I have too many conflicting feelings, and a bit more of the dust needs to settle, to produce any sort of political analysis of this election and where things will go from here but I do have some takes, large and small, about its psephological aspect. (Sorry about the length, I had a lot of Thoughts and it was cathartic to write them out).
1. We all knew that the lib dems had had an atrocious campaign, but even taking that into account, they had an atrocious night. Like with the last election, there was a significant amount of churn in their vote, with both gains and losses. Somewhat remarkably, as Talleyrand noted, the lib dems won only 2 seats in each of 2015, 2017 and 2019; Alastair Carmichael’s genepool Liberal Orkney and Shetland and electoral colossus - but only within the borders of Cumbria- Tim Farron’s Westmorland and Lonsdale. The central problem for any party is “What is the point of this party? Who are they for?”. The joy and challenge of election analysis is that you can answer this question, in the most truthful way, by looking at results, which can not lie. But a look at liberal results over the last decades and possibly even century has never really given any sort of answer. Their seats at any given time were a mishmash of celtic fringe, fortuitous by election gains, local personalities, seasoned more recently by universities and seats that were too posh for labour and too liberal for tories. Now though, barring Scotland (which is a law unto itself) and Farron, I think we can use that seat data to finally answer that question. They are the party of the liberal, highly educated, rich, with all that entails(Note
this remarkable tidbit from the yougov post election poll: - the Lib Dems are the only party where propensity to vote for them is correlated with income (though with the caveat that income is not the same as class)). This is a real disappointment for those angling for the glory days of Ashdown and Kennedy, because these people are not actually that common and can’t win you that many seats. But it does have some upside, if you have a real authentic constituency, even if niche, and you represent them, their support will endure. Their map has been nomadic over history. So many seats have followed the progression of going Liberal for a term or two or three, and then, after their MP loses or retires a steady slide into deposit losing territory. This election, bleak though it may be, they may well have found an identity that solidifies their floor, even at the expense of lowering their ceiling. For a party that has lost so much, that may not be so terrible a result.
2. A testament to the incompetence and unlikability of Swinson in particular is that she lost East Dunbartonshire. Their other results in Scotland, which is politically a separate country, and must be considered so for campaign purposes, were actually pretty good. Not only did they increase their vote nationally by 2.4%, they also had a string of impressive results, regaining (albeit a distant) second place in Ross, Skye and Lochaber, gaining Northeast Fife from the SNP of all people, holding Edinburgh West and particularly, Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (now, according to Hanretty, their only seat which voted (51%) to leave). All this suggests that Swinson, who lost 3.8% or 1500 votes, probably did so not in spite of her newfound prominence and access to media platforms but because of it, which is pretty damning of her tenure as a leader.
3. Thinking about Scotland more generally, the first thing to note is, once again, how evenly spread the SNP vote is. As Gully noted, it is remarkable that a party which received 45% nationwide only received over 50% in 8 of 59 constituencies. Overall the SNP result is probably not best seen through the lens of 2015. It was certainly not as triumphant, unlike then, where unionists were taken unawares, they fought a successful rearguard campaign in a decent number of seats. The campaign was also oddly muted it. The UK parties campaigned in a UK manner, Jackson Carlaw, Richard Leonard and Willie Rennie were overshadowed by their bosses, and the SNP were not as independence focused, though they did not ignore it, as in the previous two elections. I think, and the polls bear this out, that it would be wrong to read the result as a massive endorsement of independence. What it does show however, is a Scottish electorate that is completely at odds with the English, not just far apart, but swinging in opposite directions. It shows there is a very large bloc of voters who may not be sold on a yes vote, but who see themselves as distinct from and hostile to English politics and the Conservative party. This is a ticking time bomb that may switch if, as seems almost inevitable, they are poorly handled by Johnson.
4. One of the most remarkable results, though it will receive little attention in London, was the SDLP regain of Foyle (the constituency is just the city of derry, it is called foyle after the river so the boundary commission don’t accidentally restart the troubles) on a swing of 17.3 per cent. Brexit, and the ostentatious disregard shown for the island of Ireland by the British political classes has paradoxically both increased support for a united Ireland and reduced support for abstentionism.
5. Another set of fascinating results is Labour’s performance in Scouseland. A look at
this list of labour seats held before the election ordered by average age shows that practically the only old people who still vote Labour are old scousers. Labour got 80.8% in Knowsley, 79.4% in Bootle and 84.7% in Walton. This is one of the only areas left in Britain where people vote like it is the 50s, where political parties are a fixed part of your identity, rather than being a conditional relationship with distant and distrusted politicians. And this complete and utter tribalism occurs in some of the most white working class seats in the country. Why is this? I don’t know, but there is no facile answer. Merseyside was certainly devastated by Thatcher, but so were many areas which now have conservative MPs. It can only be the result of a a specific culture which has developed around Liverpool over a long period of time. But, as sui generis as it is, I think it is something that the party should look seriously at to try to learn from, and that academics and journalists must also consider before making overly hasty generalisations about what exactly has happened.
6. During this campaign Labour had one of the largest and most finely tuned campaigning machines in british electoral history, while the conservatives had five canvassing pensioners and some racists with twitter accounts. Nevertheless, unsurprisingly, the rising tide lifted all boats. Despite all the sound and fury over tactical voting, election pacts and ground game, in seats where this applied the conservatives triumphed as easily as seats where it didn’t. It is of course the case that ground game can make a difference, and is worth doing. Canvassing has its own rewards besides getting out the vote, anyway. But we must not forget that it will only tip the balance in the most marginal situations. As Al frequently and rightly says, elections are not a strategy game. If you are losing in a seat by 10, no amount of ground game will save you. So the focus on it for its own sake, the factoring of it into predictions, especially at high turnout general elections, has been grossly disproportionate.
7. A related point, this election saw massive swing differentials by region. The
swing differentials, it has to be said, were basically predicted by almost everyone, even if the absolute swing was not. But there is a tendency to make savvy predictions about how this differential will massively help one party or another, and this is almost always a mistake. If you put the 2019 result into a swingometer from 2017 you get a majority of around 75, that is, almost dead on. Though the actual seats won might differ, the number of them, which is what fundamentally counts, will almost always balance out.
8. If the results in Great Grimsby put paid to the idea that how an individual MP votes matters a huge amount to constituents, this election does show quite a lot of evidence that significant numbers of people cast personal votes, even if its incredibly rare that there are enough of these people to get the MP elected in their own right. Consider, for instance, the fall in the tory vote in Beaconsfield and Rushcliffe, the swing in Norfolk North, Ian Murray’s performance in Edinburgh South, or Frank Field’s in Birkenhead.
9. One of the few consolations of British politics being so full of bad people is that every election, even the most miserable, offers a few amusing moments, albeit often of the schadenfreude variety. Perhaps the most amusing here are the miserable performances of Chris Leslie, the Brexit surge (and conservative vote drop!) in Barnsley Central, Labour, despite everything, holding Hartlepool, Nigel Dodds losing, the aforementioned Lib dem gain in northeast fife while Swinson lost her seat, and, most of all, the Lib Dems failing to gain Sheffield Hallam.
10. In the UK in general, perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the election was a stickiness in seats Labour gained in 2017. They held 14 of 28 seats in England and wales they gained at that election, and most of the others, places like Peterborough, Bury North, Kensington, High Peak, had very small Tory majorities. The so called sophomore bump could be a partial factor in this remarkable local stability, but given that it occurred in the context of a massive national swing, there must be other factors. I think what it shows above all is that, despite the massive surface level change, there is a similarity between the 2019 campaign and the 2017 campaign. The places that were most attracted by Corbyn then are the ones that were least repulsed (because labour still lost ground in these seats, just far less) by him now. The contours of the support are the same, and now the counter swing tory gains look like harbringers. Stoke on Trent South suggests West Bromwich East, Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland suggest Redcar and so on. 2019 shows us what places Corbynism was really attractive in, and what places it was merely attractive as not May’s Conservatism.
11. Another point to make is that in a lot of the heartland seats labour still received around the same percentage or only slightly less than they got in 2015 and 2010. The difference, of course, being that unlike in those elections, the not labour vote coalesced around the Conservatives, or, to put it another way, Labour got 2010 votes and the Conservatives got 2017 votes (note that the raw number of tory votes rarely increased by that much this year, it did not need to) in these constituencies. In Blyth Valley, Labour received 46% in 2015 and 41% this year, in Heywood and Middleton they received 43% in 2015 and 41% this year. In Grimsby they received exactly the same percentage (32.7) in 2010 and 2019. Given Labour did slightly better percentage wise in 2019 and most of the shares are a bit lower, as well as the addition to the electorate of new labour friendly young voters in between elections, that does add up to a performance that was worse. And there are a few seats, Mansfield, Bolsover, Cannock Chase (labour down to 25% in a seat they held going into 2010!) where the significant drop really does herald a trend away. But in most cases it is not a cataclysmic drop on 2015, its just no one comments on a marginal hold, but they do notice a loss (hence the tiresome since 1935 stuff with seats like Wrexham which were held marginally multiple times previously). I need to make myself very clear here. I am not saying that this election was not cataclysmic for the Labour party as an institution. I am saying that previous elections, in a very real sense, were almost as bad, but no one noticed, because of a split vote amongst non labour voters. That is, the issues Labour are having go beyond Brexit and will not be solved by it going away, though they may appear to be solved in the short term by the conservative vote splitting enough to allow reversions.
12. So let’s be unambiguous, this result was terrible for Labour. Not only is 203 seats abysmally low, it is remarkable how many seats nearly, but not quite, fell. That is, it would have only taken a stiff wind and the result would be much worse. Labour have a majority of 208 in Coventry Northwest and 401 in Coventry South. Their cumulative majority in the Newport seats is 2894 and they have a triple digits majority in Wansbeck. To get an idea of the state labour are in it is worth, as always reading Alasdair Rae’s
work. Gully said on election night that the seats Labour are left with can pretty much fall into 3 categories- the most completely devastated post industrial areas, universities towns and metropolitan seats, and, well, there is no path to a majority that just appeals to these places.
13. Finally, a note of optimism. There has been much rubbish talked by gloating tories and their media outriders that such a large majority effectively guarantees two terms. This is ridiculous, because actually all the talk pre election about the map being bad for the tories still holds, they just did so well it didn’t matter. On a uniform national swing it only takes about 3% for the tories to lose their overall majority, and they need to be well over 300 to be in any danger of forming a minority government, so skilful have they been at alienating the other parties. Yes, a labour outright majority is much more of a stretch than that, but it’s frankly been a stretch ever since the independence referendum, and will be until the situation in Scotland changes. It doesn’t practically because the SNP have no choice but to support a Labour government, so can be effectively counted as, albeit troublesome, Labour votes. But a 4 per cent swing is perfectly plausible even in normal times, and we do not live in normal times. This election, 2017, 2015 in Scotland, if they have shown one thing, have shown that the electorate is incredibly volatile, and prior performance is no indication of future success. All current majorities are like the foolish man who built his house upon the sand, and could disappear tomorrow. Boris Johnson is not beloved now, and his support is conditional, but even if he was and it wasn’t there is no reason at all to doubt that Labour can win easily in 2024. No reason, that is, based on fundamentals and national conditions, plenty based on the track record of the Labour party.
