UnHerd: So did ‘idiot voters’ get it wrong?

There are two important ways in which the electorate could be “wrong”: they could vote against their own interests, and they could vote in ways that are morally faulty. It seems obvious that both of those things are possible. According to YouGov, 33% of all richer “ABC1” voters voted Labour, 43% Tory; 33% of poorer “C2DE” voters voted Labour, 48% Tory. Sure, not all C2DE voters or all ABC1 voters are alike, and there were divisions by age, ethnicity and sex as well. But for every Labour voter, there will almost certainly have been a Tory voter whose material and financial interests would have been near-identical. One of them must have been making the worse choice, from a purely selfish point of view. [...]

If the electoral system returns something that doesn’t look “fair”, such as Donald Trump or George W. Bush winning the electoral college despite losing the popular vote, or the Tories getting one MP per 37,000 votes and the Lib Dems getting one seat per 350,000, then that’s just what the algorithm returns. It may be that you can convince people to rewrite the algorithm, but — under the system — it’s the correct output. It is tautologically true that what the electorate elects is elected. [...]

Where does all this get us? Well: obviously, voters can be “wrong”. There’s a whole subset of the electorate called “low-information voters”. God knows I don’t blame them; keeping up with political news is boring, is hard work, and does very limited good in the world. But still, I don’t imagine they do much better than chance at working out what the “right” vote would be. Once you throw in media misinformation — deliberate or otherwise — it would honestly surprise me if a large majority of voters got it “right” by any single metric you happen to choose. I would be totally unsurprised to learn that I got it “wrong”. And voters can be immoral, because, you know, people.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

The Guardian: Swinson’s Lib Dems target Raab’s seat as Tory moderates flee no-deal Brexit

Research by the Lib Dems conducted over the summer has convinced officials to rip up the party’s existing plans and adopt a more ambitious targeting strategy after concluding that it was on course to win more than 70 seats – a result that would represent its best ever return. [...]

An internal memo from June, written by the party’s campaigns director Shaun Roberts, said 76 seats were considered winnable, and a further five percentage point swing brought more than 200 seats into play. However, the party has slipped among some pollsters since the memo was written.

“Of the first 100 seats we can target, most of these seats will come from the Conservatives,” it stated. It called for an immediate “expansion of our target seat list” and emergency selection procedures to ensure candidates were in place by the autumn. It told party staff to “revise [the] general election campaign plan” and ordered new research to be conducted earlier than planned at the start of September. [...]

Peter Kellner, past president of YouGov and a People’s Vote supporter, said: “This polling shows that, in the battleground seats, Boris Johnson’s hard line on Brexit is far from a deal sealer in any early election. Even before a campaign has begun the Lib Dems could expect to benefit from enhanced coverage, and their tactical voting message will almost certainly gain traction. Jo Swinson’s party is well placed to make significant gains at the Tories’ expense.”

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ChickenWire: Why BREXIT Has To Be Done By The Next Election!

Why Brexit has to be done by the next election. The next general election might be sooner than you think depending on whether Brexit get's delivered or not. But what will be the result of that election. Well I take a look back at the by-elections in Newport, Brecon and Radnorshire and Peterborough to work out what these results mean. The Labour Party along with the Conservatives have been consistently losing out with the Brexit party and the Lib dems along with other remain party's like the green party making gains. But what does this mean for a general election well in this analysis we'll find out.

BBC4 Analysis: Going the way of the dodo? The decline of Britain's two main parties.

Recent polling data and election results paint a picture of woe for Britain's two main political parties. Of course both Labour and the Conservatives have suffered periods of decline throughout their history. But arguably never before have both parties been so riven by internal divides and suffered such a loss of public confidence at the same time. Edward Stourton looks to historical precedents for guidance on today's political turmoil and asks if the two parties' decline is now terminal. With Tim Bale of Queen Mary University of London; Lord Lexden, official historian of the Conservative Party; Deborah Mattinson of Britain Thinks; Charlotte Lydia Riley of the University of Southampton; John Sergeant, former BBC Chief Political Correspondent; and Adrian Wooldrige, author of the "Bagehot" column at The Economist

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Al Jazeera: Brexit Britain set to wield little influence in new-look Europe

The Brexit Party gained 29 seats in the new chamber - as many as Angela Merkel's CDU/CSU, and more than Matteo Salvini's League in Italy, which got 28 seats as 34 percent of Italians who voted opted for his far-right, anti-migrant party. [...]

A number of smaller far-right parties across Europe support Salvini's bloc, however, most did not perform well in the elections. Geert Wilder's anti-Islam Freedom Party in the Netherlands, for one, lost all of its seats. [...]

"But ultimately, they don't have the same aims, so it's unclear at this point how much they are going to cooperate. Traditionally, Farage and his colleagues have rarely taken an interest in the works of the EU. They weren't really active in the committees, they didn't hold any of the important roles," she said, adding that it remains to be seen "how invested they [Farage et al] are in the European Parliament". [...]

"[However], the League is much more oriented towards playing the European game. Of course, they have positioned themselves against some of the decisions made by the EU, but unlike Mr Farage, they do not want to undermine the EU and the institution of the European Parliament per se," Frantescu told Al Jazeera. [...]

"A more fragmented EU parliament shows there is more polarisation, and I think that makes for a more healthy debate. But it will also make EU reform much more difficult," Wright added. "There are going to be lots of challenges ahead for the EU and I'm not sure where Brexit sits in that list of priorities."

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UnHerd: Who broke the Left?

In the name of the free market, she trashed the long established infrastructure of care and civility that held us together as a country. Not since the Dissolution of the Monasteries has a whole pattern of social care been so thoroughly and successfully wiped away. In particular, she eviscerated northern working class towns, held together by mining and heavy industry, that were the heart of this country.

Second, my philosophical point: Mrs Thatcher wasn’t really a Conservative at all. She was a turbo-charged classical liberal who believed that the freedom of the individual, and most especially the economic freedom of the individual, trumped all other moral considerations. Setting people free from the state, setting people free to pursue their individual economic interests, this was her guiding idea. And so she took a sledgehammer to all those patterns of community living that held the individual back. To express her mistake philosophically, she confused ‘freedom from’ (any external constrains) with ‘freedom to’ (something that requires a whole social architecture of discipline and solidarity to enable people to flourish and live out their fullest lives). [...]

There are those who will argue the Labour Party had no choice. Its traditional power bases had been so weakened by the Thatcher revolution that it had to find new ways of drawing upon a wider constituency of support. Others, like me, think he sold the pass. And so the Labour party became an uneasy coalition of professional metropolitan liberals, media professionals, techies, academics, journalists; and socialists who looked back to a political philosophy embedded in the factory and more traditional patterns of communal life. [...]

The problem for Labour is that it now looks in two directions and it cannot make up its mind. Liberals face in one direction and Clause 4 socialists in another. The transfer of votes from Labour to the Liberal Democrats during the European Elections – including that of Alastair Campbell – demonstrates the natural affinity of new Labour with liberalism. The story of 20th and 21st Century politics is usually written up as the death of the liberal party after WW1. In 1935, George Dangerfield wrote the highly influential The Strange Death of Liberal England. But he read the rites far too early. Liberalism has decisively shaped both the Conservative and Labour parties. It became the enabling philosophy of late capitalism. And it gradually hollowed-out and replaced the original philosophies of the two great parties of the 20th Century: the conservatism of Conservatives and the socialism of Labour.

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Financial Times: How Brexit has broken the UK's two-party political system

FT political editor George Parker says the European elections have exposed how both Britain's ruling Conservative and opposition Labour parties are 'cracking up' under the pressure of Brexit.

ChickenWire: BREXIT: Remainers vs Brexit Party - Who's Bigger?

Brexit: Remainers vs Brexit Party - Who's Bigger? Who is bigger in the EU elections 2019 in the UK was it the Brexit party, UKIP and other leave parties or was it the combination of the remain parties such as the liberal democrats, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. Well it depends how you tally up the vote if you add up the nationalist parties or not and if you add up Labour and the Tories. In this video I explore in detail and analyse the full results for the UK in the EU election 2019. It looks like Nigel Farag's Brexit party came out on top but does that mean more people support remain or a second referendum or leaving without a deal or leaving with a deal? I also take a look back at Theresa May's performance and give statistical advice on where I think the parties should go.

Channel 4 News: Brexit Party comes out on top in EU elections - ahead of Labour and Conservatives

The results of last week’s EU elections are in: Nigel Farage's new Brexit Party topped the poll with nearly 32%. And the Liberal Democrats came second with 20%, their best ever result in a European Election.

But what does it mean? And how will these results affect Brexit?

TLDR News: What the EU Election Results Mean for Brexit - Brexit Explained

Last week people across the EU went to the polling station to cast the votes for a new bunch of MEPs. The results of these elections could have serious ramifications for Brexit and the EU as a whole. The success of the Brexit Party may push the Conservatives to a more 'hard Brexit' stance. The Liberal Democrats good results might encourage Labour to come up with a more defined, clear position on Brexit.

UnHerd: Are these the last gasps of our old political order?

With Theresa May having failed, so far, to deliver any sort of Brexit, the Conservative Party is getting hit on all sides. Their biggest setbacks were in Remain areas. And among the voters, the most important were not the 18-24-year olds that are generally obsessed over, but the slightly older, 30-and 40 somethings who swung hardest against them in 2017. [...]

But most worrying of all is the fact that the party is now also losing ground among the older and more committed Leavers, albeit less dramatically than it is losing ground in Remainia. Many of those areas where the party lost council seats, or councils flipped into no overall control, had endorsed Brexit in 2016. [...]

But, for me, the most striking statistic of all from the local elections was that the combined share of the vote going to the two big parties tumbled to just 56% – the second lowest figure on record. A bad night Labour and the Tories was a good night for independents, Liberal Democrats and Greens. [...]

As we argue in National Populism, what is happening in Britain and other advanced democracies is that many of our established, older and hence less flexible parties are struggling to absorb and navigate new issues that are cutting directly across their traditional electorates. [...]

Meanwhile, deeper changes in the overall structure of societies are reshaping party coalitions from below, and will continue to do so for many years to come. These drivers include the expansion and now squeezing of the new middle-class, the rise of university graduates, our collective failure to respect and support those who choose, or are forced down, other paths, and the ongoing effects of unprecedented migration and demographic change.

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Quartz: Are the UK’s two leading political parties on the edge of collapse?

“I think it is fair to say that this is the return of at least three-party politics,” political scientist John Curtice told the BBC. “But I suspect that on 23 May”—or the date of the forthcoming European Parliament elections—”we will discover that there are more than three significant players. We may see the most fragmented British electorate since the advent of mass British democracy.” [...]

Since 2016, the year the UK voted to leave the European Union, more than 20 MPs have resigned from roles in prime minister Theresa May’s government over her handling of Brexit. Some of these ministers were literally tasked with its execution, but have found developing a plan that works for everyone, or even has majority appeal, an insurmountable hurdle. May’s repeated attempts to pass her own deal with the EU have been utterly unsuccessful. Now, with less than six months to go before the UK’s new leave date, the future of the party, and its leadership, is far from certain. [...]

The Brexit Party’s only policy is that Britain should leave the European Union, and that it should do so at once, without a withdrawal agreement. Since the party’s registration with electoral authorities in February, polling has gone from zilch to 17%. At the same time, Conservative party support has dwindled, leaving the party conclusively trailing Labour for the first time all year. [...]

But the party’s inconsistent messaging saw it punished at the polls in recent local elections. At present, Labour is pushing for a snap general election. If it wins, its job will be just as hard as the incumbent’s. With Brexiteers across the political spectrum, any deal requires bipartisan support to have a hope of being passed—including a no-deal Brexit. At present, there is no incentive for Corbyn to “sign off” on May’s Brexit. Any pro-Brexit Tory leader is just as unlikely to be prepared to compromise with Labour.

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The Atlantic: Britain Is Rushing to Seal a Brexit Deal Few Support

May needs at least 320 lawmakers to back her deal in a final vote for it to pass. Without a parliamentary majority or a unified party behind her, it’s estimated May can only count on as many as 235 party loyalists, as well as four to five Labour lawmakers. Those who have already pledged to vote against her deal include a group of as many as 40 Hard-Brexit Conservatives, a majority of Labour lawmakers, as well as the SNP (35 lawmakers), Liberal Democrats (12), Plaid Cymru (four), and the Greens (one). [...]

Though May appears to have avoided the high-profile cabinet resignations that have plagued these negotiations, a figure who could be key to the deal’s success in the days and weeks ahead is Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, the prime minister’s pick to usher the deal through to its final phase after Davis’s resignation over the summer. A committed Brexiteer, Raab has been among the most vocal in cabinet against a deal that risks keeping the U.K. closely aligned with the EU. If he is able to accept a provision to maintain some regulatory and customs alignment with the bloc to maintain the status quo at the Irish border, there is a chance others will too. [...]

Ultimately, however, the fate of May’s plan won’t be decided by cabinet, but by parliamentary calculus. Conservative Brexiteer Peter Bone warned the prime minister in the House of Commons on Wednesday that if reports of the draft deal’s contents are true, the agreement could be dead on arrival. “You are not delivering the Brexit people voted for,” he said, “and today you will lose the support of many Conservative MPs and millions of voters across the country.”

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openDemocracy: Why I am not a Liberal and how we need to fight bin Trump and Brexit

I am not a Liberal with a capital ‘L’ because the nature of its embrace of individualism is inseparable from capitalism, and I want to see the replacement of capitalism. By capitalism I mean a world run in the interests of those for whom accumulation is the measure of value and success. I am not saying we know how this will happen or that it will be soon, but I live my politics as a refusal of our present circumstances. In any society, however, a precondition for replacing capitalism is a robust constitutional democracy and openness. Rightly, voters will not trust a more collective form of government without a rock-solid framework of human rights, privacy, active toleration, freedom of expression and organisation and the equality of all persons. Liberty Before Liberalism was what Quentin Skinner titled his exploration of what this might mean. Liberty after liberalism, while standing on its shoulders, might describe my anti-capitalism. [...]

The excruciating paradox of Trumpism is twofold. First, it is rooted in the anti-political, let-it-rip economics of Reaganism and the deceits and over-reach of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld: it is an extreme expression of the deceitful era that gave birth to it. Second, at the same time it rides the rage of opposition to that era and its consequences and presents itself as the most ferocious opponent of the fraudulent elite - which Trump in fact personifies. [...]

This means we have to take Trumpism and the hard right seriously not only as an irrational threat capable of destroying the checks and institutions essential to democracy and liberty, but also a force that does have an empirical claim on reality. Its repudiation of the previous order has some justice to it, even if its response does not. Simply calling for Trump to be stopped is too feeble a response, therefore, and is unlikely to succeed; as Hungarians have just learnt with Orbán and the Brits are learning with Brexit. We have to dig deeper. A process and a claim need to be reversed. It is not credible to call for a reversion to the way politics was conducted before 2016. [...]

At least in his new book, Counter-Revolution, Liberal Europe in Retreat, Zielonka poses the issue of whether democracy and neoliberalism are incompatible. He does not provide an answer; yet he emphasises, correctly in my view, there can be no way forward without a confronting what went wrong. In his article that started these exchanges Fawcett agrees that there has been a "long failure by the liberal centre to keep democratic liberalism in good repair". He provides a vivid list, both conceptual and strategic, from misbegotten wars to the financial crash. Yet the metaphor of repair suggests that these were merely accidents and there were no fundamental flaws with the way the world was run after 1945.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Corbyn Generation

Today, those frustrated hopes and freezing afternoons appear in a different light — as the first signs of the generational divide that has come to define the country. After Labour’s humiliating defeat in the 2015 election, many of those involved in the student protests went on to support Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the party. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, three-quarters of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds voted Remain, while two-thirds of over-sixty-fives favored Brexit. Then, when a snap election was called in June 2017, Corbyn made abolishing tuition fees a flagship policy of the party’s manifesto, and Labour defied expectations to bring about a hung Parliament. Youth turnout climbed to a twenty-five-year-high; the generation gap was the widest since polling records began.

Myers chronicles the trajectory of this privatization push, which began with Tony Blair’s New Labour government — a period in which fees rose to £3,000 and private-sector activity in higher education grew from 32 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2007 (the EU average is 20 percent). The tripling of fees in 2010,” Myers writes, “did not emerge from nowhere.” Now, UK students are saddled with more debt on average — £50,800 — than in any other country in the world, partly thanks to extortionate interest rates that can be raised retrospectively at will. As one of the government’s own advisers on student finance remarked, if a company possessed similar terms they might attract sanctions, perhaps even prosecution. (In the United States, although the cost of tuition varies far more, the average debt burden on students is much lower at $36,000, or £27,900.) [...]

Most significantly, however, the demographic of these protests was different. Like the French student protests in 2005, the 2010 movement brought together a cross-section of poorer city youth — ethnically diverse and more disillusioned — with wealthier, middle-class students. These disparate groups had distinct motivations, but they had a shared feeling of being held in contempt.[...]

Again, this new alliance would endure after the collapse of the 2010 protests, helping fuel Corbyn’s ascendance to the top of the Labour Party. Support for Labour among black and minority voters rose by six points in the 2017 election, while turnout increased to a high of 64 percent. These communities have been disproportionately punished by austerity. Like students, they were asked to bear the burden of an economic crisis not of their making. As early as 2010 the Institute for Public Policy Research found that “mixed ethnic groups had seen the biggest increases in youth unemployment since the recession began, rising from 21 percent to 35 percent in the period.”  

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