…the results in the recent British elections:
If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time…
Now assume that Liberal Democrats are British voters who will not vote for Labour. Once the Lib-Dems had made common cause with the Conservatives it left former Lib-Dem voters no reason not to vote Tory.
I think some assumptions had been made about Liberal Democrats swinging over to Labour but that, obviously, was not the case.
With most of Labour’s voters in Scotland swinging over to the Scottish National Party and Scotland having been a stronghold for Labour it goes a long way towards explaining the results.
I’ve heard some absurd explications of Britain’s politics trying to analogize between their parties and ours. It’s a futile exercise. Political orientation does not translate well. The Tories are Tories; they’re not Republicans. Labour is Labour not Democrats.
Here in the United States we have the Republican Party which used to be a catch-all party turning center-right moving right and the Democratic Party which used to be a catch-all party turning center to center-left party and moving left. The fastest growing group in the U. S. is independents who no longer have a comfortable home in either party.
I’m not sure any of the major British party official positions on controlling/reducing legal and illegal immigration would make into a U.S. major party platform.
It seems to me that the election was about Scotland. I didn’t watch much of the returns this year as I’ve had in the past, but I’ve always found fascinating the intrigues of multi-party contests within local first-past-the-post voting. It brings out strong suggestions of strategic voting, where someone may not select their first choice depending upon which parties are locally competitive and national trends. The pre-election polls showed probable election results that were close and hung, possibly imposing a two-party vision of the future with a Labour/SNP coalition being the least popular outcome in England.
Labour appears to have opened a real can of worms with Scottish devolution. For a Scottish voter it increases the value of voting SNP to extract more concessions from dependent Labour. This is not your grandfather’s socialism, which assumes the working class shares common interests everywhere and nationalism is a cruelly divisive force.
I’m putting together a mammoth post on the subject now. One of the interesting things about it involves the LibDems. Which is that even among those comparatively few who voted for them this time around, a majority preferred Cameron over Miliband. And most of the LibDem seats lost went to the Tories. Which means that both sets of previous voters, those that stuck with them and those that didn’t, likely preferred the Tories to Labour. Which means that regardless of their political views, LibDems are operationally conservative. I can’t think of any other explanation.