Blimey, Limeys

My almost entirely uniformed take on the UK election results is that the while the party distribution in Whitehall shifted significantly to the left, British voters actually shifted away from the center and somewhat to the right.  The Labour Party of 2024 is not (for better or worse) Labour of 2019, and has shifted to the right while it rebuilt its appearance of competency and even-handedness.  On the whole, it picked up more voters on the right than it lost on the left, but the fact that it received roughly the same percentage of the vote as in 2019 can't be ignored.  And almost a sixth of the seats that it picked up came from the complete collapse (due to incompetency in the devolved government, and internal party issues) of the Scottish National Party, which has generally offered a very similar economic program to Labour.  The Green Party and assorted left-leaning independents picked up several seats, mostly from Labour, but also had a few oddball wins over Conservatives.  The Liberal Democrats rose from near death to capture the center by attracting center-right Conservative voters who couldn't stand the incompetency of the past few years, but who also would never vote for Labour or Reform.  However, its vote share was little changed as well, and like Labour, LibDem votes were distributed efficiently.  Reform UK - which should be "Reform", since it is more interested in revolution than reform - didn't capture many seats but did attract a huge protest/repudiation vote from people who thought that the Conservatives failed to deliver on the promises of Brexit and knew that the Conservatives failed to halt immigration.  And finally, the Conservatives collapsed, losing almost 44 percent of their 2019 vote share.  The punishment was entirely deserved given how poorly the party governed from 2010 to 2024.

If the Conservative and Reform votes were combined - as might be the case if the UK didn't use an archaic FPTP standard for parliamentary elections - the right-wing vote would exceed that of Labour.  That would leave LibDem voters as kingmakers, and given that the LibDems mostly captured seats from the Conservatives, the overall 2024 vote was more conservative than the outcome.  However, the UK system rewards "efficiency" - meaning that it rewards distributing enough votes to come in first across as many constituencies as possible, not the overall number of votes nationwide.  Given that the right-leaning vote was split 2 or 3 ways, Labour was the most efficient party in the election, and thus won the seat count handily.  (I'll have another post in a few days with the details of the vote distribution.)

Despite what some in America may hope, the Labour victory on 7/4/24 provides no lessons for Democrats beyond a generic "look competent", which Democrats should already know.  The dynamics are just too different this time for anything else to apply.