Starmer’s Labour suffers huge losses as hard-right Reform gains in U.K. elections

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Listen to people's concerns.

Labor just needs to exactly adopt my specific views, and because I am so smart and my views are so correct the rest of the country will see the truth and all vote for them

That the clock is ticking for reform to gain very real power and unless Starmer doesn’t convince reformers he can fix migration without Farage, well then Farage wins. Even with Polanskis counter-populism all he can hope to achieve is making that even harder for Starmer to do

Immigration.

That British voters are stupid basically. The interviews I saw of, reasons people voted reform show an incredible ignorance of how politics works and how economics works

One would be, to make a bigger noise about progress being made under the current government

They need to actually do something about immigration, and especially illegal/criminal immigrants.

Pretty much, thats why Nigel secretly doesnt want to win the next GE, being Leader of the Opposition is an easier job because all you have to do is criticize things without offering workable solutions.

It honestly doesn't matter if these are just local. Seeing this many people vote for reform is f****** scary, all because of "muh borders"

That's basically what everyone does, SNP have being doing that for years, every problem in Scotland is the result of Westminster and every positive is because of them.

Reform will say that but I don't think even Reform voters are going to believe their council is superbly run.

It doesn't matter who's in charge of labour when the media is constantly against them. He's cut interest rates, more kids are being fed in school, increased defense spending, massively cut NHS waiting times and I'm seeing police patrolling on foot, something that hasn't happened by me for 20 years. Of course this isn't everything, just what I remember. Oh, and lifted the 2 child cap. I'm not always a Labour voter, but it's clear they don't want to mention the good they have done.

That’s the case in the US too

Labour won a landslide in terms of *seats* at the last General Election. But they also broke the record for the lowest vote share of any party every to win a majority. Labour started out being unpopular, and won largely on the back of not being the Conservatives - promising change. Unfortunately they seem to be far too nervous about doing anything or, at least, doing anything significant. Many people were hoping for big, sweeping changes from the new Labour Government, and what they appear to have got is tinkering around the edges and some incremental reforms (which, in fairness to Labour, make sense given how the last Government to try to implement sweeping changes failed to outlast a lettuce). A lot of people seem to want change, no matter what, and Reform (and at the other end of the spectrum, the Green Party) both promise that. Those promises may be lies, but they are enticing lies. Nigel Farage is largely popular with older people (55+), people in the Northern suburban parts (the places that suffered the most under the Conservatives and haven't recovered yet), and poorer people (including pensioners). However, it is important to note that he is still deeply unpopular. Reform has been polling around 25% lately - far lower than Labour's record-low 35% in the last General Election. Farage is deeply unpopular, but his party is the least unpopular of the now 7 or so major parties across Great Britain. When you have plurality voting you don't have to be popular, you just have to be more popular than everyone else.

First, Labour won a landslide but actually had a very low number of individual votes (if I remember correctly, the lowest of any government in British history). So lots of people didn’t want them in to begin with, and were quite ready to express dissatisfaction the moment the Labour did anything - or nothing - they didn’t like. Second, Farage is getting popular due to a variety of factors but I believe primarily because of widespread discontent with regards to previous governments’ immigration policies, the economy which is undoubtably very bad for most regular people now, and the increasingly widespread view that the ‘Westminster establishment’ are corrupt and incompetent. They appeal mostly to white British people, I think primarily the working class but I’m not sure. They’re not really unique to Britain at all; as you may have noticed, there is a surge of populist, right-wing, nationalist movements across much of the western world and even beyond. In many ways Reform can be seen as a kind of British iteration on the MAGA movement, or at least a similar movement that has consciously converged with MAGA since its rise to power in America. Third is impossible to really answer. They may be utterly incompetent and fall apart quickly, they may be capable and enact their policies quickly in which case the UK would face many significant changes, potentially including mass deportations and the UK withdrawing from international bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights, or they may get in power and follow the pattern of previous governments, in which case they’d likely lose most of their support. The manner of their election to government would matter a lot; even now it seems unlikely that they’d be capable of winning an outright majority, so they’d probably have to make a coalition with the Conservatives to get in power. Ultimately we’ll have to wait and see.

To be fair, Labour didn't so much win as the Tories imploded.

They didn't "win" the landslide so much as the Tories lost it. Tory voters stayed home in droves, meaning the Labour party picked up lots of seats. The vote for Labour was lower than Corbyn achieved when Boris Johnson got his landslide victory as far as I know.

1. To be honest I think people will just complain about any PM. Personally I think he’s been fine, and if the Tories won the election we’d be at war with Iran right now. He was the best of a bad bunch but that makes it easy to criticise him. 2. Immigration is a huge topic right now in the UK and Europe generally. Economy bad = blame foreigners. Brexit happened and immigration numbers went up, there have been large protests as a result of crimes committed by asylum seekers. Farage has always been the figurehead for anti-immigration in the UK. He is popular in many circles but mainly white working class. 3. 1. Think Trump except British

Because social media manipulates people to believe in the wrong thing and attacks character instead of policy. At the same time governments refuse to acknowledge this or do what they pledge within their policies not only pissing off their base but the people who they should convert to their base. The people who come to fix the country once it’s been fucked are never given enough time to fix it and instead everyone tries to find a new bed to lay in whilst forgetting the new bed is actually the one with bad springs. We saw it in the US and now we’re seeing it here and no one has the balls anymore in politics to call it out as it is. Enough with the niceties. If the asses don’t want to play nice then Kier shouldn’t either and should just speak plainly about what actually matters and stop the social media manipulation. But that’s just my take

If I were to be generous, I would say that a vote in the locals is a statement of intent from the voters, saying that they aren't happy with the way the Westminster government are running the country, and want to make their voice on that heard. Being that most people dont vote in their locals, it's much easier for those with this mindset to get their protest across. But realistically, most of the people voting for single issue parties don't understand how the system works, and think that likely equate a vote for local government with a vote for national government.

Unfortunately I think Labour have fucked themselves too much for a 2028/29 win to be a possibility.  That doesn’t mean I think a Reform win is definitely going to happen and I really hope I’m wrong but I can see a path to Reform winning way clearer than I can see Labour, even with a different leader.

I saw somebody once say that Bush likely didn't forget what the idiom was supposed to be. They think that he realises halfway through his sentence that if he finishes the idiom then his opponents would forever have a clip of him saying "shame on me" to use in ads, and so he improvised (poorly). As dumb as he was, he was still a relatively quick thinker at times and I'm inclined to see that point of view.

*Looks at 2016 and 2024 election* Yup. We’re fools.

I think a huge part of it, is that western economies were all built for industrial output. While they have all shifted to service based economies. Their systems are built for the continuous growth of an industrial economy. Services have a limit and scale linearly with population As the population stagnates so does the economy, not in terms of GDP, but in terms of jobs, housing etc. This means that tax revenue stagnates and can't keep up with inflation causing the price of government services to increase. This then causes birth rates to drop and then it cyclicly repeats, causing some sort of spiral. I think the western world genuinely needs to rethink the fundamental pillars on which its economies are built if it seeks to solve these issues going forward.

Canadian here, we're fucked. Our previous PM allowed 3 million immigrants in to this country a year. Most of whom were asked for by the big companies because they could pay them slave wages and avoid employing Canadians. We don't need 3 million uber drivers and minimum wage workers. Now our economy is fucked, with stupid high unemployment and an even worse housing shortage. The government under Carney has finally started bringing down the immigration numbers but colleges were making b ank off international "students" who would come in because they were paying through the nose. Meanwhile these migrants get lots of perks - access to our healthcare system, free luxury hotel stays, help with finding housing(meanwhile there are native born Canadians choosing assisted f****** suicide because they can't find housing in this country) There is a lot of anger. Grocery prices through the roof. Inflation going nuts. No one seems to care with no end in sight. But all we see are more and more immigrants. Mostly from Asia, mostly Muslim and many of whom are refusing to accept Western values. (our military released a memo that said recruits from migrant backgrounds were "having difficulty accepting women as equals and peers", source https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jamie-sarkonak-non-citizens-in-canadian-forces-struggling-to-treat-women-as-their-peers)

>Starmers problem is he comes across as dishonest but no one can quite put their finger on why. In truth because he wont be open about the scale of the economic issues so everything feels like he is lying, when he is trying to basically manage a low growth economy with rapidly rising costs for debt, health care and pensions while pretending everything is fine. It just feels so far off. I wrote this earlier. The problem is they seem to be trying to not admit the scale of the issues so they came in promising a sort of grown up pragmatic centricism and everything would be back to OK. And its taking its sweet time with no help from the shitshow in Hormuz. People "feel" lied too about things and they cant say why. So he comes across as dishonest.

not what the above poster said, but it is unfortunate that the majority seem to think so.

The problem is the tories and Labour have been in power and haven’t managed so people are clearly looking for someone who might. You can post laughing emojis but that won’t fix it either.

Almost definitely not, but he's selling a message that he will.

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Labour wouldn’t have to go radically left wing to regain Green votes, they just need some visible left wing policies. I suspect there are fewer hard line Green voters than you think, but it’s the obvious choice to signal support for left wing policies at the moment, rather than supporting Labour’s lurch right. 

Sorry how can reform get 200 seats they don't even have 20 guys

They more than tripled their number of councillors, weird underperformance

Government is the problem. Vote for us and we'll prove it.

Worked so well in 2016. It's a vote against the status quo, I yell from my deportation wagon

The US and UK have a similar flow of information. I live in the UK, and while nobody would want to compare themselves to the US, it is almost identical. I'm surprised by how many people don't understand politics, while basing their knowledge off bits and pieces from social media. Progressive types, too.

I would second this. I'm a brit who lives abroad, I noticed a big difference with media output when I went back last Christmas for the first time in a few years. Both my dad's Facebook feeds and all the GB news constantly all on in the backgrounds, it wasn't like this 15years ago. Its absolute propaganda whispering into their ears constantly

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> They have a massive majority and can do basically whatever they want. This, I think, is a huge part of it. In fact it's probably the biggest part. Labour had the ability to show us exactly who they are and what they believe with zero risk of being stopped. And they did that. They used that power to show exactly who and what they are. And it turns out that they are not even remotely what they sold themselves as, nor are they what the majority of the electorate actually want. They were given exactly what every party dreams of and due to their own failure of an ideology and platform it became their nightmare.

I understand all of this and most definitely understand the desire to burn down the status quo that has not been working for decades. I just don't understand why a left populist candidate/party isn't gaining huge traction like right-wing populists. Why are the Greens in the UK not gaining the same level of voter swing? We had Bernie here in the US 10 years ago and it truly did feel like a huge grass roots campaign that was getting people excited (but then of course we all know what happened). Do people feel the problem is more of an immigrant issue (and thus vote right for the country to to harden borders and decrease resources for immigrants) compared to a more left/labor focused late-stage capitalist corporate-wealth-hoarding issue?

>Not because he's especially bad at his job, but because there's nothing to get excited about. At all. This is part of why the world is being flushed down the toilet. Nobody wants a boring politician who does his job. They want a celebrity they can worship.

I can't get over how surprised I am with Starmer's unpopularity. I think, "Well *I* despise him, he's specifically pissed *my* fringe demographic off, but why does everyone *else* hate him?" Objectively his government so far has been fine, and actually done some of the first good things we've seen in decades. But it seems like everyone has their specific reason for not liking him. There's also just the fact that there's a frightening movement in the UK, well-funded by the likes of Elon Musk, that blames the existence of Muslims for *everything* wrong in the country. Nothing Labour does will make those people happy: that movement is largely waiting for Farage to disappoint them by not going far enough, so they can go even more extreme still.

Being unpopular is correct. They should have stuck with the winter fuel reforms - we have the triple lock, they don't need both. At best at least take it away from all the middle class retirees that don't need it

I have been saying this for years, if not decades. There is a fundamental inability to communicate - particularly among the more soft-left social democrat type parties - that means they get absolutely blattered at elections even if they're full of good intentions. Off the top of my head: * "Investing in Education" is great for the kids. But if I'm 40-something, struggling to keep a roof over my head and feed the kids - I don't want to be told to go back to school. That's patronising. I want a good job that will cover my expenses. * The right-wing parties counter this with a two-punch: "You don't have a job because (insert marginalised group here)" and "We'll bring back the sort of jobs you lost!". Both are lies, but they're a much easier sell. * "The elites don't care about you!" (usually trotted out by rich politicians who haven't done a days work in their lives). * A right-wing politician says this, he means "The people who act like they're better than you". A left-wing politician hears this, he hears "The people who **are** better than you". The left-wing politician is stunned into silence by the hypocrisy, completely unaware of the fact that the right-wing politician was actually dogwhistling by subtly saying "My colleague here thinks he's better than you!". The dogwhistle lands; the hypocrisy doesn't.

Not in Wales & Scotland.

Yes, the Greens gained a lot from Labour, too — just announced that they won the Hackney mayor vote. The reality is that these kind of elections tend to be littered with protest votes, a handful of which can win you the election as the voter turnout is significantly less than a general election, so, usually the big winners tend to be those that cater to the chronically online and somewhat radicalised. Despite having more publicity than usual, due to Starmer’s shaky position, I still doubt most people in the country were aware these elections were even happening and, if they were aware, they probably didn’t care enough to go out and vote

For real. Immigration is a top 5 issue for many voters in SEVERAL countries, not just the US. Listnook, being very left leaning, doesn't seem to realize just how bad the messaging is for this issue seemingly regardless of country. The most common reaction is legitimately to plug your ears and think its just a small section of the population concerned about it that they can handwave away. Labour, in particular, DEFINITELY isn't good at messaging. It doesn't matter how good a plan or policy is if you cant get that out to the people and have them understand it. Right now all that comes through is "they are bigots and racists" which wins over approximately nobody and only works if you want to lose elections. edit for spelling

LOL...was Starmer a resident of some other country is whole life? The UK press is WORLD famous for vitriol.