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Notes -
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the UK held an election for local authorities, in which Labour were soundly trounced, losing a whopping 1,375 seats. Almost immediately, Labour back-benchers began clamouring for incumbent prime minister Keir Starmer (he of "two-tier" fame) to resign.
This morning, he followed that recommendation.
Starmer is expected to be succeeded in the role by Andy Burnham, former minister for health under Gordon Brown. I was unfamiliar with him before this morning, but those more familiar with his political career are generally unimpressed:
Similarly, Spiked characterises him as "just Keir Starmer in jeans".
Get ready for the UK's sixth prime minister in a decade. I wonder if he'll stick around until the next general election. At least he'll last longer than Liz "Lettuce" Truss.
We're seeing a lot of caretaker governments by nonentities in Europe these days. They get these unstable coalitions to try to keep the "far right" (usually the center left actually) out of power, which are unpopular and constantly lose elections, but always staple together the ruling class to keep the troglodytes out. Meanwhile parties on the actual right are forming to outflank the relatively liberal (Reform, AFD, FN etc) opposition parties.
The opposition becomes steadily less controlled.
I think Labour might have done better under a coalition government actually.
They got a large but brittle majority based purely on the Tories collapsing and then had to square what they had to do for the economy both with the promises they made to sweep into power (no broad tax rises which meant trying to squeeze taxes everywhere else which both pissed off specific segments of the population and may have caused employment issues) and with the ideology of the backbenchers (who want to do things like lift the limit the cap on benefits for children during a moment when they need every pound they can get, there was a bit of whining about Mahmood's immigration turn but it seems to have gone through)
If they couldn't get anything done without some other party those people could be the bad guys and take the blame.
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