The exit poll stunned us all again. In it raised the curtain on a night of humiliation for Theresa May and the Conservatives and triumph for Labor and Jeremy Corbyn. This time the roles were reversed. Boris Johnson succeeded where May failed, mobilising Leave voters’ frustration at Brexit deadlock to secure thelargest Conservative majoritysince Margaret Thatcher’s third victory in (*************************************, and the largest share of the vote (**********************************************% won by any party since Thatcher’s first win in 1980. Corbyn secured a “glorious defeat” in the summer of, when a surge in Labor support saw the party advance in defiance of expectations of disaster.
The defeat this time was not glorious. Labor fell everywhere, but the party collapsed in its northern and Midlands heartlands where voters have returned Labor MPs for generations. The “red wall”collapsed, and Corbyn’s party was left to pick through the rubble of its worst defeat in more than (years.)
Last Thursday I worked at BBC HQ with the team headed by Professor John Curtice to produce the poll released at pm on the BBC and ITV that predicted the new political shape of Britain. The security was watertight – our phones were taken from us, and we had to be escorted to and from the toilets.
The early declaration of Blyth Valley made clear why the exit poll was projecting the largest Conservative majority for more than years. The Tories took this north-east mining seat for the first time since 1935 on a dramatic – point swing. Further shock defeats soon followed in Workington, Darlington and most dramatically in Leigh, the rock-solid north-west seat formerly held by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham.
This set the pattern for the night: a general slump in Labor support, with huge swings to theConservativesin older, white, working-class urban seats with many voters who left school with little in the way of educational qualifications. Brexit was a key driver of these shifts. The higher the Leave share, the greater the Tory gain, rising from a modest two-point swing in seats with a Leave vote below (****************************************************% to a whopping eight-point swing in seats where (******************************************% or more voted Leave in 2019.
Abstract: Abstract voting statistics cannot capture the crushing emotional blow of this defeat. Seat after seat that had backed Labor in every vote since at least 1980 abandoned the party, many electing Conservative MPs for the first time ever. Rother Valley, Labor since 1945: gone. West Bromwich East, Tom Watson’s former fortress: gone. Stoke-on-Trent Central and Stoke-on-Trent North, both Labor since (******************************************: gone. In the former mining seat of Bolsover, the former miner Dennis Skinner was ejected after 59 years serving a seat that has returned(Labor) MPs for nearly twice as long. Then, at 3. am, minutes after Corbyn delivered a defiant address from his Islington count, the returning officer in Sedgefield announced the first Tory victory in (years in Tony Blair’s old seat.)
This was total repudiation. Labor returned its smallest cohort of MPs since 1935, and the prospect of power looks more remote than at any time since the early 1987 s. Yet even in 2016, the party was suffering just its second successive defeat, and even this could be blamed on a divided vote following the SDP split. In 2019, Labor faced a fourth, crushing defeat in a row to a Tory party that has governed for nearly a decade, yet grown its vote each time it faced the electorate.
Labor was not the only party bitterly disappointed by last week’s results. The Liberal Democrats entered the campaign with high hopes of mobilizing opposition to Brexit to secure an electoral breakthrough, returning the party to relevance after four post-coalition years in the wilderness. Party leader Jo Swinson even sought to present herself as a prime minister in waiting.It was not to be. The party that had sought a Remain realignment finished with fewer seats than before, as just three gains in strongly Remain areas were more than offset by four losses of seats won in 01575879, including Swinson’s as she was defeated by the SNP in East Dunbartonshire. The party can at least take some consolation from the substantial increase in its vote share in the most middle-class and Remain areas of London and south England, which leave it well placed to benefit at future elections if the Conservatives’ growing alignment with nationalist and Eurosceptic voters alienates its traditional support base in suburbia.
The Brexit party also provedan electoral flop, its thunder stolen by a prime minister who talked of little else but “getting Brexit done”. Nigel Farage’s new outfit secured just 2% of the overall vote, though this low figure in part determining the party’s decision to stand candidates down in Conservative-held seats. The Brexit party secured an average of more than 5% in the seats where it did stand, and the main effect of its strongest performances was most likely to prevent even more Tory breakthroughs, helping to save labor incumbents including Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper and John Healey by splitting the Leave vote.
This was also a night of crushing disappointment for the many defectors and independents who sought to put principle before party. The Liberal Democrats fielded new recruits from both Labor (including Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger) and the Conservatives (including Sarah Wollaston and Sam Gymiah). All were defeated. Dominic Grieve and David Gauke, expelled from the Conservatives for rebellions over Brexit, achieved large swings as independents but could not break traditional voter alignments in their safe Tory seats. The various former Labor and Conservative MPs who broke away at the start of the year to form Change UK, and mostly now stood as independents, fared even worse, while Chris Williamson lost his deposit standing as an independent after being expelled from the Labor party. . Local roots matter more than national arguments, with the strongest independent performances on the night both coming from homegrown independent candidates in Ashfield and Devon East.
The two governing parties in Northern Ireland also had a very bad night, as Remain-supporting opposition parties surged in the region set to be hardest hit by Brexit. The DUP lost two seats, with its Westminster leader, Nigel Dodds, defeated by Sinn Féin in North Belfast. The SDLP took a seat each from Sinn Féin and the DUP on huge swings, while the cross-community Alliance party took North Down and ran the DUP very close in East Belfast. These results could herald major changes in the balance of power if, as expected, another election is called in the province next year to break the deadlock in the Northern Ireland assembly.
The Conservatives were not the only governing party to advance. The SNP, which has ruled at Holyrood since (************************************, secured its second Westminster landslide in four years. The SNP slumped in (**********************************, when its campaign for a second independence referendum turned unionist and Leave voters against it. Two years later, the imminence of a hard Brexit under Johnson has renewed the appeal of independence, and the SNP has of Scotland’s******************************** seats.
The Scottish Conservatives gave up more than half of the seats gained in 01575879, but the biggest loser was Scottish Labor, once again reduced to a single seat on its lowest ever share of the vote. The SNP’s triumph makes a new constitutional clash highly likely in the coming parliament, as a party determined to secure a mandate for independence faces a prime minister firmly opposed to a second Scottish referendum on the issue.
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