With the election coming up, here's the latest poll results for the UK from Yougov:
The change over the last month (15-16 April) is notable.
Brexit Party up to 35% from 27% (+8)
Liberal Democrats up to 16% from 9% (+7)
Labour down to 15% from 22% (-7)
Greens flat at 10% in both polls
Conservatives down to 9% from 15% (-6)
Change-UK down to 5% from 6% (-1)
UKIP down to 3% from 7% (-4)
Only two parties appear to be increasing their market share, Brexit and the Liberal Democrats. All of the others are flat or down. The two formerly mainstream parties, Labour and the ruling Conservatives, are down to a
combined 24%. The poll is especially humiliating for the ruling Conservatives, who are in fifth place, down to single digits. They seem to be losing most of their rank-and-file voters.
Presumably the Brexit Party MEPs will find common cause with Matteo Salvini's Lega and Marine LePen's RN MEPs. Along with many of the Eastern Europeans, that might just create an interesting new bloc in the European Parliament. Take
that Guy Verhofstadt, Jean Claude Juncker, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel! Of course it wouldn't change anything, since the European Parliament seems to be largely impotent and the EU is actually ruled from Brussels by the European Commission (whatever that is).
The more interesting question is what impact this seeming realignment in the UK will have on British national politics. (Is Britain really a nation any longer? Or just a peripheral province of the EU?)
Could this possibly herald one of those periodic shakeups in British politics similar to what happened in the middle 1800's when the Whigs and Tories were replaced by the Liberals and Conservatives, or in the 1920's when the Liberals were replaced by Labour?
Both the Conservatives and Labour seem to me to be suffering from extraordinarily bad leadership. Theresa May seems well-meaning but hopelessly muddled: weak, feckless and increasingly disingenuous. (I think that her problem is that she listens too closely to her advisers and is receiving terrible advice. She's a weather-cock rather than a leader, pointing whichever way the London bankers in expensive suits point her.) Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn promises to become Britain's own Hugo Chavez and turn Britain into Europe's new Venezuela. Red flags, hammers and sickles... followed by economic collapse and the secret police making mass arrests for "wrong-thought".
So both the Conservatives and Labour are bleeding voters to the Brexit party and to the Liberal Democrats. Is it just a European election protest-vote or will these voters consider voting for their new parties in "national" elections? If that happens, the Brexit party and the Liberal-Democrats might just emerge as Britain's new top-two leading parties.
Either that, or Britain might follow the other Europeans into a more muddled and fragmented political situation with lots of contending special-interest parties and ensuing struggles to form coalition governments.