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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   1862 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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My top questions are:

  • what is the outlook for net migration? Are we likely to see a return to the high pre-pandemic level of ~600,000 per year
  • is migration the “Irish question” of our times in that it will destroy the Conservative Party as the Irish question destroyed the Liberal Party?
  • is the Conservative Party ideological or even conservative at all?
  • what is are the long-run chances of the Reform party? It looks a lot like the Peoples Party of Canada which has basically collapsed as COVID ended.

It seems unlikely that it's specifically migration that's destroying the UK Tories. It probably plays a part, but the poll support has for the most part not gone to Reform but to also pro-migration Labour.

The clearest reason would still seem to be increasing dissatisfaction with the Brexit, combined with an extra helping of loss of trust after the "Truss shock". Labour might have promised to not reverse Brexit, at least for now, but they're stll associated with, well, not doing it. Corbyn was what allowed Tories to avoid the post-Brexit dissatisfaction for some time; after Labour got rid of Corbyn and made an extra effort to clear away Corbynism in general, that's no longer there.

Of course the migrant situation is also arguably connected to Brexit, since Brexit seems extra hollow after the promises to cut down immigration just meant that EU immigration was replaced with non-EU migration, with dividends.

It looks to me like about 50-50 in terms of where lost conservative support has flowed to. Reform was ~0 and is now 10% and the total loss of Conservative vote share is about 20pts.

I suspect a lot of voters are cross pressured working class whites outside of London: they are culturally conservative, but like the Labour welfare state and are generally low information. So depending on the issues, their support is a toss up. It sounds like in the UK the narrative is the conservatives are just lurching from failure to failure (like the Liberals in Canada) so that motivates defection. To have half of those defect to the “far right” seems material. And with Brexit no longer the animating issue, for those switchers it has to be migration.

Maybe it’s true that migration is only the issue for a small share of the population, but it’s a pretty big share of the conservative base.

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