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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   1578 thread views

Transnational Thursday for May 23, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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And they're off. Rishi Sunak has called a (technically early) General Election in the UK, Polling Day is 4th July. Effortpost to follow. Feel free to post questions you want me to cover.

Polling looks incredibly dire for the conservatives. Could this spell an end to the current conservative party and it being replaced by a new party in the UK's two party system?

Labour survived the leadership of Corbyn and the disastrous 2019 election, I see not reason why the Conservatives can't do the same.

Labour still had 202 seats after 2019, which would be an excellent result for the Tories at this point.

If Canada is any guide they will probably regroup and hang in there -- it's not like the people who were Conservatives are going anywhere, they are just pissed at the current leadership.

(and if the English Left turns out to be even 10% as unserious as what we've got going on in the colonies, everyone will be twice as pissed at them before the year is out)

The institutional Progressive Conservative Party of never recovered from the 1993 electoral disaster when they were reduced to 2 seats. The rump PCs eventually joined the Canadian Alliance - technically it was a merger of equals and the new party was called "Conservative Party of Canada" but what actually happened was more like a takeover of a failing company with a valuable brand.

But yes, British Conservatism isn't going anywhere. There is a possibility of of 10+ years of left-wing dominance if the right is split between a dead institutional Conservative party that refuses to go away and a successor conservative party.

The consensus among British politics-watchers is that if the Conservatives win enough seats to staff a full opposition operation in Parliament (this requires about 60 MPs who are able and willing to do moderately demanding unpaid opposition frontbench jobs on top of their work as a constituency MP, so probably 100-odd MPs in total) then the institutional Conservative and Unionist Party should be able to recover. Per polls and spread betting markets, this is significantly more likely than not. Dominic Cummings, of course, thinks otherwise.

The institutional Progressive Conservative Party of never recovered from the 1993 electoral disaster when they were reduced to 2 seats. The rump PCs eventually joined the Canadian Alliance - technically it was a merger of equals and the new party was called "Conservative Party of Canada" but what actually happened was more like a takeover of a failing company with a valuable brand.

That is what the Liberals say when they are trying to scare people into voting for them on the basis of abortion rights, yes -- it's not really true though. I was there, man -- and the members of the PC party did not disappear, they just found themselves homeless for a bit. I imagine it's even more like this in the UK.

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