My prediction for 2024 UK General Election: Conservative majority

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-- I am not a rowebot. My name is Leah Rowe.

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Article published by: Leah Rowe

Date of publication: 22 February 2023

WARNING: Long article. I was unbelievably bored when I wrote this. I hope to bore you aswell. This article is an unmitigated disaster, because it sounded so much better in my head, but then when I wrote it, and read it, it seems to convey only 10% of the message I want to put out. I’ll publish it anyway.

Tories winning in 2024? What!? Are you high?

Such is the question, that many of my readers may want to ask me. I assure you, I’m not. I have a keen eye on events, and knowledge of historical trends. The current polls, for many months now, have predicted a landslide victory for the Labour party, but I think this is premature.

Basically, the rule of thumb to follow is this: when times are good, people reward the current ruling party with re-election, because why fix what isn’t broken? Similarly, people generally blame the ruling party when things are bad. This is because people generally have an (incorrect) belief that national politics have any influence on global events, which are by and large the more important factor to consider in any major western economy; most people are also non-owners, so they live under the false pretense that they cannot control their own life or otherwise have an effect on the world, but I digress.

In British politics, 2019 is the most recent high-point for conservativism in the UK, or at least the One Nation brand of British conservativism. Boris’s government was basically very similar to a social democratic government (tax and spend), regulated by actual conservatives within the party, and with a bit of social conservativism thrown in - which I disagree with (Boris is a racist and a transphobe. I’m glad he’s gone, and Rishi is a twat too).

Was it actually conservativism that won, when the Tories got a landslide election victory in that year?

No. Most people are not political, but that was a very good year economically, and it was just before covid ruined everything.

That, and public support in favour of Brexit was being thwarted by a cabal of treacherous MPs, in both the Labour and the Conservative party, trying to scupper any deal with the EU, in an effort to circumvent the Brexit vote - a vote which was democratically made, in a referendum, by around 30 million people who voted (representing a turnout of about 70% of those eligible to vote). Boris promised to Get Brexit Done (and that he did).

I don’t need studies to tell me otherwise; I simply read the news. Let me tell you what I think is happening.

Covid itself isn’t actually the problem - it was a global pandemic, that wreaked havoc. It also had a very low death rate by percentage of people who caught it, and mostly affected the older populations - the issue was that it overloaded the hospitals, so governments felt the need to create lockdown scenarios.

Governments - especially the UK one - pumped so much money into everything, to maintain an artificial environment where everyone still got paid but where businesses were not operating, or were operating at severely reduced capacity. Everything shut down, one way or the other.

What do you think happens when your ability to make money suddenly goes away, and everyone goes off of work for a year or more?

The conservatives were initially lauded for success in dealing with covid. The UK was one of the first countries to successfully vaccinate the population, and schemes such as the Furlough Scheme or the various loans government issued to businesses, helped avert wider chaos. Obviously, it was an emergency, and none of this could continue indefinitely.

All over the world, the lockdowns, and then re-openings of business everywhere, caused sudden inflationary pressure - this is why stuff costs more now. Not everyone could open at the same time, and shortages of things were inevitable (a lot of stuff we use depends on supply chains that are difficult to stop and start at short notice - Covid really fucked everything).

Compounding that: China, one of the world’s largest economies and which supplies a lot of technology that we depend on, stayed in lockdown for a much longer period, only officially coming out of it some time in 2022.

Obviously, all of this causes money problems for people in the UK. The UK depends heavily on foreign trade (and has a deficit in trade of goods with most countries - but a surplus in trade of services) - trade deficit in goods means we depend on the ability to import a lot of stuff, so if that stuff is unavailable, guess what? We can’t do things either, so people’s jobs are affected. The (economic) world is vast, and complicated.

Ministers, and the prime minister of the time (Boris Johnson) were found to have breached their own Covid lockdown rules, throwing lavish parties. I actually think the lockdowns were harmful, and should have been avoided; it would have been better to protect the elderly first, and tell everyone else to go about normal day to day business, while also being careful. In practise, people are social and lots of people still got sick anyway.

I think it was a good thing for Boris and his people to leave mainstream politics. People should face the consequences of their dishonesty, when they’re caught out like that. It’s only fair.

Unfortunately, politics (in any country) is largely determined by personalities, and charisma, more so than the substance of any message one way or the other. People are not inherently ideological. The good that the government did was then ignored by the public - as if nobody got generous support to keep their bills paid during lockdowns, as if the UK wasn’t the first country, literally, to have mass vaccinations against the disease.

People have such short memories!

Liz Truss is a sanctimonious bitch, someone who just says what they think people want to hear in the moment. She was a libdem, now she’s a Tory, she was a Europhile, now she’s a Brexiteer - you could tell, just by looking at her. She was insincere.

Her actual policies, that she promoted at the time, were good, but too much of a good thing at the wrong time. What the left calls trickle down economics is actually what saved this country from the ravages of socialism in the 1980s, causing much of the prosperity we have today.

It needed to be done carefully. Unfortunately, timing was not ideal, so it sort of fell apart.

People blame underfunding by the tories, on the poor state of the national health service. Let’s ignore the fact that the NHS is already extremely inefficient; other countries in Europe have privatised healthcare that is much more efficient, and actually more cost-effective, done in such a way as to still provide universal care, but without creating a giant unaccountable behemoth slow to change - the NHS has been broken, since its inception in 1948.

But no, this is actually a genuine mistake of the conservative government, though not as a result of funding.

I’m a brexiteer, but I recognise the value of skilled migration, and I also know that you don’t just move country willy nilly; most migrants are indeed skilled, and will come because they have a job offer or to start some business. This means they are contributing, making the country better. In other words: immigration is profitable.

The stupid people (the really thick people) are unfortunately used as cannon fodder, by any party, not just the Tories, as a tool to advance whatever agenda. I’m talking about the really thick people, who just don’t care about anything, they don’t even have an opinion, they just parrot what they hear.

So of course, Brexit is done, but a dogma about controlling migration is established. People leave the country in droves, because of the racist sentiment that the thick people have been encouraged to indulge.

The reason to leave the EU is because it’s an undemocratic, protectionist hellhole, not because Polish people want to come and, you know, help out. Because, you know, Polish people are generally very well educated in scientific and technical things, and we have a skills shortage in… everything science and technology. Or all the doctors from the continent…

About 1/3 of the NHS staff were foreigners, and a lot of them have left, because of stupidity by the government making immigration very restrictive. People just didn’t feel welcome, and the government put up all kinds of stupid barriers.

It has nothing to do with money. If it was, then the Scottish healthcare service (which gets more funding, by its leftwing Scottish National Party which currently is in power) wouldn’t have problems. Alas, the Scots are in the same boat.

I’m pro-immigration. I think it’s either not a threat, or a net positive, to any country. There are so many barriers besides immigration enforcement and things like visas, that prevent someone from moving to another country unless they really want to (or really need to).

If we had more of our own people to do everything, we wouldn’t need immigrants, and there would be not enough jobs for them - the tables would instead be turned, because we might end up with a surplus of skilled labourers, that we could export to other countries, to help them develop. Which is exactly what we need.

One of the things the EU does is bleed countries, especially in the east of the bloc. Young people from eastern europe leave for the west, educated by universities funded from the west - employers get to take their pick. This is actually the real purpose, in my view, of so-called free movement in the EU. It is specifically designed to allow capital flight (which is what results from all of this). It is inherently unsustainable, because eventually you get an ever ageing population in those sorts of places, and stuff just gets more broken over time.

The existence of a single centralised currency also helps.

The UK has suffered from low productivity and low competitiveness in everything, for decades. Part of it is that that are just too many regulations that make it difficult for employers to do anything; for example, it’s really hard to fire someone in the UK. The UK had opt-outs from many EU regulations in the 90s, that were later scrapped when Labour were last in power.

We became overly reliant on foreign labour, and then put restrictions on foreign labourers entering the country. This is stupid. I support the principle of hiring your own people. I think British people should get jobs first, in the UK, but the truth is that we just have too many unskilled people in the UK. It’s our fault. The other countries in Europe didn’t make us shoot ourselves in the foot, we did that ourselves. For example, university tuition fees (which were introduced first by the labour party) make higher education inaccessible to many people.

Unscrupulous employers who want to under-cut wages will use foreign labour from poor countries to increase their profits - a perfectly reasonable thing at first glance, and there’s nothing morally wrong with it, but there is everything economically wrong with it in the long term. It’s better to just pay people properly, treat them with respect. But alas:

Scapegoats gonna be scapegoats. The nature of politics is that you have to find something to blame, because a lot of people really are just quite thick.

It’s possible to be pro-business, pro-people and pro-immigration: I’m all three things. When I employ people, I pay them a decent wage no matter what job they’re doing: at least £12-15 an hour. I’m not inclined to bus people in from another country, because I don’t feel the need to, but I have nothing against that either (and I’ve used foreign workers before, on payroll or as contractors):

Any good business has to treat workers with respect, which means paying them right, and not abusing them. That’s just common sense. You want the best out of them, and you want to keep them. It’s also the right thing to do. Unfortunately, a lot of bosses (quite unlike myself) are just very short sighted and petty, too full of themselves, so they just act like proper cunts; this, combined with a hostile immigration system, and it’s no wonder many EU migrants left. And that’s why the NHS is fucked - and there was no reason for it to be that way, but I digress.

What point am I trying to make?

The point is this: the leftwing media puts a spin that Brexit is the cause of many of our skills shortages. It’s not just NHS, it’s lots of industries, that are losing output due to worker shortages. This spin is wrong. Brexit is a good thing, because democracy is a good thing and the EU is undemocratic; we were right to leave. However, Brexit and anti-immigration sentiment do not need to be part of the same equation. It’s anti-immigration policies, combined with a lack of real skills of our own people, that is causing our messes today.

We need to educate and train our own people, and let foreigners in to fill any gaps that currently exist - we are doing neither, so shortages of skilled workers in key industries are just making everything much worse.

So, since 2019 we’ve basically had these problems:

• Covid screwing everything
• Bad macroeconomic management (by incompetent ministers)
• Shortage of skilled workers
• Rest of the world also in chaos

Here are several things that I see happening:

• China is back. Trade with them will come roaring back, and we can return to same level of normal. Like it or not, we need them.
• Ukraine/Russia conflict likely to end during 2023: it’s just not logistically possible for it to continue much longer, something will budge - return to some level of normality/stability
• Generally, countries are getting back on track. US and EU are looking good at the moment.
• Basically, I think a lot of problems people have will be better by then.

(also, the government has the power to enact policies that help people in the short term, which they can do just before election period starts, and they can hope people respond in kind for that)

What about other aspects? Here are a few:

Labour is pretty well united at the moment, but this will change. The anti-semitism report by internal Labour party staff was leaked, and the party is planning to bring a lawsuit against the leakers (all corbynites) in early 2024 - look it up, it’s been in the media lately.

Such a lawsuit will make the Labour party look very disunited, and it’s going to drain the party of money, that it needs to fund a rigorous general election campaign.

The rightwing press will have a field day with this. It will backfire on the Labour party, and people will think twice about voting for them.

Sturgeon resigned, and her successor is likely to be weak (successors usually are, because they have to live up to their predecessor and surpass them, which is hard to do- Sturgeon was a very effective politician, and very good at getting things done).

Infighting and just general apathy among the population will split the left vote in Scotland, which isn’t good news for Labour and it allows Scottish tories to drive a wedge, giving them probably more seats there.

From May 2023 local elections and elections afterwards, it’s now law that you need photographic identification in order to vote.

I oppose this law, because I think people should have the right to vote, and a lot of people in the UK don’t have photographic ID for one reason for another.

In particular, poor people (who are more likely to vote Labour) often lack ID. The UK does not have mandatory ID yet, for everything - though you now need photo ID to open a bank account, since 2017.

i want people who support Labour to be able to, without restriction. I don’t like Labour, but people should have the right to vote for them if they wish.

Voter ID law is a form of voter suppression. This law was introduced by my own party, and I would like this law to be removed.

However, whether I like it or not, the tactic is likely to be successful. And yes, it is a tactic. My party is saying it’s to prevent voter fraud, but instances of voter fraud is very low in the UK. It’s an absolute load of nonsense.

The right is on the defensive for now, because we’re in mid term. We’ll get our gloves off when the time comes round.

The current high polling for Labour is in the absence of this. Labour always does better in the polls, during mid-term, but dips in an actual election.

2024 is likely to be on a knife edge, with no party having a majority, and the conservatives will be in a very strong position.

For example, here are some lines the rightwing press might (will) say, in the event that I’m right and economics improve (people’s money situations get better):

• “Look at all this prosperity, this is because of our careful planning. Don’t let these socialists ruin everything”
• References to…. every last labour government (they’ll selectively ignore the Blair years, which were actually good, though Blair was largely neoliberal not social democratic, in his policies)

The hard-left pro-corbyn type people in the Labour party still have a lot of sway, and are likely to cause trouble for their party.

Ukraine must win, and get Russians out of the country. A Russian victory would threaten the rest of Europe further: what if Russia invades, say, Poland or Moldova next? And then Hungary? It would be bad.

Because, you know, nazis are bad. Putin should be shot in the head. This is my humble opinion.

What if it escelates into World War III? I hope it doesn’t, but:

Well, at that point, all bets are off, but the UK government has been far more proactive than say, the EU or even the US, in providing weapons and aid to Ukraine. This would continue, with our government saying:

We are doing all we can for our brothers in arms, or some other heroic rhetoric. If UK is dragged into a wider conflict, it could be seen by the public that the government is taking a decisive lead and doing good in the world - it would be a disaster for humanitarian reasons, but it would do wonders for the electability of the conservatives.

A Ukranian victory, which is far from impossible, and may well happen before 2024, would be good news for the conservatives, who can boast to the electorate about everything they did to help make that happen.

This is a cynical way of looking at things, but it’s what will happen. Politicians of all sides are ruthless.

The leftwing media is saying people regret Brexit - no. People just don’t like that they are suffering from lack of money in the bank, people don’t like being poor. And this is being caused by so many things, that are affecting so many countries.

Recent polling suggests about 2/3 of people would vote to re-join the EU. Is it really the EU though, or just a vague sense that it would just be a quick fix to solve all their problems?

What about 2019 then, when the conservatives got a landslide on a pro-Brexit platform?

No, I think people are just finding something to blame. As is the case with our politics, sadly.

Would people vote to re-join if the beaucrats insisted we join the Euro, and a host of other things? The Euro is deeply unpopular with British people.

Would the EU even have us back? Doubtful.

I recommend ignoring anything you hear about that. The left just don’t like tories (duh), and want something to talk about, but they have nothing to say.

The UK and EU have a comprehensive trade deal that eliminates tariffs, allowing trade simply on VAT terms; pay on either end and that’s it. There is slightly more paperwork, most of which is automated when you send items (the courier can handle it for you, and they charge a small filing fee for taxes - couriers by now have the infrastructure to handle it). For small merchants, the EU even did something surprising: they made it easier to trade. For example, you used to have to file for VAT in every EU country, if your company operates outside the EU. You can now, for low-value items, file in one country under the IOSS scheme - and instead of charging 20% UK VAT for high value goods, you can charge 0% and the customer pays their own country’s rate of VAT instead.

It’s all a bit muddled, but the gist of it is: a bit more paperwork but the trucks keep moving.

I don’t know what people are on about when they say trade has gotten harder. I regularly sell laptops to the EU, in the same volume that I did pre-Brexit, and I haven’t had any problems. Sure, items take about 1-2 extra days on average to arrive, but they do still arrive and customers are happy.

Paying import tax is a very normal thing, that happens everywhere else in the world. The EU’s customs union is, in my view, superfluous: they are just granting rights (to member states) that they first took away. The EU doesn’t need to exist. The EU itself is harder to trade with than anywhere else, for all non-EU countries, not just the UK. EU tariffs on most goods from outside, cause everything to become more expensive and less competitive within the EU:

So the difference is this: as a brexiteer, you see the EU as the original problem, and Brexit as part of the solution leading to wider action later (more countries leaving the EU, and the EU falling apart) - or if you’re one of the weak remainers who like being controlled, you’d rather play it safe and keep your country’s sovereignty under the hands of an unelected elite. You like the fact that your government can’t remove VAT on tampons, you like the fact that your citizens are literally unable to vote for any other economic programs that that prescribed by the Commission (and implemented by your puppet government) - I digress.

Even if the EU was genuinely an asset, and that the fear mongerers were right and that Brexit is the worst financial decision the UK has ever made, I’d still support it, as a libertarian. I believe in democracy, and the ruling bodies of the EU (such as the Commission) are all appointed, rather than elected by citizens.

Anyway, I got bored.

I’m not going to write anymore. I even have half a mind not to publish this, but I probably will.

tl;dr anything can happen, and don’t read into anything too seriously. just wait and see what happens.

The labour party was destined to win the 2015 general election, and the 2017 election. In 2015 it was… not really focused, just a general lofty agenda put out by Ed Milliband’s PLP at the time, about this and that. In 2017 it was about what the left called the Dimensia Tax criticitizing Theresa May’s policies about elderly care - in 2019 it was all about Brexit.

In every case, and with polls to back it up, it showed Labour doing very well, entering as a majority or (in most polls) a coalition. They were wrong every time.

They’ll be wrong in 2024. If Labour does enter power, it’ll be as a minority government, or a very weak majority.

People are not political. Only a minority of us are. People don’t vote for parties, they vote for policies, in line with the times, and the times change quickly.

Everything you see is bullshit, including this article. What you should do is adopt a principle, and stick to it. Current events and trends aside, what matters is the intent behind every action, and every word spoken. Analyse intent.

What the Labour party intends is to turn the UK into a very authoritarian place, where you can’t do business the way you want, where people generally have restrictions on what they can do, for the greater good - what they want in socialism, the idea that workers should conduct their own affairs, that the bosses and the billionaires are evil and cannot be trusted - don’t be fooled. If you think things are bad now, they’ll be much worse if those bastards get in.

They won’t make the billionaires pay for their plans. They’ll make you do it, and they’ll march this country straight back into the European Union.

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