Monday, February 18, 2019

Splitters!

As I've mentioned before, in a First-Past-the-Post electoral system there is room for two main parties and one "none of the above" option. For better or worse, in the UK at the moment the two main parties are the centre-left pro-Brexit Labour party and the centre-right pro-Brexit Tory party. The "none of the above" option is a fractured mess that is effectively impotent. (Northern Ireland is an exception to this, of course. Because in UK politics, Northern Ireland is always an exception.)

The unfortunate consequence of the above is that a group of MPs splitting off from the Labour party to become a new independent grouping is to help the Tories. They're not going to suddenly gain ground to become a new second party, and they're not suddenly going to be the central mass around which the "none of the above" grouping are going to coalesce.

All that this really serves to do is to demonstrate one of the other great truths of UK politics: it doesn't actually matter how terrible a mess your party is in - you just have to be marginally less dysfunctional than the other guys. Neither Labour nor the Tories are fit for purpose, but the Tories are just barely managing to hold together, so they'll win.

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