UK: Labour expected to get creamed in tonight's local elections

[RandySF]

What happened, folks? Economic populism not snout to erase the stink of anti-semitism and other problems?

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. Guess Brexit must still be popular with the British electorate.

[Demsrule86]

3. Too many parties, you get permanent minority rule

And conservatives play the game better.

[OnDoutside]

8. No, it's down to the First Past the Post system, with single seat constituencies. The Liberals have

been pushing for Proportional Representation for decades without success. Both Labour and the Tories have shot it down at various times, but Labour are the ones rueing that now. Labour need to grasp PR as a policy, and work with the non-Tory parties to defeat the Tories and get the voting system overturned. In Ireland we have multi party, multi seat constituency proportional representation and in general, it leads to less polarising governments.

[edhopper]

2. why do they pick the worse candidates to lead them

beating Boris and the Tories should be easier.

[cabot]

4. Apparently, according to a friend who lives in the UK

Johnson has done a good job with the vaccine rollout and Keir Starmar isn't popular. To quote her "Labour needs a better leader."

[OnDoutside]

9. Never mind the 128.000 dead on his watch then....

[roamer65]

5. The Scottish election is the one to watch.

If the SNP get a massive majority in the Scottish parliament, it will be seen as a mandate for a second independence referendum.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. The Tories' new business model is: bung government money to cronies, painting it as 'regeneration'

for poor areas, and make it clear you need Tory local councils and MPs to receive it. Whether it'll help those areas, I doubt - but the Tories think they'll get away with it for a few more years.

Brexit supporters are now only voting Tory - there's effectively no UKIP or Brexit party to divert votes. Areas that supported Remain, like London, are expected to stay solidly Labour - Sadiq Khan will cruise home as London mayor (and Boris Johnson won that as a Tory in 2008 and 2012).

The pandemic has made it impossible to say what have been the effects of Brexit, and what the virus. And bad Conservative decisions in the pandemic (sending hospital patients back to care homes without a Covid test where many then spread the virus, delaying a lockdown in the autumn, giving money to incompetent cronies for schemes that didn't work) just don't seem to have hurt them. And that may have been Labour's mistake - they didn't criticise the Tories enough at the time, for fear of looking unhelpful in a national crisis.