UK Election Unchained: Imminent Labour Win Edition
Final Week highlights of election season. Bumper Edition: Leader pot luck, Labour slashing knife crime
There are 12 hours until polls open nationwide and millions of soon-to-be disgruntled constituents pour into their local village halls, schools, and community centres (at least the ones that haven’t closed in the last 14 years) to cast their vote in the most predetermined election in living memory. This week, loyal readers are rewarded with a bumper edition of UK Election Unchained, in a move that had everything to do with orchestrating my publishing in accordance with political developments and little, if anything, to do with me being on holiday last week.
As all of the polls are expecting a dominant Labour majority and the only people betting against Labour are their own parliamentary candidates (more on that later), you could be forgiven for thinking that this is not the most exciting election, but you only have to look at the movements that Labour are making to be reminded that on any given Thursday, any candidate can beat any other candidate. Several fascinating local constituency battles featuring the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, Rishi Sunak, Nigel Farage, and Faiza Shaheen will draw attention firmly to their local battles and away from the ~640 other seats that no one really is paying attention to anyway.
The potential of the shabby-trousered rabble-rouser Jeremy Corbyn to independently hold onto his seat after being booted from the flashy new Labour party is one of the tightest battles of the election. To see a lone independent Corbyn in an island of Labour would say something about the sway that he still holds and his constituency being sandwiched between David Lammy’s, Diane Abbott’s, Emily Thornberry’s, and Keir Starmer’s is enough to make me wonder if having an MPs should actually have a seating plan that corresponds to their constituencies geographically. There has been much talk of Rishi Sunak potentially being the first sitting Prime Minister to lose his seat, but even not accounting for Count Binface splitting the anti-Tory vote, it seems very unlikely that will happen. And not just because he is not a sitting Prime Minister, he is a walking Prime Minister on his way to the departure lounge at Heathrow. At the risk of spoiling the event for those of you who like to stay up until 6am watching election coverage on a weeknight, Nigel Farage will win his seat and Faiza Shaheen will lose her seat. Sorry to ruin the surprise, but at least now you can get a good night’s sleep.
In gearing up for the final week of campaigning, the leaders of three parties all happened to take to the same artisanal craft of pottery on the same day, giving an opportunity for us to see how it plays out when Starmer and Sunak take the wheel (the pottery wheel, that is). Sunak really put the pedal to the metal (the pedal that operates the pottery wheel, that is) to create a teapot at the Denby factory, so it’s worth remembering if you’re looking to buy a teapot in the future that there is a non-zero chance it has been made by Rishi Sunak and has more holes in it than a National Service proposal. Keir Starmer’s main artistic contribution was the resultant series of photographs of a local potter absolutely losing his mind laughing at, presumably, Keir Starmer’s terrible football jokes. The man’s jaw will be hurting for weeks. But it’s Ed Davey who appears to be the real pothead among the three, and I’m not talking about him painting ceramics in Manchester, I’m talking about him legalising cannabis. Ed Davey, having admitted to smoking cannabis on “a few occasions’’ at university, refused to rule out legalising other substances, such as magic mushrooms. If Keir Starmer doesn’t stand firm on this when the Lib Dems are in opposition, we could all be back at Woodstock, wearing tie-dye tshirts and saying “Groovy, dude” before the decade is out. Needless to say, this doesn’t seem very compatible with Liberal Democrat net zero plans, how are our nation’s scientists going to think up solutions to the climate crisis if they’re too busy passing the blunt around the lab all day? Davey also started off this week by doing a bungee jump, hopefully the last stunt we see from him, unless he hang-glides into his polling station tomorrow.
Meanwhile, Labour have been getting down to the serious business everyone expects of an heir apparent. The final leader’s debate occurred last Wednesday, a fiery shit-slinging between Sunak and Starmer which descended into everyone’s most rational topic, gender identity. Labour seemingly couldn’t get enough of that topic, but rather than carefully thinking about what is the most sensitive approach for the wellbeing of all involved, they have gone another route and agreed to have a meeting with J.K. Rowling, who, it’s worth remembering, is not an well-renowned expert on gender identity, but rather is a celebrity who has just decided a few years ago that she needed to get increasingly angry and offensive about this one particular subject because no one was paying enough attention to her terrible new books. Since then she has pushed herself further down the rabbit hole and now almost exclusively hangs out with abusers and bigots who share the main view that she has, so it’ll be interesting to see how that group get along with whichever unfortunate Labour minister has to go and talk to them about this.
Elsewhere, Keir Starmer has made a very brave pledge to cut knife crime in half by the end of their first term. It’s an interesting tactic to promise the completion of an impossible goal and also take absolutely no steps towards doing it in either the short or the long term, but everyone’s been crying out for Labour to make a pledge and here they’ve come out with a belter. Given that Labour have made no significant spending promises for community centres or youth support workers, I don’t see how they will be able to achieve this, short of Keir Starmer putting on a spandex suit and beating up drug-dealers in an alley. And personally, if he does, I hope the first criminal he goes after is Ed Davey for smoking weed in university.
Labour are also planning to introduce automatic registration for voting, which I really didn’t think was actually a possible thing to do, given that I have never heard of any party mentioning it as a plan. Labour presumably believe that this will mobilise millions of young voters in future elections, a demographic more disposed to voting for parties of the left (which makes it a strange demographic for Starmer’s Labour to mobilise). However, at least one Labour candidate can see through the hype and is putting himself in a position to benefit from their failure. Labour parliamentary candidate Kevin Craig continued the gambling trend of this election by placing a bet on himself to lose the election. Some might say this was a bad idea, but as the Labour party have now suspended him and withdrawn all support, the odds for him to lose have probably shortened a fair bit and he is lined up to make an absolute killing. As many political commentators have said, this is surely not as bad as the Conservatives using insider knowledge to bet on the election date, it’s not as if Kevin Craig is in a position to affect the outcome of this bet.
Tuesday kicked off with Keir Starmer admitting that he sometimes stops working as early as 6pm on Fridays (and who knows what other days??) which predictably resulted in a lot of attacks from the hard-working Tory politicians who have never had a day off in their lives. One of the most logical criticisms made towards the ‘Part-time Prime Minister’ was the Tory deputy chairman saying “Let’s hope Putin doesn’t choose 6.01pm when he wishes to go any further with his illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine.” It does raise some serious security concerns over what Sir Keir would do in that situation; if he’s anything like me he’d just about see the message while logging off, turn his phone off for the weekend and hope the problem is resolved when he starts again on Monday. Keir Starmer’s final message to the electorate, hypocritically, is one stressing the importance of active participation. It is no longer just “time for change”, the message now is “If you want change, you have to vote for it”. And asking me to take 15 minutes out of my day to go to the polling station is a lot to ask of me when the person asking it is probably going to sleep in until noon, forget to vote, get elected Prime Minister anyway, and then knock off early the day after he’s elected.
That brings me to the end of this week’s article, having finally caught you up with all you could possibly need to know about British politics. We’ve covered: which parties are bad (all of them), which news stories matter (none of them), and which leaders drink beer (not nearly enough of them). I would like to congratulate you on staying politically-engaged enough to keep reading these election season highlights right up until the very end. This time tomorrow you’ll have voted and you will finally be able to relax again in the knowledge that there is, once again, nothing you can do to arrest the downward trajectory of this country for the next five years, a liberating thought. Unless they call an early election.
Thanks for reading! UK Election Unchained will NOT be back next week.
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