For once, people who don’t want to squeeze the poor and pour pressure on the NHS have woken up… not totally depressed.
As discussed in our British Politics thread, despite the high tensions surrounding the election, we still expect you to be on your best behavior when discussing the fallout! Thanks!
HERE WE, HERE WE, HERE FUCKIN GO
yassssss
Very much hope that the literal millions of new Labour voters are energised by how close many of these races are and how far many seats swung: there’s no such things as a permanent safe seat if those swings were to happen elsewhere.
As a Scotsman, I am actually more depressed now, because unlike in England the change went the other way with more people voting for the Tories and not less.
I’m honestly finding it hard to get too excited from this. The positive side is that May called an election to strengthen her mandate and ended up barely able to scrape together a government. That’s a pretty hilarious self-own, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Tories are still in charge. I’m happy that Labour made such major gains, but I’d be happier if they actually won.
I’m also extremely upset by the result in Scotland. The Conservatives made big gains, the SNP are talking about dropping plans for another independence referendum, and Scottish Labour ran a campaign purely on ousting the SNP and picked up enough votes from Corbyn supporters to be rewarded for it.
I don’t feel like any of this is a positive outcome. The most we got is another reason to laugh at Theresa May, but not one that would really change the course of the next five years.
I completely disagree! I think this election gives us as Scottish leftists infinitely more solidarity with English people than I thought could exist, and unites us behind a common, suddenly very electable party and manifesto. This is something great to build on that couldn’t possibly have existed without the election.
Edit: I can also see this DUP/Tory alliance collapsing within a year. There’s plenty more to come, I’d be astonished if we went another five years with no new opportunity for a new government.
Edit 2: @Wracketeer, I voted Labour, and made sure to call the Scottish Labour headquarters and inform them it was because of Jeremy, not their toadying.
I find it really hard to imagine that it’s gonna be another 5 years before the next GE, really. The Tory/DUP position now is so ludicrously unstable, and the internal backlash against May is just starting.
I also voted Labour in Scotland, 100% down to Corbyn and not the Holyrood lot. My hopes are that with the indyref2 squabbling and pro-union tactical voting out of the way for a bit, given how much ground the SNP have lost, Labour could make some gains against the Tories based on their Westminster position, manifesto and leader.
I think the next 5 years have completely changed.
The Tories don’t have the votes any more. They’ve got a weak agreement to prop them up but that’s it.
Far more importantly, they’ve got a Labour party who were divided over the direction of the party and saw their message jump from 30% to 40% of the voters. No more can party membership be called some unrepresentative tiny slice of a few hundred thousand activists. The party have a purpose, they have a manifesto to continue to iterate forward and unite behind. They have a weak government who now have to try and string along a tiny group of extremists and MPs who have to deal with up to 12 years of weak rule without splitting and not even with the expectation that they’ll have a strong majority after the next GE.
And the billionaire press barons have been shown their power is over. They no longer are kingmakers who get their private meetings with those in power and dictate policy while acting as state media to disseminate propaganda. They’re as dead as the trees that go into their product.
We are in a completely different game. The Tory dismissive attitude that power was their right is either going to get dropped extremely quickly or the Tories are going to continue to find things crashing down around them.
Imagine how many Labour votes there could be if the PLP had united around the platform and voters knew their vote would definitely count because swings really were on the cards. Whenever this government collapses, the next GE could easily be a Labour landslide. (Not to get all privileged/accelerationist on this but…) The Tories have nothing left in the engine and things with Brexit only get worse from here if they continue on their current path and expose their economic incompetence. The infrastructure they’ve neglected will continue to deteriorate.
Also at some point the Tories are gonna have to pivot from ‘we’re allying with and relying on the DUP, unequivocally the most homophobic party’ to ‘Ruth Davidson’s our leader now’
Thats only true for JC but the fact remains that Scottish Labour is a trash fire and the reason Corybn isn’t currently PM. Dugdale said Corbyn was bad for the party and she ran her whole campaign on opposing the SNP instead of the Tories, even telling the voters to go Tory simply to block them. If they hadn’t blocked the SNP like that then we could have been looking at a Labour-SNP coalition and not a Tory-DUP one.
As a resident of the USA it is very nice to see a pretty far left politician shown to be very popular, under Corbyn leadership the party overall gained just over 3 million votes from their 2015 vote total to now. That is definitely encouraging as is the fact that it is almost all due to young new voters, hope them changing this election is focused on by the dems in the states, swing left and have good plans not just oppose the party that has power and you can energize the non voters.
Congratulations for no longer being under the tyrannical rule of a woman who is literally cartoonishly evil. As a Canadian who lived under the dreadful decade of Harper’s robotic disection of what made my country great (and his own cartoon villainy), I know the feeling of relief when their word is no longer law. She might still be your PM, true, but this will keep her in check from destroying your country for the foreseeable future.
May your official opposition live up to the expectations, your voters be energized going forward, and your next election come swiftly.
Today I realised that Theresa May is an anagram of Smeary Hate
Corbyn has really brought about something very special, over 70% turnout amongst 18-24 years old. Personally I’ve never felt more energised or hopeful about politics, happily donated to the party which I could never have imagined a few years ago. Was nearly crying this morning it was so nice to feel a sense of hope and not feel estranged from my countrymen.
Thanks to everyone who voted for a positive change x
I donated to Labour several times throughout the campaign, which made voting Lib Dem feel doubly weird, but that’s FPTP for you.
Kensington just finally declared: Labour have taken it. It’s where the Daily Mail lives. Nice.
