Waiting For The Great Leap Forward
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.
