United Kingdom General Elections: December 12th, 2019

[bore]

I don't know how many people here still know who I am, but for those who do and care what I think this is what I think we’ve seen and learnt over the course of the campaign.

I have never been a prolific poster - if I have nothing to say I would rather do that in no words than in many - but I have been even less so during this election. This is partially because I hate the twitter motto of “The first take, right or wrong”. We have seen in 2015, 2016 and 2017 that polls, vox pops and focus groups are basically worthless, only election results tell us the truth. So it is a sign of a deformed intellect to make sweeping statements, for instance, about the electoral map being redrawn. We are not in a hurry, we will know for sure in a few short hours. Analysis can only be done when you have something to analyse, and for all the sound and fury in a campaign itself there is not much worth analysing.

The other reason for silence, though, is more personal. In football a common grenade to launch at opposition fans is “You only sing when you’re winning”. The virtuous fan is supposed to remain in the ground, no matter how badly his team are being thumped. Whether that is true virtue in sport is one thing, but it is clearly not in politics. If the party you dislike are winning, it’s not virtuous to watch their celebrations, its masochistic. And this campaign, even if the good guys win in the end, has been nothing but a triumph for everything I hate, from the always evil tories to the shrill incompetence of the lib dems, the hate of the print media to the craven cowardice of the BBC.

Nevertheless, inevitably, I post on this website, I live in Britain, I have been followed enough to know what’s going on. I am expecting, though only a fool would predict, a healthy tory majority. I will though, taking my own advice, save a post mortem on labour’s campaign and corbynism until we know that the patient is dead. The one thing I would say is you can not underestimate the political ramifications of a tory win on the demographic which most of us are a part of: the young, educated and on the left. We have seen, throughout this campaign, just as we did in 2017, that these people are exceptionally motivated- we had, for instance, 700 canvassers at one time in Putney. There was an expectation in the aftermath of 2017 that it was a turning point, in the next election that Labour would sweep in to power, while not perhaps in Westminster arithmetic, in the sense of momentum, the tories had consigned themselves to the past in 2017. Something was happening but the establishment did not know what it was. If, after all that, after all the chaos of the last two years, the tories win more seats then it will be a seismic event. Some will react by plowing on, confident in the actuaries eventual victory, some will abandon politics, some will decide the time has come for factional infighting and some will, having seen the BES figures and the other crosstabs, declare war on the boomers. I do not know what combination of these approaches will fill this vacuum but a look at the Democratic presidential primary does not give me much hope that we will make the right call.

If, when the clock does strike 10 though, the exit poll delivers a grim sentence, I’d like to offer two small crumbs of hope. Firstly, the tory campaign - if campaign is the right word given they spent more time avoiding than interacting with voters - when not robotically repeating Get Brexit Done, was an implicit rebuke of their policies of the last 9 years. That is not to say that the spending they propose on the NHS or on schools or the justice system is in anyway adequate, and obviously they can not be trusted even to do that. But it is a recognition on their part that Britain is in a terrible state, and that the electorate will not tolerate it. The left should take heart from the fact that for all their dirty tricks and bad intentions, the right wing can only row the state back so far. The next Labour government can build services that the tories can not touch, and that is a powerful motivator.

The other straw worth clutching to, redolent as it is of bad atlas takes, but true nonetheless, is that this is not an election that will produce an enduring tory government. Boris Johnson is phenomenally unpopular, kept in the race by the fact Corbyn is even more phenomenally unpopular, and he will not become more likeable. His central slogan is a lie which will be found out. His government will try, but it will fail, to get Brexit done, because Brexit will never be done, that is how trade negotiations work. It will not do anything close to enough to rebuild the crumbling public realm, its standard bearers will, whenever they are seen, make the publics skin crawl. It has nothing to offer. It would be eviscerated in a 2024 election. This future destruction, I should make clear, is not worth the present human misery that will occur if they are re-elected, but it is something to remember as you watch them gloat. Whatever happens tomorrow, sometime soon The Day Will Come.