Will we now build Jerusalem? Boy, is that a recontextualised reference these days. Labour has won a landslide result in the UK election. Paradoxically, it may be a disappointing one. The exit poll released at 10pm UK time (7am on the east coast here) has Labour winning 410 seats, with the Tories on 131, the Lib Dems at about 60, the Scottish National Party (SNP) collapsing to 10 seats, and “upstart” Reform taking 13.
That appears to be accurate. At noon here, 3am London time, Labour was on track for well above 400, and the Tories, well, they’ve lost four of their five seats declared. About 100 seats will be declared as I file.
So it’s the worst result in the modern history of the Conservative Party (let’s not go back to 1832 and the Reform Act). It’s a real dumper. Labour is in command, and the centre of Labour is in command of Labour. What remained of the left has been purged and there is a left-centre-left that will use the freedom of the backbench (there’s an idea, ALP!) to dissent and cross.
Update: 4pm east coast, 3:30pm Adelaide, 1957 Perth.
With 610 of 650 seats declared, Labour has won 400 seats and the Tories 106. Looks like Labour will get 420 or so, the Tories 115. The Lib Dems have done better than polled, getting 70 seats, a result of a great deal of tactical voting, which probably took 10 seats off Tories and Labour alike. The Greens have quadrupled their holding from one to four, in a country where hyphenated names aren’t academics’ children, they own Shropshire. Reform also got four seats, down from the 13 or so expected, but getting a lot more news coverage than the Greens.
Plaid Cymru doubled their holdings from two to four in Wales. The biggest loser party-wise was the SNP, destroyed as a force, down to seven our eight seats from 48. Sinn Fein is the clear force in the Six Counties/Northern Ireland, with the DUP losing at least three down from seven. Three or four seats were taken from Labour by British Asian i.e. Muslim community candidates, protesting Gaza.
The individual losers? Where do we start? The biggest loss, in terms of possible future leaders is Penny Mordaunt, who held the sword while dressed as an Air Macedonia stewie in the coronation. Grant Shapps, a real estate agent type has gone. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Toad Hall Tory with a nannie, has gone, And my God, former PM Liz Truss went too. She was a spent force anyway, but my God…
But all that said, it may not become the result Labour — and quite a lot to the left of Labour — was hoping for. Leaving aside silly outlier polls predicting the Tories going down to 10 or being wiped out, there was a real hope that they could be driven below 100 seats.
Double figures would have been a huge blow to the Tories, taking them into the scrum with the minor parties. Had it come down to the 70s or 80s — and in first-past-the-post voting that would be a matter of a 2% or 3% shift — the Lib Dems, SNP and Greens could have formed a parliamentary alliance and petitioned to be the official opposition.
Okay, it was unlikely to happen. The Tories remain the opposition. Everyone who was associated with them will now leave, in a series of by-elections, several of which they will lose — and a new leadership, if it is smart, will do what Keir Starmer did, and pour one bucket of manure after another on the former leadership, mercilessly. It will do what it didn’t do in 1997, recognise that the world has changed and reorient its politics. Whether any leader can do that, and whether the party would respond, is another question.
Nevertheless, and though they won’t say it, some in Labour, towards the centre, will be relieved that the Tories didn’t collapse entirely, because many of their deeper losses would have been taken by Reform UK, the third iteration of UKIP/the Brexit Party. It is on track for 10-15 seats, a curiosity, and below the level it could really build from. Had it gained 30-40, its neo-Thatcherism would have constituted an edgy pseudo-opposition, and moved the country to the right.
Some Tories might take some comfort in the idea that you can have too large a majority — as Boris Johnson’s 80-seat win turned out to be. But by that time, the Tories were a coalition of princelings. The collapse of unity in the Brexit period had prepared for a period of decadence. Having won Brexit, the Tories didn’t want to actually run the new polity they’d created, even though they’d said that was exactly what Brexit was for.
Starmer Labour doesn’t have that problem. This is a united party, coming from a common idea of what politics is, even if the policy settings vary somewhat. It is now a European-style technocratic social democratic/social market party (and how often has the German SPD dreamed of first-past-the-post!). It is well to the left of Albanese Labor, but it is still after the same thing: to become the reliable party of capital, the one that major corporations would prefer to have in power. There are major dangers ahead for that approach, but no-one can doubt its desire to reconstruct the country. The question is what it wants to make it into.
What about the minor minors? The Lib Dems are likely back to the strength they gained in 2010, before the coalition with the Conservatives destroyed them. What they become is another question. Their social-liberal faction’s politics have been taken by Labour, while Reform has a toothier agenda than their free-market faction. They have a major role to play in protecting and re-extending civil liberties, and new ideas about social process and foreign policy. But will they take it? Part of their base is now Tory shires that couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the Blue rabble.
The SNP has lost, absolutely. Total dominance in Scotland was always going to fray. But modish cultural politics, internal splits and corruption utterly discredited it. Gorgeous George Galloway has lost Rochdale, which he snatched a few months ago. And just heard that Jeremy Corbyn has retained his seat as an independent in Islington North by 7,000 votes!
But at this moment of joy/relief/grudging respect for and by leftists, well, I hate to play the Grim Reaper… actually I love to play the Grim Reaper. I went to a party in Hackney (London not Adelaide) in 1998 as such and had to be led through the dark streets by a friend holding the sleeve of my hessian robe (actually, the now very distinguished novelist Sandra Newman, who was dressed as a genetic engineering accident, in green slime and a mannequin head on her shoulder. Innocent times? No, we knew things were on the way down even then). We got to a shabby off-licence/corner shop and went in to stock up. “I am death, shatterer of worlds,” I announced, among the pork scratchings and lard and grease-flavoured crisps, to the half dozen people also there, getting six-packs of Thug lager and Moldovan Phwuickk two quid red wine. “Get in the queue,” someone said. Ladies and gentlemen, Great Britain.
…anyway, I hate to be the Grim Reaper, but firstly, this was won off a low turn out. Labour got 35% of the vote, 5% short of Corbyn’s 2017 victory. Overall turn out may be in the high 50s. That is substantial disengagement. But it won’t be won back by the Left left. The combination of comprehensive socialism and liberal-radical social values on immigration, borders, sexuality, etc. Gone beyond gone folks, and unless you’re hoping that this is some dialectical less-than-zero moment, from which all will spring forth, a rethinking is required.
It’s true that Corbyn Labour almost got there in 2017. But it did so as a pro-Brexit “respect the result” party. Trying to combine economic leftism and cosmopolitan social values in 2019, they got, well, phwuickk is the word. Those who want to organise workers, the excluded, the poor, the beaten-down, better get in the queue. As a knight of the realm journeys to a palace to seek to form a government at the pleasure of the king, in England’s green and pleasant land.
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