this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
87 points (97.8% liked)

UK Politics

2983 readers
149 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I count 306 seats where Labour are 1st and the Conservatives 2nd, or Conservatives 1st and Labour 2nd.

In the other 326 seats, either the Lib Dems, Reform, Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru or independents are a top two party. Where most voters live, the traditional Labour vs Conservative debate is no longer the relevant one.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

On Merseyside the Greens are second in the majority of constituencies, the Tories are often fifth. It's been like that for a while I think.

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

The 99 seats where the Lib Dems are top-two are the really interesting ones here because a) most of these seats are now ones they actually hold rather than ones where they're runners up, and b) their main challenger in these (typically middle-class Southern) seats is almost always the Tories. The Lib Dems winning 72 seats this time is an enormous part of why the Tories had a record-breaking bad night as opposed to just a regular bad one, and their ability to sustain this next time will be key to keeping the Tories out of government in future.

For the other parties (e.g. Greens are top-two in 43, mostly in big cities; Reform in 103, mostly white working-class Brexit areas), they're almost always the runner-up party (usually by quite a big margin) behind Labour.