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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1222 thread views

Transnational Thursday for July 4, 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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Britain is going to the polls today. All signs point to Labour's Keir Starmer getting Britain's largest ever landslide on one of the smallest vote shares. I'm hesitant to change the system of voting we've had for centuries on the basis of one election but it's very awkward that Labour is likely to get approx. 450 seats on 40% of the vote while Reform UK is expected to get approx. 10 seats on slightly under half that.

Poll of polls is here: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/

A couple of interesting phenomena:

  1. Reform UK suddenly doubled its vote share in the last month, drawing even more strongly from (the left-wing) Labour party than from the right wing Conservatives. This can be pretty much purely attributed to Nigel Farage entering the race and shows how important a single charismatic figure can be IMHO. The great forces theory of history has much to recommend it, but it's also true that Right Man in the Right Place historical contingencies have more effect than I think is commonly credited to them.
  2. Reform UK suddenly dropped in the last week, and all the freed voters go to the Conservatives. I would bet good money that this resulted directly from Farage saying* that eastward expansion of Nato had provoked Putin and given him an excuse to invade Ukraine - something he had predicted ten years ago. Not sure whether he would have done better to lie like Marine Le Pen, but he seems to have paid a price for honesty.

*Quote:

"It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, 'They're coming for us again' and to go to war,"

I think he could've doubled down and reminded people why their energy bills are so high. The oil and gas sanctions on Russia have caused trillions in economic damage to Europe. German manufacturing is declining, Britain's last steel mills are closing... All this has a lot to do with energy prices. Net Zero is also to blame, which Farage has railed against.

The UK has certainly at no point in history stood against an aggressor at the expense of its own economic interests, and the UK does not hold defiant resistance against European warmongers as a central aspect of its national character. Appeasement famously is extremely popular in the UK and the proponents of appeasement are feted in the history books as wise pacifists whose counsel averted further war.

Sarcasm aside, Reform is firstly an antimigrant party, and it captures the right wing cranks just like the Greens capture the left wing cranks. The difference is that Reform can accept anti Russian elements in their ranks, while the Greens have to be in perfect lockstep with Gaza, Energy and Trans stuff. It is likely that being anti-Russia is part of the anti-EU stance, which is common to much of the Right, but that still doesn't mean being pro-Russia is a vote winning position. The only thing Farage needs to do is promise to deport all muslims, and he will probably be allowed to fly the hammer and sickle in Clapton.

I've tried this with my parents, it doesn't work. They just think I'm making excuses for Brexit (in a well-meaning way). I think this strategy would also run the risk of activating the 'Blitz Spirit' gene. There's nothing Brits are more proud of than suffering for the sake of a good cause.

I know what you mean, there's a certain cohort that will blame everything on Brexit. Britain has all kinds of problems with planning, energy prices, immigration, taxation, bureaucracy and national strategy generally. But some people seem to think that everything was fine until populism happened in 2016 and that caused all the problems, now growing increasingly dire.

He's probably used to people not taking what the media says about him at face value and so isn't too worried about negative media portrayal. That appears to have been a miscalculation when it came to comments about Russia/Ukraine. Or it could be that he's simply a very honest person.

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