So it may not have escaped your notice that the UK has
just held a decisive General Election (above). The Conservatives triumphant; the
Scottish National Party celebrating; everyone else flatlining or crushed. The
age of English and Scottish Nationalism is upon us, and our next constitutional
battles are likely to see those two forces fight it out for the future of the
United Kingdom. Oh good.
But where does that leave our predictions, here at Public
Policy and the Past? One of the main losers on 12 December was Britain’s main
Opposition, the Labour Party. They got run out of town in whole areas of the
country where they used to dominate – not just stereotypical ‘Northern
England’, where if you read some of the papers you’d think there was a whippet
and a pint of warm ale on every corner – but in parts of the Midlands and South
where they used to dominate.
Let’s go to Harlow and Stevenage, shall we? Two New Towns
full of blue-collar workers where Labour held the historically-marginal seats
until 2010. Now it’s a sea of blue as far as the eye can see. What about
Cannock Chase, or Redditch in Worcestershire? They’re now so far out of
Labour’s reach that they would need arms like a Mr Man to get anywhere near.
There are simply not enough urban, young or studenty seats (hello, Edinburgh
South and Truro and Falmouth) to make up for Labour’s historic collapse across
Deep England – North, South, East and West.
That presents us with a problem, because, er, we said Labour could win this – not as a majority (without any real presence in
Scotland, that looks impossible), but as a minority governing with the say-so
of other parties – particularly the SNP and the Liberal Democrats. That was,
well, let’s not gloss this… wrong.
That’s okay in a way though, because as we’ve said before
the job of speculating (let’s not call it forecasting, shall we?) is to learn –
to see clearly where you thought the pieces would fall, and the reasons why you
thought that, against how they actually broke down. So this election result is
a great opportunity to test our priors against reality. Why did we think Labour
could get so close to the Tories, and why didn’t they?
Here’s what we thought back in the summer: Labour was
deeply unpopular, but it still had three advantages over the Conservatives.
One, the Tories were imploding. Their Parliamentary Party was in the process of
what looked like a historic split between Liberal Conservatives and Tory
particularists (as in 1846). Two, Boris Johnson was a great leader for Labour,
deeply, deeply unpopular among all those swathes of liberal and Remain England
in which the red team had to get a hearing and win back Liberal Democrat and
Green defectors (and those famous Don’t Knows). Three, Labour had and has a
huge membership that could give them a big advantage in the ground game –
flooding marginal seats with activists that might not be able to convert people
to their cause, but sure could Get Out The Vote.
Turns out this was really wrong. But we’ve at least got three
categories in which to ask the question: why? Setting up opinions, and setting
yourselves up to get shot down or proved wrong, is a good thing for these
reasons. It allows self-reflection. It permits self-audit. It gives you the
colour-in boxes to fill in after the event, and maybe to ask better questions
and get it wrong more narrowly next time.
So, category one. The Tories didn’t implode. Prime
Minister Johnson was able to expel the dissident pro-European wing from his
Parliamentary Party and lose almost no electoral support. Amidst all the talk
of Labour Leavers and their desertion from Labour, there’s been nowhere near
enough talk of Conservative Remainers. In the end, a big majority of them stayed with the Tories. Why? Well, they were simply afraid of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. On top of (and related to) that, the Liberal Democrats had a
torrid campaign in which yet again almost everything went wrong
for them, as in 2017 - though the experiences of the February 1974 and June 1983 elections ought to have alerted us earlier to the possibility that two unpleasant extremes might tear their voter base apart rather than glue it together. In any case, a more emollient Labour leader and a more humble, focused Liberal
Democrat advance might have rumbled the Tories. It didn’t happen.
On to category two. Johnson was indeed unpopular, but there
are two reasons why this didn’t matter in the end. He wasn’t all that unpopular in Leave England (or Leave Wales): and because his mission was to unite the Leave
vote around himself, and not around Nigel Farage’s upstart Brexit Party, that
was all fine and dandy for him. The Brexit Party crashed to almost nothing, and
despite having a couple of what amounted to good by-elections amidst the din
(in Barnsley and Hartlepool), the very darkly comic character known as ‘Boris’
in the end looked like the best bet for everyone who wanted to leave the
European Union.
The second reason why Johnson triumphed, despite being
one of the most unpopular PMs ever at this stage of his stay in No. 10, was
that he was pretty popular when set against Corbyn. Johnson was the political
equivalent of a McDonald’s: divisive, likely to make you pretty unhealthy in
the end, but a fast and dirty meal. Corbyn was more like a Little Chef: much
talked about, never visited.
What about three, Labour’s ground game? Well, that didn’t
work that well. You can’t polish a turd, of course – and Labour’s manifesto was
absolutely deadly in that it made people laugh, not read. But the interesting
points here go deeper. Activist turnout and effects were good in Putney, Labour’s only gain of the night,
where the party was able to put out hundreds and hundreds of activists. Anywhere
near a train station, on the Tube, at the end of a tram line? Great. Young
engaged activists could pour in and make a big difference. Anywhere else –
anywhere where you needed a car, say, oh… everywhere in Deep England? Much less
successful.
Labour’s targeting operation also sent those really fresh
and optimistic troops into dead-cert Tory seats, thus throwing away one of their only advantages. They did that partly because
election supremo Karie Murphy doesn’t really know anything about elections, to some extent
because their reading of 2017 was that they weren’t aggressive enough to gain
more seats, and in places because they wanted to move people away from where
they might actually save Labour MPs who don’t like Corbyn. As so often, one of
the most tragic elements is just how much hope and goodwill has been squandered
by the Labour-haters who now occupy the Labour cockpit.
One last thing. As so often, the feeling from the gut,
and the first trigger movement, were right – and all the intellectualising and
post-hoc data were wrong. Here at Public Policy and the Past, our first
instinct was that Labour was heading for a terrible defeat from the moment it elected Corbyn. That’s not a Left-Right point so much as a point about the
people around him, the long associations and ideas with which he was associated
and would by which he would become known, and the poisonous influence of the
super-union Unite – which has now taken over the Labour Party in all but name.
Many Corbynite insights are right. Britain does need much
better public services, better organised public transport, more lifelong
education. But as we’ve said again and again, these weren’t the people, and
their presumptions weren’t the ideas, by which to carry that argument. Let’s
end this experiment where we began, in the autumn of 2015:
There is a difference between inspiration and the peddling of false hope. Because what will happen when Mr Corbyn is either ousted by his Parliamentary colleagues, or – even worse for Labour – is actually allowed to collide with the electorate, like a piece of space debris burning up as it smashes into the atmosphere? The eye-popping but fake sugar rush of this microwaved Tony Benn’s elevation having passed, the subsequent crash will be terrible. There will be the blankest, darkest, most painful despair you can imagine, followed by blame – of Blairites, the media, the public themselves – who were not clever or far-sighted enough to accede to the Corbyn revelation… And then what? Then what? The answer, you know in your hearts, is this: decades of unbroken Conservative dominance. And a Britain that becomes less fair, less equal, less open, less liberal, less European – and less respected – with every passing day.
So there are three interesting academic lessons to be
learned from the 2019 General Election: about the nature of the Conservative
vote, now quite dependent on older, more socially conservative Britons who live
in towns; the importance of relative and not absolute popularity; and the
limits of a load of activists carrying a message that voters just don’t like.
But the most important lesson of all? Sometimes, trust your instincts.
