The mainstream media will doubtlessly try to push the story that 2019’s disastrous UK election results are a warning to the Centre-Left everywhere and in particular US Democrats, to become more centrist.
Almost needless to say here, it’s a bullshit narrative. Corbyn’s Labour ran surprisingly well in 2017, an election that was more about socio-economic platforms than the current one that was all Brexit. Just like in the US and even more so, the majority of voters tend to like social-democratic policies when presented sans baggage or distortions.
1. Disarray Galore
The main story was the right wing consolidating its votes around the Tories, once Johnson proved to the Brexit die-hards that he’s the real deal by losing all those crazy Parliament votes — the equivalent of a successful sacrifice of a chess queen (forgive the pun). When he became PM, the so-called Brexit party (successors of fascist UKIP) was polling at >10% eating into Tory support. On Thursday the Brexit party won only 2%, and their leaders coordinated with the Tories by removing candidates from any Tory-held seat, allowing the latter to spend far less energy on defense.
By contrast, for the past generation-plus the UK’s centre-left has been divided between 3 major parties and a fourth ascendant one. The UK’s politicians — just like in Canada — keep trying to fit a square peg into a round hole: a winner-take-all system (or in British jargon, “First Past the Post”) is incompatible with more than two substantial parties running for each position, unless distorted outcomes with a huge structural democratic deficit are your thing.
Labour and the Lib Dems are no friends. But they appeal to hugely overlapping sets of voters: people who want a more progressive UK. I won’t go over the litany of bad blood and policy differences between both parties, and between each party and the progressive base. This election was an emergency, and they should have united in the face of a huge common threat. Instead, they were more divided than ever.
The public tried to mitigate the division by seeking “tactical voting”, but it’s really hard to do when your usual party still has a candidate on the ballot and keeps canvassing for your vote, and when different “tactical voting” guides tell you different things.
Up in Scotland, the Tories lost about half their 2017 seats, but managed to hold on to six. At least 5 of these 6 they would have lost if Labour and Lib Dem stood down and let the SNP candidate represent the entire centre-left. In most of them it wouldn’t have even been close as the Tory candidate was far short of 50%. In the sixth seat, btw, the Tory candidate got 50.1%. In greater London Tories held on to 2 seats with <40% of the vote, and the rest split among centre-left parties, and even gained 2 seats with 42% and 38% respectively, nearly all else split left of centre.
DemSign’s diary claims to have crunched the numbers: if each camp had only 1 candidate and the vote tallies had remained the same, their diary says the right-wing would have still won a razor-thin seat majority despite losing the popular vote (which lose they did, btw).
I won’t re-do the numbers now, but it’s beside the point. Had the centre-left coordinated better and run a single candidate in each competitive seat, the motivation among voters would have changed too, and the vote totals themselves would have likely been better. Instead, the very opposite had happened: Lib Dems ran Labour defectors vs. the Labour candidate; where conscientious candidates stood down to make way for the other party, they were told the party will run a candidate anyway.
The Tories increased their national vote share by only 1.2% from 2017, but their seat haul jumped by ~16%. It was all about efficiency, and the writing was on the wall. The rhetoric and tweets of centre-left politicians may have been all about stopping Brexit and Johnson at any cost; the behavior was the exact opposite, as if poking out the eyes of the other centre-left parties was more important than winning the overall battle.
2. Corbyn’s Costly Brexit Triangulation
So many pundits keep making the ridiculous claim that “The loss was not because of Brexit”. What a bunch of crap. This election was precipitated by unprecedented Brexit parliamentary crises, and Johnson campaigned on Brexit front and center. Facing this, to the last day the opposition leader Corbyn has refused to share his personal opinion on Brexit, claiming that he’s “neutral”. How can someone think he can portray himself as a man of principles and integrity with this kind of evasion, beats me.
And it sure beat Labour. Corbyn’s triangulation gambit was essentially to retain the support of working-class pro-Brexit whites in the countryside, while not alienating the much larger and more diverse anti-Brexit base everywhere else. See the headline plot: the first part failed miserably, just like pandering to aging former Democrats in the exurbs, immersed in a Faux News world, has failed and will fail in the US.
Meanwhile, far larger groups everywhere else became alienated by Corbyn’s lack of courage to stand up and fight Brexit. Scots in particular, could not understand how their plight in being dragged out of the EU against their will — and in clear betrayal of promises made during their independence referendum — is less important than the socio-economic plight of the countryside (a plight felt in Scotland too, of course) a plight which was wrongly blamed on the EU. Labour which until 2015 dominated Scotland, was reduced to 1 out of the country’s 59 seats.
Corbyn has lots of other personal baggage of course. But Brexit was the issue of the day. And Corbyn showed us again, in a manner usually demonstrated by spineless centrist politicians, that if you stand for nothing on the issue of the day, then you will win nothing.
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Sunday, Dec 15, 2019 · 1:30:02 AM +00:00 · AssafIf you want a more expert take, look up the Guardian’s official post-election editorial. You will find many themes I mentioned here, but much more.