More than half of the UK’s voters voted for Remain parties – a little over 54 per cent compared to 46 per cent – but because of Britain’s first past the post and divisions among those parties it didn’t matter a jot.
Boris Johnson’s simple three-word, focus-group-approved, slogan Get Brexit Done has delivered the Tories their biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s third election victory in 1987.
A simple three word catchphrase, which he repeated in panto-like call and response with party workers in his victory speech this morning, that offered simplistic clarity to a hugely complex and nuanced issue.
And just as Margaret Thatcher appealed to those working class voters who bore the brunt of her divisive, polarised policies so, too, has Johnson. He acknowledged, in that same speech, that he appreciated they had ‘lent’ him their votes.
He and his advisers have been quick to exploit a social fault line Labour has wilfully ignored since around 2001 – that they see the Labour leadership as out of touch with everyday working class issues.
These traditionally Labour, post-industrial constituencies have borne the brunt of nine years of austerity and Tory policies.
In the US such areas would sometimes be called the rustbelt, areas who gave such support to making Donald Trump US President.
Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and his coterie have throughout the election prioritised their vice-like grip on the party and its machinery over any broader appeal to voters and to getting elected.
A leader with the highest unpopularity rating since such measurements began, an utterly ludicrous, non-credible Brexit policy to which he had to be dragged kicking and screaming, a shameful record on dealing with anti-Semitism, and whose supporters hounded out moderates as ‘centrist scum’ led his party to an entirely predictable – and predicted – defeat.
Both he and the vanquished Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson gifted this election to Boris Johnson at the height of his honeymoon when they didn’t even remotely have to and then split what majority vote there was for Remain.
Jeremy Corbyn has made clear he wants to hang on long enough to ensure party members make the ‘right’ choice of successor, just as much as he and his Momentum supporters believe voters made the ‘wrong’ choice.
In all of their hot takes it has been everybody else’s fault, but never that of Corbyn and the people around him. All of which reinforces a narrative that the party’s management has been seen by core voters as condescending and patronising to them – not least when they asked where the money for astronomical spending pledges would come from.
The Tories were promiscuous in their spending pledges too – but nowhere near as much as Labour and were agile about avoiding detail or letting themselves be pressed on their inherent contradictions as Johnson, successfully, peddled an ‘end to austerity’ fiction that his government has nothing to do with Tory rule since 2010.
It is now certain that Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement – which had been approved in principle by MPs who simply wanted more time to examine the detail – will be rushed through and the UK will be out of the EU by the end of next month.
And while Johnson has shown no compunction about abandoning promises – it has been a hallmark of his career – there is, as yet, at least, ostensibly no reason to believe he will necessarily abandon his commitment to a post-Brexit trade deal by the end of 2020 with no extension of the transition period.
He can pretty much do as he likes. Similarly, he can ignore Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s demands for a second independence referendum even as she leads her party into new Scottish Parliament elections in 2021. But that could, potentially, be fraught with unintended consequences for the Union. Legally, however, Scotland is powerless on such decisions – the authority lies in London – and the SNP may find itself in a Catalonian-style bind.
Johnson can also take some comfort from the fact that, despite Northern Irish nationalists having a majority in Westminster for the first time, the area’s special Schrodinger’s Cat-like status in the EU – both in and out at the same time – and divisions between parties and a resumed Stormont will diffuse any nascent momentum for a united Ireland, or at least a Border poll. The apparent lack of appetite for any such thing from voters south of the border will also give him a buffer in this regard.
It should also be noted that the political scientist drafted in to ‘rehabilitate’ Fianna Fail, Professor Tim Bale of Queen Mary University London (QMUL), pointed out that there is a tradition of newly elected Conservative Party Prime Ministers pledging to heal divisions – remember Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 victory speech citing St Francis of Assisi – and then spending the ensuing years doing exactly the opposite.
The fortnightly investigative and satirical magazine Private Eye has gone to great lengths to highlight the special interests to which Boris Johnson, his predecessors and his party are beholden – oligarchs, venture capitalists merchant bankers – and who will be looking for payback.
Johnson will have to find a way of squaring that with a longer-term second election victory that one might reasonably expect will depend on those working class, unskilled, predominantly white and older voters who ‘lent’ him their votes feeling he has kept their promises to them. Assuming they’re still around next time.
Equally, it may depend on whether or not many of those Labour voters who reportedly just stayed away this time return to the fold of the party they used to know and love.
Prime Minister Johnson may also have to, for the first time, start telling the truth about the cost of Brexit and the decisions that will have to be made – after all, there is no incentive for the EU to give the UK a better deal than it had an undermine itself.
But truthfulness long since departed UK politics, whether that is permanently or temporarily we will learn over the next five years.
