With a couple of days to digest we can start and see some trends emerging from the rubble of the Conservative Party
Labour were expected to win a landslide with 40%+ of the vote. In the end they won a landslide with a much lower vote share, with other parties also doing incredibly well. This doesn’t mean that the polls were wrong, or that Labour’s win was a fluke. Nor does it somehow rehabilitate Jeremy Corbyn.
What we saw was tactical voting on an enormous scale. The difference between the polling and the result indicates that up to a third of Labour, LibDem and Green voters backed the candidate best placed to oust the Tories.
All of these voters did so knowing that in doing so they were delivering a Labour landslide, and while they might not have been electrified by the prospect they were relaxed enough about it to help deliver it.
We have spent most of the C20th in a 2.5 party system, plus Scottish and Welsh nationalists. 40% of the vote is a good score in that position. But clearly we are now in a 4 or 5 party system, which produces weird results under First Past The Post. In Northern Ireland alone 4 different Unionist parties won seats. Without electoral reform we will keep on getting these kind of results.
The headlines are all about the rise of Reform. In reality the number of people voting for Reform isn’t that different to the number who voted for UKIP 10+ years ago. What has changed is a fragmented political landscape allowed them to win seats in end of the line towns.
Reform MPs will give pompous speeches about elites while stuffing their faces and lining their pockets at the taxpayers expense. They have little or no interest in policies, other than loudly promoting the kind of Liz Truss economics that crashed the economy. They are funded by a small group of very rich people to try and remake British politics in their own image: authoritarian, xenophobic, snobby. They will continue to demand madder and madder policies, and some in the Conservative party, freed from the constraints of reality that come with Government, will join them in a long march into a fantasy land of endless grievances.
Reform did come in 2nd place in 92 seats, mostly Labour, which means that their vote might be starting to concentrate enough geographically to win more seats in future.
What is certain is that there are lots of rich people who control lots of old and new media outlets who will heavily promote Reform’s agenda; Mail, Telegraph, Express, GBNews. These outlets might be good at setting the agenda for the right of politics in a way that favours Reform, but increasingly people aren’t listening. All of these outlets lose huge sums of money a year, and their viewers/readers are in decline. Their base is older, non-digital natives, easily swayed by button pushing emotive content. That is a declining market segment. The only younger demographic that might be interested are young male incels who spend their lives on line and are borderline radicalised. Not sure that is enough to replace the inevitable decline of their core constituency.
While everyone has panicked about the 5 Reform MPs no-one is really talking about the other 4 far right authoritarian MPs elected as “pro-Gaza” candidates. There were dozens of pro-Gaza, anti-Labour candidates who stood, with mysterious and lavish funding. The source of these donations hasn’t been fully understood yet. They campaigns focussed on anger about Gaza, but also on deep seated socially conservative attitudes against the LGBT community. Their campaigns, often amplified on social media, were deeply homophobic and misogynist, and the Labour MPs they targeted were mainly female or LGBT. We now have an authoritarian, far right bloc of MPs, with attitudes at least as right wing as Reform sat in the House of Commons. This is a huge and permanent change in British politics, a Muslim version of Ian Paisley’s far right Protestant parties. And they will be just as bigoted, just as intractable, and just as destructive.
Sadly lots of well meaning white middle class lefties cheered them on, unable to spot that they were cheering on the far right.
Both Reform and Pro-Gaza candidates benefited from huge amounts of botnets and disinformation, some of which looks like it originated outside the UK. There is a whole story to be unravelled about who was trying to promote the most divisive and toxic politics in this election. Some of the Reform candidates in the North East had no on line presence, made no public appearances, and couldn’t be contacted by journalists. Something very odd going on.
But the biggest change was the election of 4 Green MPs. The Greens have always been an odd party. In urban areas they campaign as liberals, at times positioning themselves to the left of Labour, or at least as more pious. This part of the Green Party has sadly absorbed large numbers of Corbyn supporters from Labour, with all of the crankiness and bigotry they bring with them.
But lots of their support comes from rural Conservatives, who tap into a long tradition of right wing environmentalism going all the way back to Jorian Jenks and the BUF. They are the party of stopping houses being built anywhere. The Greens now have 2 MPs from each wing of the party.
It is likely that the urban wing of the Greens will continue to offer younger voters a more luxurious vision of politics than the working class policies of Labour. It is entirely possible for the fault line in the Greens between urban lefties and rural Tories will remain unresolved for the next few General Elections, after all the SNP managed the same trick for more than a decade. But at some point they will have to decide which party they are.
Finally – this was an election about Brexit in which no-one wanted to talk about Brexit. The Leave campaign lied and cheated to win, and the politicians who lied and cheated prospered; Boris and Farage chief among them. That dishonesty and contempt for the rules don’t work in office as the Conservatives found to their cost. Brexit has failed, totally and utterly.
But there is still no Parliamentary path for Return. Right now the EU will not contemplate letting us back in again, and it will take a long time to persuade them that the cheats and liars aren’t going coming back.
The only realistic path is for Labour to win a 2nd or 3rd term, and put rejoining the EU back on the table. But for Labour to win successive elections they have to make the economy work. And if the economy works, the impetus for Return diminishes. If the economy fails again the impetus for Return will build, but Labour will be out of office quickly, with Reform the main beneficiary.
The only path of Return is outside of Parliament, a mass movement that can operate across party lines and can build broad support. Pressure has to come from outside the house.
Party politics can’t solve every problem.
I read a fair bit of political commentary in the main stream media but rarely do I find such insightful and detailed analysis that you provide week in week out. Your insights on the ‘pro Gaza’ MPs and the tacit support from some in the left is a worrying trend given their anti LGBT rhetoric together with the lack of visibility of some Reform candidates really should be looked at further. Thank you Jon for all the work you put into this blog. Keep ‘em coming.
Cheers, keeps me sharp!!