I hate to be an ignorant American, but would you mind explaining a little bit about the importance of the recent election results? I think that until now Britain had a three party system, right-wing, left-wing, and centrist, but UKIP is now a more right wing fourth party? It's kind of hard to imagine what a far-right European political party would look like from an American perspective.
Hey everybody’s ignorant about a lot of things! Most British people don’t know shit about American politics haha so it’s cool, I’m glad when people are interested in finding out more about the United Kingdom of Turds. Warning before you start that this is very long cause I’ve basically written a not that good primer to (some of) UK politics haha. There’s a lot of opinion and communist stuff and the analysis only really gets going like halfway through but I felt it was important to talk about this stuff if you don’t know much about the UK cause it’s hard to get a feel for these things just from reading Wikipedia or whatever. Take everything I see with a pinch of salt cause it's very opinion but yeah
I hope this is an ok answer and please tell me if you have a problem/want clarification or anything - I understand it’s probably pretty incoherent cause no editing and I sort of veer off topic A LOT but I feel it’s all connected, sorry if it doesn’t really answer your question properly, feel free to tell me. Under a read more cause yeah it’s super long. I also talk a lot about racism and fascism cause it’s kind of unavoidable with UKIP and right politics in general, I hope I’ve talked about it somewhat sensitively though.So yeah first off the 3 major parties in parliament after the 2010 election (parliament elections are usually every 5 years) are Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats (in order of size). There are also the Greens, who have 1 seat, the Scottish Nationalist Party, who have 6 seats, Plaid Cymru (the Welsh nationalist party), who have 3 (out of a parliament of 650). There are also the 5 Northern Irish parties which I won’t go in to cause it’s complicated and although they have MPs the politics there are very different to mainland Britain. The SNP, Greens and PC are all somewhat left, the Greens most so - the other 2 are sort of coalitions of nationalist forces so have a range of political views although they all run on being to the left of the 3 main parties (this is actually a major part of the scottish independence campaign). They’re all pretty small though.