Election Review

The Tories have been pushed over the line by the DUP in a Charge of the Light Brigade by Theresa May.

The Conservatives

A terrible result. Called the election to give themselves a landslide majority and then losing their majority and being forced into a risky coalition with the DUP, whose leader is under fire in the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal.

The Tories’ campaign was a very weak campaign, and May came across as incredibly robotic, wooden and dull. She had no charisma and didn’t seem to be very passionate at all on anything at all. It reminds me of Cameron in 2015 when he was called passionless and made the slightly cringe-worthy ‘that pumps me up’ speech when he rolled up his sleeves and punched the air repeatedly. Also had remnants of the arrogance of Clinton and Remain campaign's of last year.

May have been a cringe worthy few moments, but Cameron at least was said to have found his, ‘Oomph’ and from then his poll numbers improved and he went from being on level points in the polls with Miliband to eventually win a majority.

This makes May’s decision to decide to not be ‘pumped up’ about anything even more amazing. She must have known that she was coming across badly, especially since Corbyn was becoming more passionate as the campaign went on. She appeared disconnected with voters, which was furthered by her other major mistake: not appearing in the debates.

Again, I’ll compare this to Cameron. Cameron knew that the debates had cost him dearly in 2010 as Clegg took a lot of his vote, and so he knew it might not be good if he appeared in debates. But he wanted to avoid the ‘chicken’ calls by the opposition, so decided to appear in one debate, and at least appeared in several interviews. In fact he made a good decision by not appearing at a debate when Miliband went to one, and since he didn’t send a representatives the opposition parties had no choice but to attack Miliband for not being anti-austerity, which cost him points on the left.

May sending Amber Rudd was possibly even worse than not appearing. This gave the other parties a dartboard at which to aim at, and Rudd seemed just as robotic and wooden as Theresa May had done, and the other parties were all taking digs at May for not appearing.

Her narrative about being, ‘strong and stable’ was utterly crushed by seeming weak and unwilling to defend her record. She even chickened out of appearing on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4. In a few weeks she had changed the public image of her from strong and stable to weak and wobbly.

The Tories will be extremely disappointed with this result. May claimed afterwards that she would provide certainty. However this will not be the view of the Tory Party, who before the election had 331 votes they could count on by themselves, and with 11 from the Ulster Unionists and UKIP could be sure to pass any legislation on Brexit they wished. However now even with the DUP they only have 328, and it has been widely seen that this vote was a rejection of hard Brexit. May’s position has been considerably weakened by this election, and all hold their breath to see how long this coalition of chaos will last.

Labour

Exceeded all expectations. Corbyn was on 23% at the beginning of the campaign, and was almost unanimously, even by Labour voters, seen as weak and divisive. However as the campaign went on he gained in confidence, and took advantage of May’s weakness to mount an astounding comeback in terms of vote share, going from 23% in the polls to 40%.

Corbyn’s campaign was centred around large rallies, which many questioned by saying that they were in Labour held areas. However the point of the rallies wasn’t to convince the attendees; on the contrary. The images projected onto people’s television screens at home was one of an extremely popular Labour leader, speaking passionately about issues he cared about, whereas May was with a select, small group and people and didn’t seem interested in meeting ordinary voters.

Corbyn made the election about austerity and Tory cuts, and promised to invest in public services and the economy, funded by a hike in corporation tax and an increase in income tax on people earning more than £80,000. The actual policies weren’t perhaps as important as the overall impact it made: Corbyn had a vision of the country, May didn’t.

We’ve seen now in several elections that the candidate with a clear vision of how they want to change the country always does well. Blair in 1997, with his vision of an economically open, socially liberal, outward looking country. Obama in 2008 with his vision of how he was going to change the country, regardless of whether he managed to implement it or not. Trump in 2016, love him or loathe him, did campaign on a dramatic vision on changing America. Macron and Le Pen in France both had a vision of how to change France.

Voters like politicians who have somewhere they want to take the country, not politicians such as Hillary, McCain and May, while they may be seen as a safe pair of hands, are not generally well received by the public.

Corbyn’s vision for Britain enthused many, particularly young voters, who saw for the first time a clear difference between the two main parties and an opportunity to end austerity.

Labour also pledged to spend around £40 billion on removing tuition fees and clearing student debt, which cynics described as a bribe to attract younger voters. However I disagree with this and think that Corbyn ideologically wanted to remove the burden of debt and make it easier for young people to go to university. Corbyn also pledged to nationalise several industries such as rail, water and energy. For the first time there was a clear difference between the two major parties, and young people responded to this and backed Labour in droves.

Corbyn has increased the share of the vote to 40%, a remarkable achievement, but let us not forget that the number of seats has only increased to 262, far better than anyone dared hope, but only because expectations were so unbelievably low to begin with. Gordon Brown, in 2010, with the recession hanging over him, got 258 seats, which was seen as a terrible failure, and rightly so. The fact that Miliband did terribly doesn’t make Corbyn’s 262 seats a success.

Labour still lost, and what I fear is that now no post-mortem will be done, there will be no consideration of where Labour went wrong and did not appeal to certain groups, as victory fever looms large in Labour HQ. However Labour have been going backwards since 1997, and the biggest swing to the party since Attlee in 1945 shows the value of this achievement.

Liberal Democrats

The Liberals went into this election with high hopes. They saw the 48% of people who had voted remain as a potential goldmine, and sought to campaign against May’s hard Brexit and Corbyn’s ambivalence on Brexit.

Many in the party were hoping that the party would get 40 seats, and saw it being very possible as they saw how unpopular Corbyn was and a vacuum on the centre-left. This approach relied on a strong feeling for Remain persisting and Corbyn’s continuing to be weak. If these two factors had remained constant I think the Liberals could have done very well. Farron ran a very good campaign based on these factors. However neither of these factors remained in any discernible way.

The Liberals took a gamble by putting a second referendum into their manifesto, which was almost guaranteed to alienate anyone who had supported Brexit. This seemed like a decent gamble to make, as if even a third of Remain voters backed them because of this, and say there was a ‘Bregrets’ feeling, the Liberals could be looking at 20% of the vote.

However any feeling for Remain died pretty early in the campaign. The percentage of people who were ‘hard Remainers’, who wanted to ignore the result or seek to overturn it was 22%, and out of these many were Labour or Green supporters and unlikely to switch to the Lib Dems.

Forget 52%. The rise of the “Re-Leavers” mean the pro-Brexit electorate is 68%

However one might see the party’s strong opposition to Brexit as something of a long term investment. If Brexit turns out to be a disaster, people will remember that the Liberals were the party which warned of this and took a consistent and principled approach of opposition to it. On the other hand it seems to have been an unmitigated mistake in the short run as in this election it cost them any hope of a comeback in the south west and many rural areas.

The other factor which in the end played against the Liberals was the Corbyn surge. The Liberals campaigned essentially on being ‘Labour-lite’ and, if Labour had remained weak, it’s likely many social democrat minded voters would have made the switch to the Liberals. However this was not the case as Corbyn found his mojo and thus this vote was gone, and the Liberals ended up appealing to quite a small percentage of people.

I’ve written an answer on what the Liberals should have done differently, which I’ll provide a link to at the end of this section. However it boils down to being more of a Blairite party, being economically for free markets and meritocracy, and thus investing in education and being against most nationalisation programmes and some tax increases, whilst being socially liberal and for the regulation of the sex and drug industries. This would have distinguished them significantly from the Labour Party and allowed them to claim the centre ground.

The Liberals, in the end, will be satisfied but nothing more with this result. They have gained four seats, and established themselves once again as the third party of British politics, mainly due to the demise of UKIP and the return of two party politics. Big hitters such as Vince Cable and Ed Davey are back, who will be voices in parliament and will be able to be bigger media figures for the party.

However the Liberals’ situation is similar to that of Labour in many ways. It is only a good result because of how badly the party has done in previous years. The last election was so poor that almost anything would be good. Having lost some vote share, questions about the party’s popularity in Brexit voting areas such as Devon and Cornwall will have to be looked into. It is a recovery, but an extremely slow recovery and one which will take time and Brexit ceasing to be an issue in politics.

UKIP

In many ways the last election was the electoral peak for UKIP. Four million votes, but due to the absurdity of First Past the Post, only 1 seat, and that due to a defection from the Tories. However their popularity succeeded in applying sufficient pressure on David Cameron to force him to call a referendum to prevent the right wing of his party deserting him, and thus came UKIP’s lasting contribution to the history books : Brexit.

However, as Nigel Farage has noted, UKIP are now victims of their own success. Having won a vote perhaps more important than any election, UKIP became redundant, as their claim to want to ‘hold Theresa May’s feet to the fire’ rang hollow as the Tories established themselves as the Brexit party, pledging to leave the single market in their manifesto.

UKIP’s strategy seems to have been to reshape themselves as the new right wing party, akin to the US Republicans or the National Front, though not as extreme, with a pledge to reduce net migration to zero and ban the Burqa. However without the charisma of Nigel Farage, this was impossible as Paul Nuttall came across as an inarticulate fool and looked opportunistic and uncaring for continuing to campaign in the aftermath of both the Manchester and London terrorist attacks.

The Tories in many ways, stole UKIP’s act. They pledged to leave the single market, reduce net migration to 100,000 (again) and said, ‘enough is enough’ on terrorism. UKIP have lost, but their soul in many ways lives on in the Conservative Party.

Overall, UKIP will be devastated with the result. They went from 14% of the vote to 2% and only just got more votes than the Greens, and zero seats.

Their leader has resigned, having come third in the most pro-Brexit seat in the country, and there are no well known figures who could feasibly replace Nuttall. Farage has hinted that he may eventually come back, but has said he will only do so if the Tories backslide on Brexit, which may not happen given that the DUP are their coalition partners.

This is, in many ways, the first time that absolutely no party was happy with the result. Alistair Campbell was right in saying that the winners look like the losers and the losers look like the winners. The momentum is with Labour, but the Tories are weakened, but still the largest party. The one thing that is guaranteed is that this will be an interesting parliament, and a short one.

#JeremyCorbyn #LabourParty #2017GeneralElection