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To paraphrase Phyrrus, "If the elite are victorious in one more battle with the commoners, they shall be utterly ruined."
All the British political parties are in hot water right now. Granted, the elections aren't for another 5 years, but this was a warning shot to Labour not to get too comfortable in power. The electorate just threw out their last government in a pretty dramatic and coordinated way. They're entirely capable of throwing this one out, too, if it doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
The danger was never that the angry mob would overthrow the government. The danger is that the current anger will persist for long enough to have electoral consequences. The government has 5 years to improve the situation. If the British are still this mad when the next general election rolls around then the Labour regime might turn out to be very short lived.
This was not the kind of victory the government wants on its record.
It's interesting to note that despite their huge majority, Labour this time didn't win many votes - less, in fact, than five years ago under the controversial Jeremy Corbyn. There's a big hole in the electorate, in other words, waiting to be filled.
Yes, but that’s because they turned into a campaigns built around fear/love of Corbyn and Brexit and so, under FPTP, all minority parties, certainly in England, did extremely poorly. This election was more a return to the pre-2017 situation.
No, there genuinely has been a decay in trust. Starmer's Labour didn't crack ten million votes, which puts him well behind Cameron's 2010 and 15 performances. And it's true that some of that is driven by third parties, but those third parties didn't drop out of the sky. They're winning votes because there's dissatisfaction with the main parties that didn't exist in 2010.
It is that but also deliberate strategy by Starmer's Labour – they allowed base support to drop off in order to win over more conservative voters in contested constituencies. This has dampened enthusiasm and let votes split off to third parties, which I think is a slightly different phenomenon to mainstream parties losing trust.
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