<< Copied from EU thread >>
Probably best-served in the UK Politics thread. The voter disenfranchisement I was on about has various roots, from the Liberal Democrats, to the laughable Change UK nonsense, through to the Labour Party actively sabotaging itself so that the socialists wouldn't look good. Ironically, the one block that's probably best-insulated from this as classic / heartland Tory voters. Brexit might have been a temporarily-polarising issue, but we've also been through the pandemic now, which the Tories leveraged for maximum PR (as anyone would expect them to).
I understand that perspective. But I don't think that the Tories' prospects are quite as good as you indicate.
I see UK voter disenfranchisement in four contexts:
(a) fixed Term Parliament Act (conservative manifesto promised to repeal it, but when?)
(b) cancellation of local elections due to Coronavirus (when will they be rescheduled?)
(c) government shackling UK to foreign interests (so called "withdrawal agreement" and US militarism)
(d) foreign (for example, but not limited to, Russian) funding of MPs, there is meat here absent from the referendum.
<< Copied from EU thread >>
To be honest the election was up for grabs in the UK, it had the most open and diverse choice of parties with a chance of election MPs in 50 years. It was the leaders of several parties who screwed up and just handed Boris Johnson an overwhelming victory. The UK's political system, and its voters, had their choices. And it will have it again in a few year's time. No one forced Corbyn to be a whimp in dealing with internal sabotage. Boris certainly showed how that could be dealt with.
The UK's December 2019 general election was in many ways a quite peculiar election.
The top down decision imposed by the former LibDem leader (Jo Swinson) to campaign on the basis of simply cancelling UK exit
from the EU by simply revoking the invocation of Article 50 was quite extraordinary and amounted to a self inflicted disaster for their party.
It is said that English politicians do not understand the Scots, but in this case I think that it was quite the opposite. I really do not think that
Jo Swinson understood the political situation outside of Scotland. That Remain pledge was designed to win votes from Remainer Labour voters
and thereby set up the Lib Democrats as the replacement of Laour as the opposition party. It was announced without much in the way of prior
consultation with the Lib Dems MPs and was viewed in horror by many. E.g. The outgoing (he had a stroke) MP for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb)
knew that it doomed his successor candidate. That Jo Swanson decision had two major impacts.
Firstly I believe that most English LibDem seats
and possible LibDems seats were in areas where the Leave vote won, and the primary rival was a conservative, so it doomed their candidates there.
Arising from that fear of loss of votes to the Lib Dems enabled Keir Starmer to push Jeremy Corbyn to a much more pro-Remain, very poorly disguised
in the context of a Labour BRINO and further referendum, position. That meant that the LibDems did not gain much against Labour in the cities, but more
significantly it;
Secondly meant that Labour lost its appeal to the Leave voters, and consolidated loose Leave voters towards voting for the conservatives.
Thereby resulting in the election of a conservative government with a large majority, despite the fact that most of their voters don't really much like them.
In other words the Boris Johnson benefited not from support for him, but from two strategic mistakes by his opponents, that are unlikely to be repeated.
I suspect that many conservatives will assume that is a permanent change in the political landscape, and are likely have their hands caught in the till again.
I don't know what will happen next, but if the LibDem membership elects Ed Davey, who was if I recall correctly one of the less incompetent ministers
in the UK's 2010-2015 coalition government, the Liberal Democrats may well stage a significant recovery in many UK constituencies.
