British Elections are coming in as I type and, well, it's looking apocalyptic for the current leadership, the Conservatives:
So here's a quick lesson:
The conservatives have been in power exactly since I left the country - before I was even politically aware. Maybe it was a subconscious evacuation heh.
In that time, everything has basically crumbled into oblivion. While it's true you can say the same for most places at least in the Western world but certainly the majority of the world, the UK has performed pretty much the worst out of all its peers in the G7 or EU or whatever other group you want to put them in.
In the time I've been gone, we've gone from one of the wealthiest countries on the planet to having London being kind of wealthy, and the rest of the country being poorer than many Eastern European ex-soviet states.
The truth is, regardless who is in power, too much damage has been done and to undo that is nothing short of impossible. We are going to be experiencing a managed decline for at least as long as I'm alive. I simply can't see a way out short of some miraculous technological development leading to some globally dominant market we hold a monopoly over.
But with so much red tape and bullshit preventing anyone from accomplishing such things, somebody in the US will get the idea first and run with it into the trillions of dollars of profit in the first week or so.
So in all honesty, I'm quite apathetic about this election. And I'm not alone. The perception here is the left side of the image, Labour, is winning by a landslide and everybody loves the left wing party. This is far from reality. The reality is simply that most people who used to vote Conservatives, aren't voting.
The overall voter turnout in the previous election was about 67%. This year it's looking like something like 51%. Their vote share has only actually increased about 1.5% - that magically made the difference between losing before, to an absolute landslide.
The left side party is winning purely by default.
So overall excitement is very, very low. The only thing people are pumped for is the complete eradication of the Conservatives - the oldest political party in the world - zero seats everybody chants. But with such apathy, people aren't even voting hard enough against them. Although it's looking like their loss is still catastrophic, is not quite as apocalyptic as everybody hoped. They are looking, as of this moment, to get about 150 seats.
Although I care nothing about the Labour left, I do appreciate that their voters will be younger overall. The reason this is important is because of housing.
Us Millennials are the first generation in a long, long time, to become worse off, and have fewer future prospects, than their parents and ancestors. Every generation after us is looking to suffer the same fate.
The older generations have, in my opinion, been solely responsible for the downfall of the country, by voting Conservative almost exclusively with the sole aim of benefiting their own personal hoard of wealth at the expense of everybody younger.
The average old person owns a couple of homes, and refuse to, for example, move into a home more suitable for their age and size (living alone and unable to walk upstairs, for example, should move into a bungalow). They consider their homes as assets they can just sit on and become richer until they die. Meanwhile, a huge portion of the Conservative party are, coincidentally, working in real estate.
So by voting in a younger voting base under a leadership who are not hoarding mass real estate for themselves, whether or not they're commies or whatever, can only be a good thing in that they'll feel more incentivised to work on lowering housing prices.
I highly doubt they will be remotely successful but at least it's a different direction. Depressing to justify with such a weak argument lol.
The fact is, even in my situation, with both of us working, no child, high paying stable jobs, a ton of savings, zero debt, passive income in rental property and investments - we still cannot imagine being a homeowner in the UK. It's just out of our price league.
I mean, sure, we can technically buy a garbage house for as little as 5,000 GBP ($6,000), but we have at least 'average price' standards. And that's what has us priced out.
Imagine being a zoomer right now working in Starbucks. You probably didn't even picture a life in which you have a home and a pension. That's just some fantastical historical storytelling like learning how Ancient Romans used to live.
Here's the updated outcome:
The one interesting feature here is that tiny light blue party 'Reform'. They are certainly the talk of the entire election, and they are making a lot more waves than the voting numbers suggest, due to the nature of our system. Although something like 20% of the country are Reform voters, it translates to only a tiny number of seats.
But this party is only 5 years old and scrambled together a campaign only a few weeks before the actual election. So like it or not, that's pretty impressive.
Their whole schtick is pretty much the same sentiment as much of Europe and the western world at the moment - Anti-immigration. If they were ever to be in power it would certainly be a pain for me personally with a foreign wife, but I can totally see why there's such a demand for them.
Canada, France, Germany, you name it, immigration has overwhelmed. Reform aren't exactly anti-immigration in a far-right sense, they're more into having 'modest' immigration like we always had over previous decades - about 30,000 per year, rather than the last 5 years of about 1,000,000 each year. No exaggeration:
They also have another goal outside of the immigration talking point, and that is to be the new 'opposition party'. They don't expect to win this time at all, but they want to be a voice that can keep the actual winners, labour, in line. Their 'manifesto' - book of policies - is very likely nothing short of delusional fantasy, but in the context of it being just a bunch of talking points and expectations, rather than actual policy to attempt to implement, is actually quite useful.
If they were in power and attempted to put their policies into practice, I could imagine everything imploding and collapsing in disorganised chaos, but just as a talking point, there's some value in having them with a small handful of seats.
I don't like a whole number of their views, their ignorance on climate and vaccines, the fact a bunch of their members turn out to be random actual racist types, rather than just regular people being accused of racism for coughing wrong, and there's something a bit... well, I feel some distrust of their egocentric, budget-Trump leader Nigel Farage. But I do think, like every populist, he believes what he says, as he's been going on about the same issues for decades. This is something else the government absolutely needs: Conviction.
Both the firm belief conviction and the handcuffs and behind bars conviction XD
So yeah Reform certainly don't have what it takes to be a respectable leadership, but they do represent a certain sizeable chunk of the population which, regardless of how wrong you think they may be, is specifically the point of democracy.
Update:
There were rumours that in all likelihood, the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak (person on the right) would lose their seat - the first time in history that ever happened. However, the news in just now tells me he managed to keep his seat. So the conservatives certainly aren't doing as badly as everybody thought.
However, he has already conceded defeat before the majority threshold has even been called. As you can see, you need 326 seats for a majority, labour is already on 290. Not far to go.
A lot of people describe this as the 'Uni-party' - two sides of the same coin. Labour will essentially continue the same status quo, but at a slightly more accelerated rate of decline. I'm not sure. Maybe it'll be slower. But it will be a decline.
SNP is the Scottish National Party. They've had a whole plethora of their own scandalous problems. Scotland is in a terrible state with the worst drug addiction and alcohol abuse in Europe, among the top in the world. Life expectancy is lower than places like Baghdad. No surprise they've lost a bunch of seats.
As you can see there's a whole bunch of other parties representing, for example, Wales, Northern Ireland, Greens like anywhere else, and more.
You can see the winning seats are quite diverse around the country:
There is a lot of talk about completely changing our political system from 'First past the post', where basically only two parties can ever win, to 'Proportional representation'.
Without going into it too much, this would be more in line with some European countries like the Netherlands, and it does come with problems. Representing the voters proportionally means that those minor parties get a much larger voice. This is nice in theory, but in practice it means the idea of a coalition is practically guaranteed every time. No single party will be in power, having to gain a majority by joining forces with one or more other party.
This means people with opposing views working together against the greater enemy can't get anything done because they have to keep conceding issues to each other. It still might be preferable to our current system, but if we can wipe out the conservatives this election, and then wipe out Labour in the next one, we could have something nice and fresh in 5 years instead.
Ok I'm just gonna wait like 10 more minutes until the majority hits and leave it at that...
Oh, that didn't take long!
It's really quite a sad day. It might have a few hours of 'victory' for most people in the country. A feeling that democracy still works, we managed to vote out the bad guys. But come on. Nothing is going to change. Nothing can change. There's so many barriers, laws and legislation that it would take an army of vikings pillaging and burning down every town to the ground for a complete reset if we were ever to hope for an upward trajectory.
This election, in short, means very little to nothing. At best, it's just a conversation starter.