Blue Lines Revisited

There are two interesting groups of voters in the 2017 election. One is the 3.5 million people who voted Labour and didn’t last time. There’s been a lot of talk about these people - young voters, “progressive alliance” tactical voters, ex-UKIP voters, and so on.

The other interesting group is the 2.5 million people who voted Tory and didn’t last time. There’s been a lot less talk about them: they stubbornly fail to fit the narrative of Theresa May’s incompetence. But they are very important: if the 3.5 million resurrected Labour, the 2.5 million are what blocked it from coming to power.

So it’s worth asking who they are, what they want, and whether they will show up again next time. If they don’t, Labour’s job is a lot easier.

Who are they?

1. HARD BREXITEERS: The Conservatives made three linked but separate pitches to new voters in their campaign. For all the awfulness of their Manifesto and May’s performance, it seems reasonable to assume these pitches worked on some of the 2.5 million. The first was May’s original excuse for calling the election - with a mandate, she could better deliver Brexit. The people who bought this line and voted accordingly will mostly be the “lost tribe” of ex-UKIP voters ‘coming home’ to the Tories, though there are also some ex-Labour voters (enough for the Tories to oust a couple of Midlands Labour MPs). They voted to Leave, they want it to happen and were happy to vote Tory to make sure it did.

2. MAY-NIACS: The second pitch was that Theresa May was a personally “strong and stable” leader who would run the country better than anyone else (by implication, better than the previous set of Tories too). May was very popular at one point, and it’s entirely possible that plenty of low information voters never picked up on the assorted criticisms and U-Turns. A lot of these voters would have voted Tory anyway so the number who are ‘new’ is probably small, but there will be some from both the right and centre who genuinely believed the hype. They want strong leadership.

3. ANTI-JEZ: In the final week the tone of the campaign shifted to panicked attacks on Corbyn, backed up by the tabloids. Some of the 2.5 million will be voters who believed that Marxist extremists were on the rampage and wanted to prevent the predicted disaster. These may be ex-UKIP, ex-Labour, lapsed or new voters…they could have come from a lot of different places.

4. SCOTTISH UNIONISTS: A special case - people voting Tory to either reduce SNP dominance or to save the Union from a second referendum. Labour picked up some of these votes too.

So the big question is - how soft are each of these groups? How likely are they to vote Tory next time?

Group 1 will be disappointed by the election - a hard Brexit looks in jeopardy and the Tories will go into negotiations weaker. If the Tories seem to be compromising or ballsing up the negotiations, they might be lured back rightwards by UKIP or a successor party offering easier certainties.

Group 2 will be even more disappointed: May is not the second Iron Lady and won’t even be PM for long (though who knows). They may drift away or fall back into apathy.

Group 3 will be even more concerned, and are likely to stay with the Tories unless there are major shifts in Corbyn’s own positions (and why should there be?)

Group 4 I don’t have much idea about - Scottish politics seem in flux. I assume they will stay though.

What this adds up to, for me, is a Tory vote that’s much softer than it might look - not so much because it’s vulnerable to Labour but to apathy and whatever UKIP morphs into.

hacash:

I’m sure by now a lot of people have heard that the Tories intend to form a working agreement with the DUP, a party with a history of homophobia, climate change denial, terrorism links and an assault on female rights. As is pretty much par for the course these days, this can all seem very scary, especially to those people who have been struggling to get by under a Tory government.

But! The important thing to remember is combined, these two parties have a majority of two seats. That is not a strong and stable government. That is barely a government at all. What this means in practical terms is that if May’s government wants to put some absolutely heinous bill through Parliament - and there’s a fair chance… - and everyone else outside her coalition voted against it, she would only need three members of her own party to back down in order to lose the vote. And there’s plenty in the Tory party right now who are not happy with Theresa May. There’s also some Tory MPs who only got back into power by the skin of their teeth (hello Zac Goldsmith) and they are not going to want to vote in anything that damages their constituents lest they lose what little majority they have.

So when government opens again and shit starts getting real, much as US tumblr has urged Americans to put pressure on their representatives, do the same for your MPs. If you have a Tory MP who only got in by a small minority, remind them of how tenuous their position is. Hell, if you have a Tory MP who has an ok-ish voting record, encourage them to stick to their guns. Remember that the election turned out the way that it did because of the staggering number of youth voters, and get involved.

(Non-UK followers very much encouraged to reblog!)

https://www.writetothem.com has an automated system that makes writing to your MP INCREDIBLY EASY!

Also, I am old enough to remember a minority Conservative government propped up by Unionist votes - we had one in 1996-7. It was laughably weak. Pay attention to the Queen’s Speech, identify the stuff you don’t want to happen, hammer your MPs about it (or encourage them if they’re opposition MPs).

I’ve seen retweeted American takes on the election result which - unsurprisingly - tend to fit it into whatever lens the U.S. poster views their own politics through. That’s fine - it’s how these things work - but some of these takes are very wrong and some are not but are still mildly off.

First of all the take that May’s vote collapsed because of her own bad decisions (like allying with Trump) not because of socialism so there’s nothing to learn. This is the very wrong one because May’s vote did not in fact collapse. The Tories got a hell of a lot of votes - their share jumped 5-6 points. Their LEAD collapsed, and their lead was why May called the election in the first place. But the Tory vote share was way above their pre-Brexit polling. All the things May did wrong - from Trump to the Dementia Tax - didn’t actually shift that, though her incompetent campaign surely hit her approval ratings.

What really shifted was the Labour vote. Up FIFTEEN points off their polling lows. Up nine since the 2015 election. And that almost all happened after the manifesto leak and after they unveiled a bunch of populist left wing policies. If this election result was about May’s incompetence (vast though it is!) then you’d have seen a big drop in Tory polling and a mild recovery in Labour’s. That’s not what happened. Occam’s Razor suggests that Labour surged and ended the Tory majority because of its policies. Which are solid, sensible social democratic ones.

So that’s the very bad take. The less bad but still mildly off take is the one that projects the big argument in the US left - between “class” and “identity” politics - onto this election. Labour did in fact have an internal movement dedicated to embracing the “legitimate concerns” of the “white working class” - it was called Blue Labour and its entire premise was shredded last night. It believed that the only way back to power for Labour was reconnecting with UKIP voters on the issues that mattered to them (eg immigration). What this election proved is that you can appeal to some UKIP voters on quite different issues without compromising on metropolitan, ‘liberal elite’ cultural values if the root of your appeal is generational. Activate young voters and the class v identity question becomes vastly less relevant and more artificial, because you then have a movement capable of holding your ‘heartland’ seats but striking out into Tory territory like Canterbury, Hastings, or Kensington (KENSINGTON ffs).

I’ve been wrong about lots of stuff myself of course - I assumed the Tories were going to win yesterday, I also assumed that Corbyn’s personal ratings were in an unclimbable pit. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It underlines that what Labour achieved yesterday is ASTONISHING - almost no prior theory or precedent fits it, though credit to those (Corbyn included) who saw this way forward and took it. It tears up everything people thought they knew about British elections. It’s been a remarkable day and it now feels like anything could happen.