the reason he can win again is that Brexit has made the whole thing much, much more complicated.”[...]

On Saturday night local Conservatives selected Joy Morrissey, an ardent Brexiter and Ealing councillor, to replace Grieve and take him on. He will not worry too much. He is happy on the stump sticking to his own views and principles, under the banner of independence. “I just think the Boris Johnson deal would be a catastrophe for the country, so what else can I tell people? What else can I do?”

read the article

The Guardian: Survey: Tory poll lead over Labour drops by four points

The Tories still hold a 12-point advantage over Labour but their lead is down four points since last weekend. The Conservatives now stand on 41%, down one point on a week ago, while Labour is up three on 29%.

The Liberal Democrats are down one point on 15%, while the Brexit Party has fallen sharply by three points in a week to 6%, since party leader Nigel Farage announced he would not stand as an MP.[...]

Some 66% of Labour Leavers now plan to vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s party on 12 December, up nine points compared with a week ago. Similarly, 48% of Labour Remainers are planning to vote for the party, sharply up on last week.[...]

Opinium said that there had been some changes among Leave voters that brought their opinion of the two main leaders more in line with their views before the 2017 election. The proportion of people saying they are satisfied with Johnson dropped seven points to 53%. The proportion saying that they prefer Corbyn has risen by two points to 10%, with those saying they don’t know also increasing.

read the article

ChickenWire: UK Election 2019 - The Polls are Right!

So the UK Election 2019 is going on and guess what? ChickenWire is back and Ill be going deep into the election with my research designed for you the voter to make up your mind about who your going to vote for and more importantly who will win. The UK general election 2019 looks set to be a tight race polls are showing Boris Johnsons and the Conservative party are on course to win a small majority or hung parliament. With Jeremy Corbyn in 2nd place the SNP taking Scotland and the Lib dems eating into Labour seats while the Brexit party will eat into Tory seats. But will these third and fourth parties be enough to defeat the two main parties. Well watch the video to find out.