DEC 13, 2019
Andrew O'Hehir / Salon
British general elections have
a tendency to deliver last-minute surprises, and the U.K.’s third in less than
five years did not disappoint. Unfortunately for the Labour Party, the British
left and the anti-Brexit forces, the surprise of 2019 appears to be a
catastrophic wipeout.
Polls leading into Thursday’s
election had suggested a tightening race that could end in a “hung parliament.”
Lines — sorry, queues — at polling places were lengthy, and British social
media buzzed with the possibility that left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
might win just enough seats to forge a coalition government with the Scottish
National Party, ousting preening, Trump-flavored Prime Minister Boris Johnson
and the Conservative Party and paving the way for a second Brexit referendum.
None of that will happen now.
As Johnson told a cheering crowd at Conservative Party headquarters in London,
the Tories had won a “stonking” victory, which will ensure that the U.K. leaves
the European Union sooner rather than later, and will lock down the right’s
hold on power in Britain for the next several years.
With most votes counted early
on Friday morning, the BBC reports that
the Tories will win an outright majority of roughly 364 seats in the 650-seat
House of Commons, a gain of 47 from the indecisive 2017 election.
If possible, the news for
Labour and Corbyn, its controversial leader, is even worse than that. While the
Conservative vote share is only slightly higher than it was in 2017, Labour’s
vote has declined by roughly 8 percent. After gaining 30 seats in 2017 for a
total of 261 — its biggest electoral gain for 20 years — Labour stands to lose
57 or 58 seats this time around, potentially its worst overall election result
since World War II.
There are several interesting
footnotes to this election, including a big comeback by the Scottish National
Party, who have won at least 48 seats, virtually wiping out both Labour and the
Tories north of the border and reigniting the push for Scottish independence.
The centrist Liberal Democrats, who had hoped to thrive by being the only party
clearly against Brexit, remain irrelevant, with party leader Jo Swinson losing
her seat to the SNP.
But for Labour and the overall
British left, no sugarcoating is possible. This election is an unmitigated
disaster.
As author
and journalist David Kogan told me in a recent interview, the British
left saw Corbyn’s unexpected victory in the Labour leadership campaign of 2015
as a historic opportunity to pursue systemic progressive change. That
opportunity is gone now, and for years to come. Let’s take a moment to
acknowledge that for many people in Britain and around the world, this is a
crushing blow.
Whatever you make of Jeremy
Corbyn, he is a person of great moral decency and unbending principle, who
engaged and aroused a generation of young activists. For practical purposes his
political career is now over: Late on Thursday, Corbyn said he intended to
remain as leader for a period of “reflection,” although many in the party would
clearly prefer he quit immediately. He certainly will not try to lead Labour
into another election.
Exactly why did this election
go so badly south for Labour, and what lessons does this debacle hold for
Americans who yearn to defeat Donald Trump next November? It’s way too early to
offer definitive answers to those questions — especially from thousands of
miles away — but if you spent any time on political Twitter on Thursday
evening, you know that plenty of people gave it a try.
The fairest answer is probably
that damn near everything went wrong for Labour, and that outside observers
will draw whatever lessons they like, mostly the ones that support whatever
they already believe. Democratic “moderates” in the U.S. are already using the
Corbyn catastrophe, for instance, to warn darkly that their own party must not
take a chance on a leftist or progressive candidate like Bernie Sanders or
Elizabeth Warren in 2020. Whatever the merits of that argument, it doesn’t have
much to do with what just happened across the pond.
It’s perfectly true that
Corbyn was the most prominent leftist leader of any major political party in
any major Western democracy over the last several years, and that he pushed an
unrepentant progressive agenda. But that agenda — expanding public services and
ending the era of austerity — was widely popular in almost every detail, and
was not the reason Labour lost this election so badly.
Corbyn himself, as a political
personality, is another matter. Four years as party leader have exposed the
fact that he was a lifelong activist with no management experience. He has
alternately seemed too weak and too autocratic — and has also been subjected to
relentless vilification by the pro-Tory press. Fairly or not, people in Britain
who didn’t adore him had largely come to fear and dislike him. So far, it seems
that many Labour candidates think Corbyn’s presence at the top of the party is
the biggest reason they lost, but not necessarily because middle-ground voters
perceived him as too radical.
It was hugely damaging that
Corbyn refused to take a clear position on Brexit, the overarching political
issue that dominated this election. To be fair, he didn’t have great
options, and his promise to act as a “neutral referee” on Brexit reflected an
awkward split within his party’s base. To oversimplify the equation slightly,
traditional working-class Labour voters in the north of England tended to
support Brexit, while affluent, cosmopolitan Labour voters in and around London
overwhelmingly opposed it. Still, if the party’s leader had taken a clear
position and stuck with it (as in fact he did in the 2017 campaign), the
results might have been different.
Corbyn also appeared
indecisive, or somewhat worse than that, when it came to Labour’s burgeoning
anti-Semitism scandal, in which some Jewish Labour MPs or candidates were
targeted for abuse by pro-Palestinian leftists. As David Kogan puts it, there
was no evidence that Corbyn himself harbored hateful views, but also no
evidence that he cared about the problem all that much or understood how badly
it had damaged the party’s reputation.
There are no precise parallels
to either of those things in American politics, although there are certainly
echoes. To this point, allegations of anti-Semitism against Democratic members
of Congress have done no lasting damage — largely because their source, one
might say, is compromised. But Brexit, I suppose, is metaphorically similar to
Donald Trump’s border wall, which is more or less the instrument he used to pry
Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania away from the
Democrats.
In both cases, we’re talking
about a political party struggling to adapt to rapid change, so far without
success. One analysis of the British election I encountered late on Tuesday
night suggested that Labour might actually gain a few previous Tory seats in
London, while losing many more longtime Labour seats in what was once the
party’s working-class northern heartland. (This appears accurate so far.) That
would be England’s version of the Big Sort, in which geography, educational
level and generational identity — along with race, of course — become the
dominant social dividing lines and political signifiers.
Jeremy Corbyn and the British
left just experienced a painful illustration of this cultural and demographic
shift in action, and of how it nourishes a politics of rage and resentment that
can undermine and endanger democracy. Americans already know about this: You
can feel certain you’re on the right side of history, and still end up, shocked
and dismayed, on the wrong side of electoral arithmetic. The trick, of course,
is to find a way to win without sacrificing your essential principles. Does
anyone ever do that?
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