The result of yesterday’s General Election in Britain is stunning. There has already been a great deal of analysis and comment and there will be a lot more in the days and weeks to come. Here are some of my\u00a0early observations:<\/p>\n
First, the turnout<\/strong>. This was two percentage points up on the last General Election in 2015. The figure was 69% which is the highest turnout since Tony Blair’s first election victory in 1997. We will have to see the detailed analysis, but it looks as if lots of young people registered to vote once the election was called and that a larger proportion of the young demographic turned out to vote than has usually been the case.<\/p>\n Next, Theresa May<\/strong>. It’s been a terrible election for her. She became Prime Minister without having to face a contest in the Conservative Party and she had a remarkably easy year in office. Then, having repeatedly said that no General Election was necessary, she changed her mind for what was rightly seen as crude party political advantage. Her manifesto contained some electorally damaging proposals which seriously derailed the Tory campaign. May herself targeted the wrong seats in her travels and refused to face genuine audiences or debate directly with Corbyn. The “Guardian” political satirist John Crace dubbed her Maybot because of her robotic responses to questions, when she attempted to dodge the issues and repeated the same meaningless phrases.<\/p>\n Now, Jeremy Corbyn<\/strong>. I confess that as a lifelong Labour Party member I did not vote for him in either of the Labour leadership elections, felt that his performance of the last couple of years has been very poor (although improving), and feared that a General Election with him as Labour leader would result in substantial losses. I was wrong. He performed well on the stump and in the studios, he enthused voters (especially young ones), and he has done remarkably well to improve Labour’s share of the vote and number of seats so significantly. Indeed the increase in Labour’s vote share of 9.6 percentage points was the largest for any party between two general elections since 1945.<\/p>\n Let’s look at the other parties<\/strong>. For decades now, the combined share of the vote taken by Conservatives and Labour has diminished as the two-party model fractured. This election has dramatically reversed this trend (the two parties took 82.4% of the votes). The Liberal Democrats, the Greens and especially UKIP all did badly and only have a mere 13 seats between them (losing Nick Clegg in the process). The UKIP leader has already resigned and the party is in melt-down (which is excellent news).<\/p>\n Scotland<\/strong>: The Scottish National Party could never have done better this time than in 2015 when they won every seat but three in Scotland. But their loss of 21 seats is a disaster. The big issue north of the border was the SNP demand for a second referendum on devolution (known as indyref2). Clearly voters in Scotland don’t want another referendum in the near future and have punished the SNP – taking some big scalps (Alex Salmond and Angus Robertson) – for pushing for one.<\/p>\n Wales<\/strong>: The result in the principality was a really good one for Labour and all credit to the leadership of\u00a0Carwyn Jones. There was grand talk of the Conservatives taking more seats than Labour but, in the end, they won a mere 8 against Labour’s 28.<\/p>\n Northern Ireland<\/strong>: If we have seen a reversion to two-party politics in England, the trend in Northern Ireland has been even more definitive. The DUP and Sinn Fein between them took every seat bar one (although SF do not actually send members to Westminster). It is a tragedy that the moderate Unionist party (the UUP), the moderate Republican party (the SDLP) and the secular party (Alliance) do not have a single seat.<\/p>\n A few comments on other parts of the UK<\/strong>: My constituency of Brent North had a spectacular result for Labour with Barry Gardiner’s majority increasing from almost 11,000 to \u00a0to 17,000. He himself has had a terrific election, turning in some very effective media performances on behalf of Labour nationally. I have some connections with Milton Keynes and, although both seats there remained Conservative, Labour came remarkably close to taking both. I was with friends in Oxford on election night and it was good to see Oxford West and Abingdon taken by the Lib Dems.<\/p>\n And then we have to consider the pollsters<\/strong>. Again most of them got the result seriously wrong. On the eve of the election, most pollsters were forecasting a Conservative lead of between 7-13%. In the end the difference was a mere 2.5%. The only pollsters who got it right were Survation and YouGov (although their analysis was not an actual poll).<\/p>\n So now Britain will have a new government<\/strong> just days before the Brexit negotiations begin. May said she offered “strong and stable government” compared to the alternative of “a coalition of chaos”. The\u00a0minority Conservative Government will not be strong or stable and will be beholden to the demands of the 10 MPs from the DUP in Northern Ireland. Two years ago, the Tories said that Ed Miliband as PM would be a prisoner of the SNP (which at least had powerful representation and progressive policies) but now the Tories are the prisoner of a socially-conservative party with less than a dozen seats.<\/p>\n So, what lies ahead? <\/strong>When the\u00a0election was called, I\u00a0expected Labour to do so badly that Corbyn would be forced to resign. Instead he is stronger than ever and critics like me have to accept that in the ultimate test of electoral opinion he has done really well. Conversely I expected May to win a majority of around 40-60 seats and be secure in No 10; instead, she now heads a minority government in a hung parliament facing immensely complex Brexit talks and her days as leader must be limited. The whole political situation is so unstable that it seems likely that, in the course of the next year or two, we will have another General Election or another EU referendum or both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21505"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21549,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21505\/revisions\/21549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}