In my first post I said in passing that Corbyn was not a fit and proper person to be Prime Minister. I stand by that. We know a lot more about anti-semitism in the Labour Party now than we did in 2017 (ask the Chief Rabbi about it, or Anthony Julius, or Jonathan Freedland (“the notion of Corbyn and his inner circle running the country … prompts in me, and the overwhelming majority of the community I grew up in, a fear that we have not known before”), or Maajid Nawaz, or look at the evidence yourself, or watch Panorama) and what we know is very unpleasant. Corbyn might not be an anti-semite himself, but he has done far too much to encourage anti-semitism and nowhere near enough to stamp it out. That ought to be disabling from public life in this country.
(Is Boris a fit and proper person to be Prime Minister? Again no. The charge of racism is shallow, opportunistic and, I think, unfounded. But he has a history of dishonesty that is highly concerning. His failings are personal rather than political - he is Clinton rather than Nixon - but they are worrying nonetheless.)
My first post also looked at the huge numbers of votes the two main parties had gathered: "The Conservatives won over 13.6m votes in total. That compares with Cameron's 11.3m in 2015 and Cameron's 10.7m in 2010. That is a huge number of votes. It's nearly up there with John Major's record 14m in 1992. It's more than Tony Blair's 1997 landslide based on 13.5m votes. It's way more than Blair in 2001 or 2005"; and "Corbyn also won huge numbers of votes - not far off 13m votes. You could say that Corbyn is a bigger vote-winner that late-stage Blair. A fairer comparison is with Brown's 8.6m or Miliband's 9.3m."
Let's compare that to where we are now. The turnout is slightly down on 2017, but the Conservatives have won nearly 14m votes, just shy of John Major's record. That is a stonkingly good result, way up on anything Cameron ever achieved and beating even May. For Labour, the story is much sadder. They got just over 10m votes. That's still better than Brown or Miliband, but it's worse than Kinnock achieved in 1992. (And Labour have now definitely lost Scotland: you remember the jokes about Scottish Tory MPs compared with pandas? All very old and unfunny now. The Conservatives have more MPs in Scotland than Labour (6 to 1) and won more votes (about 700,000 to about 500,000). The SNP did well (about 1.2m votes, up from below 1m), but the unionist parties got more votes once you count the further 260,000-odd for the LibDems.)
So we have seen two elections in a row in which the Conservatives have persuaded huge numbers of people, many of them not traditional Conservative voters, to put Xs next to Conservative candidates. That is why, for example, Bolsover is now a Conservative seat (47% Tory, 36% Dennis Skinner). But we have seen only one election in which the Labour Party persuaded similarly large numbers to vote for it.
So what has happened? This is what I said last time: "In the medium term, Corbyn and May have each shown they can't win a majority: both parties would be better off ditching their leaders, and the fact that May has 'lost' and Corbyn 'won' probably helps the Tories here. ... The next party to form a proper majority is going to be the one that can persuade its opponents that there is no reason to hate it, in the way that Blair and Cameron managed" and, in my second post, "it's a fair inference that what they [the 2 main parties] were offering was more popular than what earlier leaders were offering. And what were May and Corbyn offering that their predecessors were not? Being keen on (or at least fully reconciled to) Brexit, and being antipathetic to neoliberalism".
That looks prescient. Since 2017 the Conservatives have:
- changed their leader
- maintained (and indeed strengthened) their pro-Brexit position
- continued a post-neoliberal outlook
But the Labour party has:
- kept its leader
- watered down its pro-Brexit position
- continued a post-neoliberal outlook.
That's 3-1 to the Conservatives. No wonder they won.
Let's be clear about Brexit. In 2017 Labour stood on a manifesto that said "Britain needs to negotiate a Brexit deal that puts our economy and living standards first. ... we need a jobs-first Brexit that allows us to upgrade our economy for the 21st century. ... this election is about what sort of country we want to be after Brexit ... Labour accepts the referendum result" and so on. That was a position that won masses of votes. The 2019 position, even with Keir Starmer confined to quarters, was far too Remain-y for the country. In fact this was the only material difference between the Labour party in 2017 and in 2019: both elections had 'extreme Left' Corbynite positions (in inverted commas - you might them reasonable positions), but one was a pro-Leave Corbyn and one was a quasi-pro-Remain Corbyn. That's the difference. Hard-core Remainers, the Grieves and TIGgers and Parrises and so on, really need to look at themselves and think again.
(Let me be clear: a lot of people still support Remain. But they respect democracy more. Whatever your Twitter and Facebook feeds are telling you, most people respect the result of a referendum and want to vote for political parties that do so too.)
What about my comment that,in order to win, a party needs to "persuade its opponents that there is no reason to hate it"? In metropolitan London circles people still feel perfectly happy to say anti-Tory things. They think the Cabinet is "extremist" (by which they mean, I think, pro-Leave). But I still stand by what I said. Johnson, for all his faults, has helped to defuse the hatred of the Conservatives felt in many traditional Labour-voting parts of the country, despite not having that effect in the most lefty-liberal-Islington parts of the country. This famous photo should be a good reminder that not that many people actually live in places like Islington:
But the LibDems are still well below the 6.8m votes they got in 2010 or the 6m they got in 1992. I wrote last time that "The LibDems - firmly planted in the old Blair/Cameron centre ground - will have their work cut out in getting to the new centre ground. Or do they prefer their current small but comfy niche?" It seems that they prefer their comfy niche. Once the Brexit issue goes away, no doubt they can find similar small-bore issues that appeal to the same group of 5m-odd voters. My predictions include: transgender rights, abolition of religious schools, abolition of nuclear power, net carbon zero by next year, legalisation of cannabis, more hate speech laws, etc etc. Think of student union politics. If I were them then I would look for some more popular policies: I would suggest extending the NHS to dentistry in a more thorough-going way, perhaps by picking up on the problems of tooth cavities in school children, but that's too bread and butter, not student-y enough for them. They seem to be reconciled to being to politics what the Anglo-Catholics are to Church of England: a party for the few, not the many.
What next for the two main parties? For the Tories, after Brexit is done and dusted (yes, trade deal blah blah blah, but just try getting anyone - here or on the Continent - worked up about that) then the evident bonhomie and social liberalism of BoJo should make it hard to hate him or his (ethnically diverse) Cabinet. He will be a disappointment to his new voters and his old voters, as he has been a disappointment to everyone - he does not have the decency or work ethic of Cameron - but in 5 years time, if the economy is going ok, it should be back to 'don't risk it with Labour' versus '24 hours to save the NHS' election again. That (and here is a prediction) will be a highly desirable kind of election compared with many that will take place between now and then in other rich Western countries. The risk to the legitimacy of the British state has passed. We should be proud of the flexibility of our unwritten constitution (albeit disgusted with the idiots who tried to undermine it). Normalcy awaits.
There is a risk that the Conservative-Labour divide will become more of a Republican-Democrat divide, with Lab/Dem being the party for the rich in cities, with ethnic minority support, and the Con/Rep being the party of the poor and the rural. But I am hopeful that that will not be the case here: (a) BoJo is obviously not the sort of person who will say one of those things that put people outside the pale of polite discourse (e.g. that he has been saved by Jesus or that global warming is not real or anything anti-gay), by which I mean that the cultural divide is less stark in this country and likely to remain that way (once Brexit is done), and (b) ethnic minorities in this country are smaller in number and more immigrant in nature (i.e. Conservative-friendly, think Hindus) than in the US, so Labour will have to appeal to poor white people, as it did for many years, in order to win. That should help temper the divide.
The Labour Party will change leader and thereby immediately improve its position. I am confident that it will root out anti-semitism. It will do to Momentum what had to be done to the Militant Tendency. But will it make the mistake of electing a media-friendly London MP to be its leader? Labour comfortably won in London and the only Labour gain in the country was Putney. So London is not where Labour needs to concentrate its forces. David Milliband is not the answer. Keir Starmer is not the answer. Emily Thornberry is not the answer. Labour should be thinking more along the lines of Jess Phillips. Whether it will be able to do that is wholly unclear: the last time it chose a leader who was clearly the best on offer for winning the votes that needed to be won was in 1994.
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