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UK Politics General Discussion

What will be the result of the UK’s General Election?

  • Conservative Majority

    Votes: 3 2.5%

  • Conversative Biggest Party in Hung Parliament

    Votes: 2 1.7%

  • Labour Majority

    Votes: 87 72.5%

  • Labour Biggest Party in Hung Parliament

    Votes: 28 23.3%

  • Other Result (Please specify in your post)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    120
  • Poll closed .
I very much morally come from this debate on the side of trans people but I have said in the past that I felt some of the early shutting down of cis woman’s concerns and questions was not really a good idea, I didn’t not ever think it would however become as toxic as it has.

Ironically my concern around the debate has been that Cis woman will ultimately be hit hard by the purist ideology of biology and gender, here are a few reasons why:

Firstly no one has ever really been able to provide any significant evidence that men pretending to be trans to gain entry to single sex spaces has ever been a major risk, as others have said it seems a lot of effort for men so inclined to sexually assault women, there are sadly easier ways for them to commit their crimes.

Next we have the fact if you ban trans women from entering women’s only spaces you have to extrapolate that transmen (people forget they exist) will now have to use women only spaces. So in that reality what’s to stop cis men rapists from claiming to be transmen to gain access to women only spaces?

Next we have the cis gendered woman’s who are not maybe as feminine as society expects being harassed when entering women’s only spaces, we have already seen in America cis women being banned from women’s toilets because people thought they were trans women, how long before the Tommy Robinson types sexually assault a cis woman when “checking” if they are really a woman?

Now let’s be really cold and consider the costs, the head of the EHRC saying trans people should lobby for 3rd spaces (isn’t that their job?). So now every business who chooses to state their toilets and other spaces are based on biology will be required to provide alternatives for trans people (the same equality act that this ruling applies to still requires businesses and services to not discriminate trans people). That’s going to be a hell of a lot of expense for business to build 3rd spaces…. Or they get rid of gender specific toilets completely and make all toilets gender neutral. Which do you think business will do? So gone are gender specific toilets and the risk for women will certainly increase if these TERFs are correct that rapists are eager to get into their toilets…

Next it’s the NHS, based on the same head of the EHRC the NHS will no longer be able to put trans women in women’s wards, but they will also not be able to force trans women into men’s wards due to the other provisions in law. So the only option will be to put them in single occupancy rooms. The NHS has very few single occupancy rooms, and they are mostly used for patients who are an infection risk to other patients. This means either the trans person or the infection risk patient will have to be accommodated singularly in a 2 or 4 person ward bay, meaning beds will be lost for other patients….

And what do we do about intersex people? How do they fall within the letter of the law against this ruling?

The likes of JK Rowling smoking her cigar on her private yacht celebrating this ruling genuinely don’t care about women’s safety, they just want to hate someone and they have chosen trans people.
 
There have been some interesting points raised that I’ll admit I hadn’t thought about previously. That is one of the things I like about debating complex topics on here; instead of biting your head off as can sometimes happen on social media, folks on here are always willing to politely and constructively debate things and it does often lead to my view being broadened, so thank you all for that!

Having tried to do a bit of reading on the topic, I honestly think I’m further from a solid conclusion than ever. The only thing I’m clear on is that I think it’s a far more nuanced and complicated debate than ardent advocates of either side of it make out. I do feel that both ardently pro-trans advocates and ardently gender critical advocates oversimplify the debate and make it out to be quite black and white when there is a lot of nuance and an awful lot of grey, with both sides offering arguments and solutions that have benefits and drawbacks. I think it’s a lot more complicated than “allies” and “TERFs”; I don’t believe that everyone with gender critical beliefs is inherently anti-trans or transphobic, even if some undeniably are.

The scientist in me thinks that completely ignoring one’s biological sex is a bad idea, but at the same time, I do acknowledge that self-declared gender is incredibly important to some individuals, and that going off of biological sex alone could introduce other enigmas.

It’s definitely a complicated one…
 
So Staffordshire Council is now a Reform-run authority, will be very interesting to see how that goes for Towers…

Shropshire where I live went from Tory to Lib Dem, I’m not too disappointed about that, probably the best case scenario.

An emphatic rejection of Labour’s first year though. Although of course it’ll all be forgotten by the time we get to the next General Election if they manage to improve things over the rest of their term. I just can’t see it though, the country is too divided.
 
Mick said:
So Staffordshire Council is now a Reform-run authority, will be very interesting to see how that goes for Towers…

Shropshire where I live went from Tory to Lib Dem, I’m not too disappointed about that, probably the best case scenario.

An emphatic rejection of Labour’s first year though. Although of course it’ll all be forgotten by the time we get to the next General Election if they manage to improve things over the rest of their term. I just can’t see it though, the country is too divided.
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Reform only care about millionaires and corporations so it would probably work fine for Towers.

I’m in two minds about the local elections, I do think both Labour and the Tory’s are mucking up their engagement with the public at the moment, and Labour need to change direction on a number of issues (ironically the Tory’s set up a ton of traps that boxed Labour in that are now actually harming the Tory’s as it’s given fuel to Reform).

That said Farage has never actually had to produce results in his life. He never turned up to the EU parliament as an MEP (he was on the fisheries committee but never went). He also rarely turns up in Clackton or the House of Commons. Now he has a bunch of councils and a Mayoralty and 3 years before a general election. If those councils fail (or don’t improve) then their popularity will be hit.

I’m all for shaking up the two party system but we have been here before with the SDP in the 80’s who polled higher than reform has (40% at one point), and Reform is a cult of personality set around Farage who is in his 60’s and smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish and has a habit of falling out with any of his colleagues who start to get more popular.

It’s sad though that social media has allowed so many people to think he is a solution when he literally wants the exact opposite of everything they want (he was again talking about privatising the NHS this week and wants to strip back workers rights).
 
Labour need to actually do something to make people's lives better. At the moment things don't feel any different than how they were under the Conservatives. It plays into the "they're all the same" narrative.

Unless people start to see change soon I do fear we're heading for a Reform government.
 
Reform are still a really young party with limited grassroots support, there’s loads of time before a general election for apathy to set in with them. As well as all the scandals that will inevitably come out about their councillors, the party would just be another UKIP if Farage left.

Considering local councils are mostly in-charge of social care (or at least that’s where a lot of the budget goes), I think people have just decided to protest vote against Labour and the Conservatives.

Labour need to lean more into economic issues around wealth distribution, workers rights and social justice. They need to be more unashamedly Labour, no point pretending to be a softer version of the Tories when it still haemorrhages votes. Policies like better childcare, weed legalisation and more preventative healthcare are the way to go. Policies that would have a tangible impact on your local voter, that can be delivered in a shortish time frame and show the vision that Labour has for Britain.

When it comes to asylum hotels, hosting coffee hours between asylum seekers and local communities would be a cheap and effective way of mitigating the hostility and skepticism of migration. As the community would be able to connect with those in the hotels and not just see asylum seekers as an unknown that is being hidden away.
 
Some of the issue is people don’t understand how Parliament works, they think the government comes in and immediately makes changes. Fact is most of Labours policies are still going through parliament. Things like the workers rights bill and renters rights are still in that process.

The sad fact however, is the top of Labour don’t know how politics works either. Like him or loath him but Alaister Campbell knew how to sell the message back in the 90’s. The big issues as far as I can see are:

1) Labour (and the Tory’s) still think you communicate via the mainstream media, They don’t realise you have to effectively use social media.

2) Labour shouldn’t have scrapped the winter fuel payment. The cold hard fact is most pensioners are better off now even without the winter fuel payment and it was wasteful to be paying millionaires over 67 this money. But the saving was tiny in the grand scheme of things and the optics were terrible, sometimes a sensible policy is just bad politics.

3) They allowed themselves to get stuck in the tax trap the Tories set-up. They should have said they were returning NI to its level under the Tories, and outlined a commission on reviewing land tax. They would have lost some votes but once you have a majority of 60 seats the rest is just bragging and not needed.

4) They got bogged down in the culture wars because they don’t understand polling. When you poll the population around 60% of people say they disagree with trans people using women’s toilets. However, if you then ask if the policy would impact how they would vote barely anyone says yes. Labour just saw the 60% headline figure and panicked (plus a few transphobes like Streeting were likely lobbying. They will gain no votes from going TERF but will lose them on the left flank.

I don’t think Reform can win the next election, I think the likely outcome is a Labour - Libdem coalition or confidence and supply deal. It’s the election after that I think is more vulnerable.
 
I actually don’t dislike Keir Starmer, and I actually agree with quite a few of the decisions he’s made in power. Not necessarily out of idealism, but more out of the fact that we’re in a difficult spot as a country and he’s making decisions that I feel are difficult in the short term, but are likely to have long-term benefits.

With that said, I also agree with @Alsty in thinking that Labour perhaps aren’t tangibly changing people’s lives enough. I don’t think Starmer and co are being particularly radical, and while “radical” is not always a good thing, I think the country was in such a position in 2024 that the electorate would have happily subscribed to radical. Many people have been left behind by the current system, and have had enough of the status quo.

I hold the potentially controversial view that as much as people like to say that Corbynism was toxic and Starmer did the right thing abandoning it, I think his steadfast refusal to acknowledge anything positive in Corbynism has almost pushed Labour too far the other way. Jeremy Corbyn was briefly very popular (his 2017 election performance was the only time post-Blair that Labour got over 40% of the vote), and he did present a meaningful vision for change that resonated with quite a broad cross-section of the country. I don’t agree with everything Corbyn stood for (he’s probably quite a bit further left than I am), but I thought he had some good ideas and was quite an inspiring leader.

My fear is that even if Starmer and Reeves are able to get the economy going again, they’ll fall into the same trap as Joe Biden did, wherein they have a technically very strong economy, but the average person on the street isn’t feeling it. Economic figures mean precisely squat to the average member of the public if their life isn’t getting better and they’re still feeling the pinch, and I think that is what the left often misses.

I’ve been reading a really interesting book about Brexit recently (the title is All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit, if anyone wants some political reading!), and it made an interesting point about the economic argument of the Brexit debate. It said about how Remain thought they’d won the economic argument hands down, with lots of figures about how the economy would decline with a Leave vote… but what the Remain campaign had failed to grasp is that many people in those “Red Wall” areas like the North East that voted Brexit in huge numbers, people already felt like the economy was failing because their lives were poor and they felt left behind. As such, they didn’t really feel like they had anything to lose and the economic figures from George Osborne and David Cameron weren’t really resonating. Yet the simple message of “we send £350m a week to the EU… let’s spend it on our NHS instead” peddled by the Leave campaign did resonate; it very effectively painted the EU as a bad guy taking money that could be spent on making British people’s lives better, and in the working-class communities in “Red Wall” seats who don’t really care about “the single market” and such, the EU became synonymous with “we send £350m a week to them and get nothing in return”.

What I feel the left often fails at, and why the populist right often succeeds in working class areas, is that they don’t make economic figures relevant to people’s everyday lives. People in deprived areas don’t care that “debt as a percentage of GDP is falling”, or that “economic growth topped 1% this quarter” or that “inflation fell below the Bank of England’s 2.5% target” or whatever. They care about bills going up, being unable to afford groceries, being unable to afford housing, being unable to get an appointment at the doctor’s surgery. Economic arguments are meaningless if you can’t make them translate to improvements in people’s everyday lives, and I think that is why Remain lost, why Kamala Harris lost, and why Keir Starmer is struggling amongst others. People are feeling left behind and struggling regardless of what the economy is technically doing, and they aren’t feeling the economic improvements in their lives, so when people like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump come along and say “we’ll bring back the good old days”, it resonates more with people in these deprived areas who are feeling left behind than meaningless economic figures.
 
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Benzin said:
Labour doing stupid things against the disabled and trans groups who are both usually left leaning doesn't exactly help.

Why should I vote for red Tories?
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I’m in no way advocating for Labour, vote how you like, and their PIP and Trans policies are both infuriating and in error I feel (there are issues with the disability support that are traps keeping people out of work but cutting the eligibility isn’t the solution).

That said I have never understood the idealogical purity of the left (being left wing myself). In an ideal world sure be as pure as you like but we don’t have one of those. The big difference between the centre right and the left is the centre right are nearly always pragmatic. They might think “This party isn’t giving me 100% or what I believe in but it’s 20% better than the other party so I will vote for it”.

The left often go “this party only agrees with 80% of what I believe in therefore I won’t vote for it even though I know it will allow the party that I entirely disagree with to win power”.

All political parties do it, a lot of my friends on the left are now joining the Green Party and when I pointed out the Green Party was campaigning against renewable energy in parts of the south east because they have gained council seats in NIMBY areas they look at me sheapish and never have an answer.

Also Labour are not Red Tory, they swing around the political centre like they have always done when they win, just like the Tory’s swing around the political centre when they tend to win, it’s just the Tories sit a little to the right and Labour a little to the left.

In first past the post politics historically you can’t win far from the centre of politics, I suspect the media frenzy over Reform are overhyped, but hopefully there is a shift that removes the comfort blanket of FPTP for Labour and makes proportional representation more likely, if that happens then yes you can start voting more closely to your perfect ideology but until then if you don’t want what you hate you have to vote for which ever party is the lesser of evils in your constituency.
 
Labour need to be talking about issues with a social impact and positive economic outcomes.

Weed legalisation is a no-brainer, raising money for the Treasury, freeing up prison spaces and de-stigmatising communities.

Childcare is a big one, give people better access to childcare so the parents have more flexibility with work and can contribute more to the economy.

Investment in preventative healthcare. Stop the ballooning costs on hospitals, get more people involved with leisure and sports. Create stimulation for jobs within those spaces.

Land value tax, raise money from unproductive land assets and make sure it is spent to redistribute money within the country. Use it to stimulate growth within the co-operative sector where people have a stake in the businesses they engage with.
 
As an aside it’s astounding how the media have ignored the Lib Dem’s. I was watching a political
Expert I respect and they were saying the Lib Dem’s quiet rise is probably more likely to disrupt politics than Reform. Basically their assumption was because there is no pressure the LD’s are quietly building a background election machine, but Reform are likely to fly high then crash and burn.

Either way you cut it it’s curious times.
 
Broadly speaking Reform are just replacing the Tories - first they had an influx of Tory MPs, now they seem to have picked up the Tory voters too
 
Broadly speaking Reform are splitting the Tories vote, and gaining a small portion of the Labour vote.
I think long term, they may well do Labour a favour, keeping the Tories out.
The last "big" new party was the Social Democrats, wasn't it.
They did well!
Eventualy becoming a SaLaD.
 
As an aside it’s astounding how the media have ignored the Lib Dem’s. I was watching a political
Expert I respect and they were saying the Lib Dem’s quiet rise is probably more likely to disrupt politics than Reform. Basically their assumption was because there is no pressure the LD’s are quietly building a background election machine, but Reform are likely to fly high then crash and burn.

Either way you cut it it’s curious times.
 
I don’t think Reform are solely eating into the Tory vote as much as you’d expect.

Unlike the Tories, they are making considerable inroads in traditionally Labour areas. Look at Runcorn and Helsby, for example; that seat has been one of Labour’s safest seats for decades, but Reform took it in the by-election. And if you look at the 2024 election, Reform came second in 98 seats, if I’m remembering rightly, and in a great many of those, Labour were the winning party. In loads of those “safe” Labour seats in areas like the North East and Wales, Reform came second and beat the Tories by an absolute mile.

Reform represents change, and I think a lot of people are sick to death of the political status quo. A great many people have felt left behind by the political system for decades, and rightly or wrongly, they feel like Reform are listening to them in a way that other political parties aren’t.

I don’t support Reform, but whether you like what they’re proposing or not, they are a party promising considerable change. If you’re feeling left behind by the current system, why wouldn’t you take a chance on the party promising change rather than the one wanting to maintain the status quo with a few tweaks?
 
Matt N said:
I don’t think Reform are solely eating into the Tory vote as much as you’d expect.

Unlike the Tories, they are making considerable inroads in traditionally Labour areas. Look at Runcorn and Helsby, for example; that seat has been one of Labour’s safest seats for decades, but Reform took it in the by-election. And if you look at the 2024 election, Reform came second in 98 seats, if I’m remembering rightly, and in a great many of those, Labour were the winning party. In loads of those “safe” Labour seats in areas like the North East and Wales, Reform came second and beat the Tories by an absolute mile.

Reform represents change, and I think a lot of people are sick to death of the political status quo. A great many people have felt left behind by the political system for decades, and rightly or wrongly, they feel like Reform are listening to them in a way that other political parties aren’t.

I don’t support Reform, but whether you like what they’re proposing or not, they are a party promising considerable change. If you’re feeling left behind by the current system, why wouldn’t you take a chance on the party promising change rather than the one wanting to maintain the status quo with a few tweaks?
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Looking at Runcorn and Helsby is interesting.

In 2019 the results were the following:
Labour - 23,617
Conservative - 17,838
Liberal Democrats - 3,247
Brexit Party - 2,302
Green - 1,414

In 2024, the right vote splits, Labour gets a small boost, seemingly from people who voted Tory in 2019 and "lend" their vote:
Labour-+4.1%
Reform UK - +13.3%
Conservative - −20.8%
Green - +3.5%
Liberal Democrats - −1.6%

In 2025, where the turnout is -12.5% vs the previous year, the results are as follows:
Reform UK - +20.58%
Labour - −14.23%
Conservative - −8.83
Green - +0.66%
Liberal Democrats - −2.2%

The Conservative votes, who leant their vote for Labour the previous year, switch allegiances to Reform UK. The Conservative normal electorate, who voted Tory last year, also switch to Reform UK. The rest of the dip in Labour's numbers can be explained by the drop in turnout.

We're also forgetting, that in this seat, the previous MP was recalled after a custodial sentence was imposed. Scandal will have played a part too, which we've mostly discounted.

TLDR the picture isn't as simple as "Labour voters switched to Reform", it's more nuanced. Some, of course, did, but it's not as many as it looks to be at first glance.
 
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