Well done Starmer and Reeves! Wait...

This isn't really about fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Fiscal conservatism in Britain died with Brexit - the fiscal conservatives all backed Remain and got forced out of their party, and never really found a new home. Under Rishi, the tax burden hit its highest level in 70 years.

All the Tories have left is social conservatism, but Reform's whole pitch has been to out-culture-war the culture warriors.

It's a sitcom and the title is clearly a joke. Maybe they should call it Snowflakelets?

Brown is a very hot take. He was PM for three years, tell me what you think was his legacy that makes him a top-3 PM?

The main thing you can praise him for was his efforts to manage the financial crisis and the recession that followed - on which I'd say he did a great job. But that comes with the enormous caveat that, having been Chancellor for the previous ten years, he's one of the people most responsible for Britain being in that position in the first place. He was the cabinet member ultimately responsible for economic policy and banking regulation over the decade in which he permitted a massive property and financial bubble to develop in the UK, all while he pronouncing that he had ended 'Tory boom and bust' - and it turns out he believed his own hype.

Labour commentators went to great lengths afterwards to try to blame the crash in the UK on global factors and arcane financial jargon - often hamming up that the initial spark of the crisis was on US sub-prime debt. But that (deliberately) conflates the proximate trigger and the underlying cause. The vast majority of British banks that need bailouts or rescues - Lloyds, HBOS, Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, Alliance and Leicester - were bog-standard UK mortgage lenders who had simply lent too much money to people who couldn't afford to repay them and secured on over-inflated UK property values, funded through unstable wholesale borrowing, and without holding the financial buffers needed to cope with these risks. Brown and his Treasury team should have supported a stronger regulatory approach, and recognised that we were in a massive bubble and acted to deflate it - instead, they were already running a budget deficit at the height of the boom, pouring fuel into the fire, in complete contravention of Keynesian economics - a key reason why the UK public finances were in such a state when the bubble then burst (in contrast to better managed economies like Germany).

Without Brown's negligence as Chancellor, the crash in Britain would have been less severe, the public finances would have been more resilient going in to the crisis, no austerity, as a result of which probably no Brexit and no Farage skulking around working-class constituencies stirring up resentment...

FWIW - my number three would be David Lloyd George. Between his time as Chancellor and PM, he's responsible for establishing the state pension, unemployment benefits, the first (pre-NHS) state-funded healthcare provision, progressive taxation, the primacy of the elected Commons over the unelected Lords, and he won the First World War - a dramatically more impressive legacy than someone like Brown.

We're getting our country back.

The lowest Lib Dem vote share in the country was recorded in Ynys Mon, where Leena Farhat got 439 votes or 1.4% - the most 'paper' of paper candidates the Lib Dems will have put up. I typed her name into Google and it took me seconds to find her Twitter, her LinkedIn, her local campaign page, and many photos of her.

It's a bit unusual for any adult in 2024 to have no online presence, but especially when a party that appears to have won the third largest vote in a UK-wide election appears to have multiple people among their purported candidates who all have no online presence...

How dare you suggest that Comrade Online Reform-Supporter is not a real human being! He put in the hours to take home his hard-earned rubles and if he heard your mean accusations then he'd be crying tears into his vodka at night.

Right, but it's unusual to have masses of candidates that have no online presence, no address, no email address, don't even show up to the count, etc.

Think of every seat declaration you saw on election night: the Lib Dem candidate was standing right there on stage, even in Leave-voting Red Wall seats where centrist moderate liberalism is a deposit-losing proposition.

There is an enormous difference between the far-right being part of a coalition under a fair electoral system (for completeness, this rarely happens anyway) - in which the far-right lack a parliamentary majority and can't do all the awful things they desire - and the far-right having a parliamentary majority on a minority of the vote under a FPTP system.

We have seen that, under FPTP, it's possible to win a large majority on a 35% vote share - as Labour have done twice this century (2005 and 2024). The Tories + Reform just won a 38% vote share between them, so what do you think happens under FPTP if a Suella Braverman or Priti Patel led Tory party decides to fight the next election in an electoral pact with Reform?

This is the inoculation I am talking about. If the far right get 38% of the votes, I damn well don't want them getting >50% of the seats as tends to happen in FPTP.

He's pathological. He's spent 20+ years telling us ID cards are the solution to whatever the problem of the day happens to be - benefit fraud, terrorism, illegal immigration, whatever people happen to be talking about that week. Meanwhile, he's yet to give any convincing argument as to what we're all supposed to do when his ID card database - containing all our biometric information and all the government's data on us, centralised into one convenient place - inevitably gets hacked. Does he have a contract with an ID card company or something?

To be fair, in only one of those London seats did the Tories get a majority of the vote (Harrow East). In most of their remaining London seats, the Tory candidate was elected with a vote share in the mid-30%s.

One of the key elements of the boundary reform that went through between the 2019 and 2023 elections was to ensure that constituencies have broadly equal numbers of electors. Prior to this there had been more variation (and a few big anomalies), whereas the boundary reform means that all seats now have an electorate of 73,393 +/-5%. (I think this was a pretty uncontroversial change but had been held up for years because the Tories kept trying to accompany it with a change to the number of MPs, which was a lot more controversial.)

I haven't bothered doing the calculation on a seat-by-seat basis, but the electorate distribution would have to skew really badly in favour of the +5%s being Lab/Con and the -5%s being non-Lab/Con for your concern to come to fruition.