I write in the early morning of 8 June 2017, General Election day. Within 24 hours, most results will have been counted and announced. Some will come in later in the day on the 9th.

Against almost all expectations (including my own) the election looks as if it may be close-run. Predictions from polling organizations offer everything from a hung Parliament (no overall House of Commons majority) to a solid Conservative HoC majority. However, few if any “experts” are now predicting the 100+-majority landslide that seemed almost inevitable just a few short weeks ago. What happened?

To my mind, what happened to the “Conservative landslide” is that voters suddenly woke up to Theresa May as a brittle, nervy, unhealthy (type-1 diabetes) woman who, though clever at the Westminster version of office politics  (outmanoeuvring opponents etc), is not really a national leader. Her “strong and stable” mantra played well at first against a Labour Party frontbench that was (and still is, largely) a joke, but May’s U-turns on policy damaged her and her party badly. The impression was twofold– first, that policies which impact upon almost every family in the land had not been properly thought through; secondly, that faced with public and newspaper opposition, Theresa May was willing to trim or even abandon her policies. “Strong and stable” became “weak and vacillating”. There is a third aspect: Theresa May was seen suddenly as someone who might be ruthless in stamping on such as the pensioners whose votes are so vital to the Conservative Party.

There is that “backroom person suddenly given power” thing about Theresa May. Her career outside politics was at the banks’ cheque-clearing organization, BACS, hardly exciting or cutting-edge work. In fact, as MP and minister, Theresa May did not shine and her long tenure as Home Secretary was marked by absurd initiatives and continuing mass immigration, as well as by the sacking of 20,000 police officers. Her main focus was on careerism, becoming a minister, then plotting for years to become Prime Minister.

The people around Theresa May are not impressive and had been kept in the background by the Conservative election machine. In particular, clown prince Boris Johnson was not prominent. When he did emerge, he messed up (again).

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, went during the campaign from looking like a mixture of crazed radical and ineffectual duffer to looking quite reasonable and, in a word, electable, at least to many. Corbyn too was surrounded by people at best mediocre: Diane Abbott (replaced a day before the election on grounds of “ill-health” after several staggeringly-bad TV and radio interviews); Dawn Butler; Angela Rayner. All deadheads.

Corbyn had been the hate-figure of the mass media, the Jew-Zionist-Israel lobby and the Conservative Party to such a great extent that he eclipsed those around him. In the end, ironically, that may have played well for Labour. The Presidential-style campaign pitted May against Corbyn and, as May’s campaign unravelled, Corbyn’s did not and Corbyn himself began to look a lot more reasonable than May to many.

Labour has promised much. It may not be able to deliver; but the Conservatives seem to offer nothing but ever-more poverty, low pay, poor prospects, more “austerity” nonsense and repression of free speech, egged on by the Jewish Lobby which is so powerful in the Conservative Party (Theresa May herself being a member of Conservative Friends of Israel, as are 80% of Conservative Party MPs).

Few, if any, expect Labour to somehow “win” the election, either by getting a House of Commons majority (practically impossible in view of Labour’s long-term shrinkage and the dominance of the SNP in Scotland) or by becoming the largest party in the HoC. However, Labour now looks as if, far from shrinking its MP numbers from 229 to 200 or even 150 as many (including me) had thought likely, it might retain a Commons bloc (cadre?) not very much reduced from where it was after 2015. A small increase is also not now impossible.

The small Conservative majority in the House of Commons (6, but in practice more because of the non-voting of the Speaker, Sinn Fein MPs, suspended MPs etc) might as easily decrease as increase. A hung Parliament would leave the Conservatives as the largest party, almost certainly, but unable to rule except as a minority government, outvoted easily by hostile parties, notably Labour and SNP.

Could Labour form a minority government? The convention is that the largest party in the Commons has first chance to cobble together sufficient Commons support. As Bagehot put it, a government is formed when a party has “the confidence” of a majority in the Commons. If the Conservatives as largest party could not agree something with the SNP, then Labour might try, with a greater prospect of success. Labour social policies are closer to those of the SNP. The same is true in the foreign policy arena.

If the Conservatives achieve a majority greater than that presently enjoyed, then the above will be –in the American sense– moot and irrelevant. If, however, the Conservatives have no majority, then it is quite likely that Labour, even if not the largest party, will be able to form a minority government.

The only fly in that ointment is that the SNP has fewer than 60 seats in the HoC. It may well have only 40 or 45 after the election. If Labour ends up with, even, 250 (20 more than where Labour was before the election was called), that will still be far fewer than 300 even with SNP support, 326 being the necessary number. That would necessitate support from LibDems, Plaid Cymru, Northern Irish MPs etc. Difficult.

One thing is for sure: if the Conservatives lose seats, then Theresa May will have to resign. Corbyn is in a better position. His power comes from the members, who still seem to support him strongly. Moreover, the anti-Corbyn Labour MPs (many of whom are pro-Israel mouthpieces) lose either way. If Labour does reasonably well or not too badly in the election, Corbyn’s position will be upheld. On the other hand, if Labour is badly defeated in the election, the most aggressively anti-Corbyn MPs will lose their seats. They are toast either way.

Looking beyond the election, there will be a space for a new social-national movement down the line. The System parties are increasingly less capable of sorting out Britain’s problems.

Update, 5 December 2018

Looking again at what I wrote 18 months ago, the only glaring error was in assuming that Theresa May would resign if the Conservatives lost seats. They lost seats, they lost their Commons majority, but Theresa May stuck.

I underestimated the limpet quality of a backroom careerist type who had plotted for many long years to become Conservative leader and Prime Minister. She may be hopeless as a Prime Minister, but, by Jingo, she’s there and nothing short of a grenade under her bony **** is going to remove her! I suppose that she might try to hang on even after her (vulgar term) “deal” on Brexit sinks this week or next. That would have to trigger either a no-confidence vote in the Commons or the equivalent in the Conservative Party.

Writing before all results have been reported and collated, it is nonetheless simple to discern the main outlines: the Conservatives have done well, Labour has done badly, the LibDems have done fairly badly (though well here and there) and UKIP has been effectively extinguished. As the experts have been at pains to explain, the local election results do not translate exactly into General Election results, but they do provide clear indications.

Conservatives

The Conservative Party and government under Theresa May is not, in fact, “popular”, but that makes no difference electorally, because it is not judged on its merits (or those of the quite similar 2010-2015 government) but as against failing Labour. The Conservatives are winning by default, not by reason of their own (non-existent) merit.

Anecdotal evidence is always suspect, but in the South of England it is clear that relatively few will vote Labour on 8 June. Labour will win no seats and may lose the few still held, even in parts of London (the Labour bastion in the South).

As for the rest of the country, the SNP and Conservatives will sweep the board, very likely, in Scotland; in Wales also, the Conservatives are likely to do well (in places), now that UKIP is no more.

The only part of England where the Conservatives will struggle will be the North East and even there they may do better than at any time since the franchise was expanded in the early 20th Century.

The Conservatives have an almost unassailable advantage in that they need only avoid doing something which terrifies the voters in some way. Labour provides all the reasons voters need to vote Conservative: support for more mass immigration and open borders for “refugees” (migrant-invaders); its leaders’ one-time support for the IRA etc; uncertain policy on EU Brexit; most of all, Labour’s perceived ineptitude (one need only use two words– Diane Abbott!

The UKIP collapse alone will give the Conservatives votes enough to take many Labour seats. It seems that about half the 2015 UKIP voters will not only not vote UKIP but will vote Conservative. UKIP came second in no less than 120 constituencies in 2015. That speaks for itself. Many of those seats were Labour, 44 in fact: http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/ge15/UKIP-second.htm

2015 UKIP voters switching to Conservative has a twofold effect: firstly, Cons taking Labour seats; secondly, preventing Labour or the LibDems being able to take many, possibly any, Conservative seats.

Likely number of seats: from 400 to 425

UKIP

I have been tweeting and blogging that UKIP is washed-up for about 18 months now. Finally the msm has caught up with me. UKIP had two main policies which were popular: getting the UK out of the EU; reducing immigration. The Conservatives have taken over the first and pay lip service to the second. This leaves UKIP with nowhere to go. Add to that the clownish behaviour of its “leaders” (MEPs, mostly) and it is not hard to see why UKIP will struggle to avoid annihilation, even in Eastern England. Its Stoke Central by-election fail (see my earlier blog posts) was a warning: the disenchanted voters were not willing to get out of bed or leave their TVs long enough to vote UKIP.

UKIP’s weakness has always been its even distribution across England. Even on nearly a quarter of the vote in some seats and a national vote of 12%, nothing was won in 2015, whereas the Green Party, with a national vote of  less than 4%, could capture one seat because it had enough votes in one place to win narrowly in a 4-way split. UKIP’s support is expected to decline to as little as 4% nationally soon.

Under a proportional system, UKIP would have obtained 80 MPs in 2015.

That leaves open the question: if half of UKIP voters are defecting to the Conservatives, what about the other half? Probably staying home, not voting, most of them.

Likely number of seats: 0

Liberal Democrats

The LibDems call themselves “cockroaches” for their ability to survive. Many think them the least principled party in British politics. In 2010, the LibDems obtained roughly a quarter of the vote, but (like UKIP in 2015) were cheated by the FPTP voting system and ended up with 57 seats, when their vote share would under proportional voting have entitled them to 160 or so. As it was, the LibDems sold out on PR and other matters and suffered accordingly by being reduced to 8 MPs.

It is possible that the LibDems will be able to take seats from both Con and Lab, but their best chances will be in the South of England. Having said that, they may well also lose a few.

Likely number of seats: about 12

Labour

Labour is at last in that “existential crisis” which many (including me) have forecast for the past 18 months. The Jewish-Zionist plots against anti-Israel Corbyn have blown wide open Labour’s lack of relevance now that the proletariat has been replaced by the precariat. The Zionists have done such a good job of demonizing Corbyn (and so Labour) that many of Corbyn’s fiercest MP critics are likely to lose their seats!

Labour was struggling to present itself to the electorate as competent even before Diane Abbott started to come apart at the seams. The earlier mass resignations of more competent people left Corbyn surrounded by bad-joke Shadow Ministers: Diane Abbott as notional Home Secretary (to call that a joke is an understatement), Dawn Butler (both of the foregoing not only deadheads but expenses cheats!), Angela Rayner etc etc. Only the most unthinkingly loyal Labourites will be voting Labour under these conditions.

Labour’s leaders have consistently supported mass immigration (both past and future) and see nothing wrong in that. At the same time, the “Blairite” (Zionist) MPs have often also supported or not opposed Conservative cuts to social security (including the cruel and dishonest “assessment” of the disabled and sick, which Labour in fact introduced!); these policies and statements have alienated, perhaps forever, many traditional Labour voters.

Above all, perhaps, Labour is (surely correctly) seen as hopelessly divided, hopelessly inept, generally hopeless. It has no prospect of winning any seats at all and every prospect of taking a serious hit on 8 June.

Beyond the General Election, it is likely that Labour will decline into being a niche party for ethnic minorities and unionized public sector workers.

Likely number of seats: about 150

Other matters

I do not deal with other parties here, but it is likely that the SNP will end up with 40-50 seats; the Northern Irish parties have seats; Plaid Cymru will probably have a couple, perhaps a few.

Conclusion

Conservative landslide by default, barring something very unusual happening in the next month. People voting against Labour, not for Conservative, but the immediate result being the same.

The 8 June election will mean “Conservative” government for probably 5 years, to 2022 That is the 33-year-cycle successor year to 1989, which saw the end of socialism across the world. 2022 will see another huge change, in Europe and beyond its shores. A social national party, even if it only starts operations in 2017 or 2018, might be able to seize the initiative in the UK and then seize power.

Further Thoughts (written 22 July 2018)

Looking back now, after nearly 15 months, it is clear that I got a few things wrong. In fact, that is more apparent than real. The analysis was written 5 weeks before the 2017 General Election. In the final week or two before the election itself, I understood that an uncertain mood had gripped the country; in particular, while the brittle Theresa May Conservative bubble burst as the voters quite suddenly lost confidence in her, Labour was not in a position to capitalize on that loss of confidence. That led to the equally uncertain result on Election Day.

My view of UKIP as in the analysis has been proven correct; the same is true of my 2017 opinion about the LibDems.

I still see Labour as not enthusing more than about a quarter of the voters (if that), but one must always bear in mind that, in the UK, people tend to vote against rather than for. The unfair FPTP voting system reinforces that tendency.

The Conservatives now (July 2018) look tired, divided, incompetent. Labour, having been behind in the polls for months, is now ahead, despite arguably being as divided etc. That is because people are anti-Conservative Party, not because they are pro-Labour Party. I see the result of any 2018 election as being a hung Parliament, with Labour as, probably, the largest party, but only by a small margin.

Events remind us of the truth of Harold Wilson’s dictum that “a week is a long time in British politics”.

My analysis of the past year or more has now been taken up in all quarters of the mainstream media. Almost all now agree on the essential fact, that Labour is now pretty much an irrelevance in British political life. In Scotland, Labour has only 1 Westminster MP out of 59 and 23 Holyrood MSPs out of 129 (and is currently far below even the Conservatives in percentage support terms, around 18%). In Wales, another former stronghold, Labour has 29 out of 60 AMs in Cardiff; in the London Assembly, its most concentrated convention-place of influence, 12 out of 25 MLAs.

Labour has 230 MPs at Westminster (including 1 vacant seat and 1 suspended member –Simon Danczuk–) out of 650, but early indications are that 2020 will see another low: Labour is now around 25% in polling, which might indicate about 200 seats, possibly far fewer. The redrawing of constituency boundaries and reduction of Commons seats to 600 may well leave Labour with as few as 150 MPs. Some even predict 100.

If Labour is left with 100 or even 200 seats out of 600 after 2020, it has ceased to be an alternative government and has become almost a niche player, or one among several non-governing parties.

Should Labour have 200 seats out of 600 after 2020, then it probably cannot form even a minority government, even with SNP and other minor-party support in some form; should Labour have 150 or fewer seats, then even the long-shot of minority government recedes far out of reach. I have blogged previously about what might happen should Scotland secede from the UK: Labour would then have, arguende, 100-200 seats out of 541, a higher percentage than 100-200 out of 600 or 650, but without the 56 vital potentially-supporting SNP MP votes. Permanent Opposition, at best.

Labour’s old support base in the trade-unionized industrial and urban proletariat has dissolved along with that social demographic. The new urban and suburban “precariat” and/or “chavscum” either do not vote at all or prefer to vote elsewhere as the volatile mood takes them. Recent polling indicates that the one demographic now supporting Labour (and only just, at that) is the non-white population. Indeed, with Jeremy Corbyn’s well-known anti-Israel position highlighted, it can be said that Labour’s typical voter profile is that of a “British” Pakistani Muslim.

The recent Stoke Central by-election proves the above proposition. Stoke Central by-election had a turnout of only 38.2% (21,200), but it can be reliably surmised that the organized Labour Pakistani Muslim turnout was far higher, probably above 50%. There are at least 6,000 Pakistani Muslim voters in Stoke Central; at least 3,000 will have voted and (mostly) voted Labour. The Labour Party candidate won by about 2,500 votes. QED.

It cannot be an accident that, whenever Jeremy Corbyn is seen somewhere, visiting a constituency or whatever, he is surrounded by a small crowd of non-white women. Either Labour is playing to its one remaining strength or those are the only local supporters now willing to turn out to welcome Corbyn.

The 3 main strands that now make up Labour (traditional generational-voting people, “Corbynistas”, “Blairite”/”Brownite” pro-Zionist MPs and others) are unravelling. There is now a move to create a “centrist” (pro-Zionist) party which might include the LibDems and some Conservative Party MPs. The previous thought, that keeping “Labour” as a name or “brand” was the key to success, is fading as Labour becomes almost toxic to voters. It is certainly true that a new party of that sort might start off with many MPs: perhaps 100 from Labour, 9 LibDems and however many Conservatives want to put principle before electoral certainty.–probably not the 80 MPs that Anna Soubry has suggested! Half a dozen, perhaps. Still, even 100 MPs would make any new party a player.

A new social nationalist party might catch on like wildfire in former Labour heartlands, but (regrettably) does not as yet exist.

I see no reason to change my analyses of the past nearly two years. Labour is trying to pull in different directions, appeal to different groups of voters on contradictory bases (eg re EU and Brexit) and has no credibility on mass immigration, arguably the major issue which concerns voters. Corbyn is a problem but not the problem. Labour’s failures in 2010 and 2015 prove that.

The conclusion must be that Labour is not offering the policies or leadership that might attract voters. Even if it changed both its overall policy and its leader, Labour would still not succeed, because its credibility is shot, on immigration, on the economy, on competence generally.

Further Thoughts (16 months later, on 25 July 2018):

My analysis remains correct in essence, in my view. Since March 2017, Labour has done far better than I anticipated, but not by reason of its own merit. The more important fact has been the bursting of the bubble for the Conservative Party. Despite much evidence to the contrary, the voters seem to have decided, in the 2010-2015 period, that the Conservatives were “nasty but competent”. The second of these started to die off during 2015 -2017 and now (2018) the public seem to think that “Labour may be incompetent but the Conservatives have been proven to be so”. That is true on immigration, Brexit, crime/law and order, NHS etc. The Conservatives “talk a good game” but have failed to deliver.

I still doubt that Labour can get a Commons majority, even on the present boundaries, which will not change (reducing MP numbers to 600) until 2022. However, Labour has every chance now of forming at least a minority government before 2022, possibly as early as late 2018. I very much doubt that more than 40% of voters favour Labour or that more than about 35% will actually vote Labour. What matters is where that 35% live. Marginal seats, or Labour strongholds? If the latter, then Labour is still in trouble.

My present feeling is that neither main System party is popular and that the next general election will reflect that, but that Labour is offering more. It may be unable to deliver, but will voters prefer a party which offers much and may be unable to deliver, or one which offers little or nothing at all?

Update, 19 November 2020

The article above was written when it was expected that MP umbers would be reduced to 600. That reform will now no longer take place, certainly not during the present Parliament.

The election of 2019 gave Labour 201 MPs out of 655, leaving the party very weak. Relatively few 2017 Labour voters voted Conservative in 2019. More abstained, unable to support either major (System) party: