Posted Jun 10, 2017
by
It doesn’t matter where you begin.
Canterbury, Tory since the First World War, went Labour.
Labour took over Portsmouth South, a Tory–Liberal marginal. Nick Clegg lost
Sheffield Hallam, the Tory ministers Jane Ellison and Ben Gummer were ousted,
and Amber Rudd was only barely saved by the recount. A string of bellwethers,
such as Warwick and Leamington, Reading East, Ipswich, Peterborough and Enfield
Southgate, turned Labour. Mountainous SNP majorities fell. Supposed London
marginals such as Ealing Central, Tooting and Hampstead and Kilburn became safe
seats. Labour had its biggest surge in vote share since 1945, with Corbyn
racking up just short of 13 million votes, 40 per cent of the total, after
coming from twenty points behind. The political map has been completely
re-drawn.
Just as important was the dog that didn’t bark. The “UKIP
effect” was, for good reasons, expected to maul Labour in the rustbelts of the
North and West Midlands. Not a bit of it. Except for a few interesting cases,
such as Stoke and Mansfield, Labour came back with increased majorities.
It is hard to remember, in the face of all this, that Labour
didn’t actually win the election. Because, while Jeremy Corbyn didn’t become
Prime Minister, he did pull off the most stunning upset in recent political
history. And he did this by turning out voters who, according to all received
wisdom, would never vote, above all the young and poor.
The campaign had many surprising echoes of 1997. Corbyn, for
example, has cheerfully appropriated the New Labour slogan of “the many not the
few” and given it a far more radical inflection. He spoke the language of
opportunity and aspiration, but he gave it a collectivist rather than
individualist content. Corbyn is sometimes accused of populism. The appropriate
term is class politics.
Labour ran an unashamed class-driven campaign. It promised to tax the rich, and
the large corporations, to pay for council house building, nationalized
utilities and rail, and free education. It promised to abolish zero hours
contracts, raise the minimum wage, abolish the anti-union laws, and end benefit
sanctions and the bedroom tax. There was a promise to review council tax and
look at implementing a far more progressive Land Value Tax. It also
incorporated the usual gamut of left-wing “post-materialist” themes, including
ambitious targets for reducing pollution, and making free wifi available across
the rail network. The media response was somewhere between condescension – long
on passion, short on details, claimed the BBC’s Nick Robinson – and panic, as
the right-wing press decried a looming garden tax. But it was, unmistakably,
widely popular and the clear turning point in the campaign. The elderly UKIP
voters who switched to Labour, and the young who turned out, would not have
come out for anything less.
Class cut across generations, but it also cut across nations.
Britain is a multinational state in crisis. The SNP and UKIP have been two very
different faces of this crisis, but both have just experienced major setbacks.
It was assumed that Labour could only win in this situation by becoming a wan
imitation of UKIP. But this wouldn’t have worked. Flag-waving is patronizing,
unconvincing and off-putting to the voters Labour needs. Campaigning from the
Left, on the other hand, reminds people of what they like about Labour.
But the generational change is also real. In a perverse way,
the attacks on Corbyn allowed him to score unexpected wins on this front.
Attacking Corbyn’s supposed IRA “links” is a classic Lynton Crosby strategy,
but twenty years after Good Friday, it only excited a layer of older right-wing
men. Corbyn’s insistent even-handedness in condemning all the violence, and his
early advocacy for republican prisoners and willingness to meet Sinn Féin, look
forward-thinking. His critique of the “war on terror” articulated what has
become a common sense, especially for those who grew up in the years of Stop
the War. This helped him defeat May on what was supposed to be her turf.
Of course, Labour was helped by a hopeless Tory campaign. May
lost a lot of her presumed regal authority by running away from debates,
ducking questions and U-turning. But May had been exposed from the Left. Her
rightist version of class rhetoric, her patronizing appeal to “ordinary working
class families”, might have worked had Labour not offered a far more hopeful
agenda. Likewise, had Labour tried to tail the Tories on terrorism, as it would
traditionally have done, May would have controlled the narrative. Corbyn’s
backbench critics won’t like it; neither will the increasingly irrelevant
tabloids, nor the Crosbyite spin machine. But the biggest way in which the
political map was re-drawn is that the horizons of possibility were radically
expanded. We used to hear there was no alternative. Now the alternative is
clear.
