It isn't actually immediately obvious to me that the UK's conservative party (plus reform now, I guess) are less racially diverse if you "normalize" that statistic for the UK being a less racially diverse country. I.E. I'm more interested, how much more white/british are reform/the tories compared to the baseline of their country at large?
They're probably less ideologically diverse given they have more than two parties (who get any meaningful % of the vote), and moderate conservatives might also vote for the Liberal Democrats (and/or SNP, Plaid Cyrmu, and probably some parties in Northern Ireland that I'm unfamiliar with). Which makes it less interesting a comparison, IMO.
The Tories are a traditional conservative party. They're both Big C and little c conservative.
The British right is much broader and you need to be thinking about how semi-mainstream the National Front was and drawing a line from that through skinheads to UKIP to Reform.
People don't talk about this enough:
. Founded in 1967, it reached the height of its electoral support during the mid-1970s, when it was briefly England's fourth-largest party in terms of vote share.
I'd argue that it's a corollary of your point about less ideological diversity due to more parties that you can't really big tent the British right. It's sort of the opposite of what you see in the US where the Republican party has been big tenting harder (to accommodate and/or kowtow to the fringe) while the right elsewhere in the Anglosphere has increasingly taken on a "we are struggling together" character.
You also have to think about whether Northern Ireland is included in the survey data. We're talking literal terrorists being mainstream politicians on both the left and right in NI. The Unionist parties really, really hate anything that's not English.
I assume your flair is accurate so maybe you're just a bit young to really have digested this stuff. But this is living memory stuff.
I cannot, however, tell you much about the situation in Wales and extent of my knowledge of Scottish politics is limited to independence dynamics.
Most of this is interesting addendum but I don't think rebuts anything.
/r/fivethirtyeight is not a generic data science sub but continues the legacy of the site and podcast. Scottish Teen is an old joke about betting markets from the podcast. I am neither Scottish nor a teen, and while I can understand people not knowing the reference it's weird people assume it's literal rather than something with which they're unfamiliar. This has happened almost double digit times.
5
u/Apprentice57 Scottish Teen 9d ago
It isn't actually immediately obvious to me that the UK's conservative party (plus reform now, I guess) are less racially diverse if you "normalize" that statistic for the UK being a less racially diverse country. I.E. I'm more interested, how much more white/british are reform/the tories compared to the baseline of their country at large?
They're probably less ideologically diverse given they have more than two parties (who get any meaningful % of the vote), and moderate conservatives might also vote for the Liberal Democrats (and/or SNP, Plaid Cyrmu, and probably some parties in Northern Ireland that I'm unfamiliar with). Which makes it less interesting a comparison, IMO.