June 9, 2017

It’s Official: Conservatives Lose Their Majority in UK Election

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It’s official: Theresa May and the Conservative Party have lost their majority in Parliament. May called a snap election six weeks ago hoping to give herself a bigger mandate to negotiate Brexit, and just the opposite happened. The Tories lost about a dozen seats and will end up with fewer than 320 by the time every constituency has reported in. They need 326 for a majority. The Guardian’s numbers are below.

So what happened? Was it dementia-gate? Was Jeremy Corbyn just a terrific campaigner? Did May lose higher income voters? Did young people turn out for Corbyn in huge numbers? Did May turn off voters by refusing to debate? Or was it a more general problem of the country having second thoughts about Brexit?

Yes. It was all those things. I think. But what do I know about British politics? In any case, the whole populist tidal wave thing sure seems to be petering out. Donald Trump is sucking wind, and turning out to be an old-fashioned Republican plutocrat anyway. Emmanuel Macron won handily in France. And now the Brexit wing of British politics has taken a shellacking.

There’s chatter that Theresa May will resign tomorrow and set up yet another Conservative leadership fight. Didn’t we just have one of those? Either way, it seems likely there will be another election later this year.

Maybe. Stay tuned.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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