By Jo Nova
It gives us hope
The Australian conservative side of politics was savaged this weekend, but Nigel Farage’s party just won a spectacular 30% of the vote in the Council elections of the UK, and won a byelection and two mayoral races. From out of nowhere, Reform UK outpolled Labour’s dismal 20% result and got twice the votes of the Tories. As Farage says it’s “the end of two-party politics”.
Farage claimed on Saturday: “In post-war Britain, no one has ever beaten both Labour and the Tories in a local election before.”
The UK experience shows that even when the Blob wins big, if the voters are offered a real alternative, a much better one, they will jump to embrace it (assuming they can break the media embargo). The rise of Reform UK will limit the damage that Kier Starmer and the Labour Party can do in the country. Even from opposition, the Reform Party have soft power that comes from surging polls. The presence of Reform UK means the Tories have dropped Net Zero, and now even former Labor leaders like Tony Blair are throwing a few sacred cows overboard to save the ship. It shows that something good could still arise from the ashes, and that even those who win big in politics still care about some polls, even when their next election is four years away.
Ponder that Australia will have another election before the UK does.
As many as 40% of Australian voters were said to be still undecided in the days before the election. Just like the UK election, the vote for the major parties is falling. First preference votes for Labor were only 34% this weekend.
The good side of a shellacking is that the results were so bad, the Liberal party* might get the message that they need to stand for something. The bad side is that the Labor Party will be smugly unbearable.
One good note is that the Greens might lose a few lower house seats, including possibly their leader, the insufferable Adam Bandt, who is on a knife edge. The losses come probably because they copied Greta and jumped off the environmental agenda and onto the Gaza one. The “Greenslide” in the last election where they won three seats in Brisbane just meant the Greens got too overconfident.
But in the Senate, the Greens may hold 11 seats. That can’t be good.
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*For foreign readers, in Australian the Liberals mean the conservatives (in theory anyway). The original meaning of Liberal was wanting more freedom from Big Government laws. In most places lefty wordsmiths stole it from the Right and the Right let them do it.
Photo by Orwain Davies
