General election 2019: Johnson to welcome new MPs to Westminster - BBC News

Prime Minister Boris Johnson will address his new intake of Conservative MPs later as they arrive in Westminster to take their seats in Parliament.

Many of the 109 new MPs won in areas traditionally held by Labour in Thursday's election, which saw the Conservatives gain an 80-seat majority.

Their first job will be to vote on the Withdrawal Agreement Bill that the PM intends to bring back before Christmas.

Mr Johnson is also expected to carry out a mini cabinet reshuffle.

He needs to fill posts made vacant by those who stood down ahead of the general election, including the culture and Welsh secretary posts.

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The Queen will formally open Parliament on Thursday when she sets out the government's legislative programme.

It is thought the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB) on leaving the EU could be put before MPs as early as Friday.

Ahead of Mr Johnson's private speech to the new MPs, a Number 10 source said: "The PM has been very clear that we have a responsibility to deliver a better future for our country and that we must repay the public's trust by getting Brexit done.

"That's why the first piece of legislation new MPs will vote on will be the Withdrawal Agreement Bill."

With the large majority, the bill is expected to pass through Parliament in time to meet Boris Johnson's promise for the UK to leave the EU on 31 January.

Mr Johnson then has to negotiate a new trade agreement with the EU and have it ratified before the end of the post-Brexit transition period that ends on 31 December 2020. He has repeatedly said that the transition period will not be extended.

The Queen's speech is also expected to include legislation linked to pledges made during the election campaign - most notably a guarantee on NHS funding.

Moves to get the Northern Ireland government at Stormont up and running again are also expected, with talks resuming on Monday.

Meanwhile, the fallout from Labour's defeat continues.

Labour's general secretary says party officials are likely to meet early in the new year to agree the timetable for replacing Jeremy Corbyn as leader.

Mr Corbyn wants the process to begin "swiftly", Jennie Formby said, so his successor can be in place by the end of March.

She has written to members of Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC) recommending a provisional date of 6 January for the meeting, with the process beginning the following day.

• Who will be Labour's next leader?
• Labour leadership takes blame over election result

Both Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell said on Sunday that they took the blame for Labour's "catastrophic" defeat in Thursday's election.

Mr Corbyn said he was "sorry that we came up short", while Mr McDonnell told the BBC he "owns this disaster".

Labour figures disagree over the reasons for the defeat. Mr McDonnell said the main issue was Brexit and the "media portrayal" of Mr Corbyn.

Meanwhile, MP Stephen Kinnock told BBC Breakfast the main problems were "weak and incompetent leadership" as well as the decision to support another Brexit referendum and a "Christmas wishlist" manifesto.

The race for their replacements has already begun, with Wigan MP Lisa Nandy saying for the first time she was "seriously thinking about" running.

Other possible contenders are shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer, shadow business secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey, shadow education secretary Angela Rayner, Jess Phillips, who is an outspoken critic of Jeremy Corbyn, and shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry.

A new intake of 47 SNP MPs will also be taking their seats on Tuesday.

Leader Nicola Sturgeon has insisted this number gives her a mandate for a second referendum on Scottish independence - something the prime minster has told her he remains opposed to.

She said the Conservatives, who lost seven of their 13 seats in Scotland, had been "defeated comprehensively" and that the new MPs would continue to press for independence.

What will happen this week?

Tuesday

Proceedings begin when MPs gather for their first duty: to elect the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, who replaced John Bercow in November. Technically, MPs can hold a vote on this motion but this has never happened in practice.

Later in the day, the Speaker will begin the process of swearing in MPs, who are required to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown, or, if they object to this, a solemn affirmation. Those who speak or vote without having done so are deprived of their seat "as if they were dead" under the Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1866.

Two to three days are usually set aside for this process.

Thursday

The state opening of Parliament. The Queen's Speech is the centrepiece of this, when she will read a speech written by ministers setting out the government's programme of legislation for the parliamentary session. A couple of hours after the speech is delivered, MPs will begin debating its contents - a process which usually takes days.

Friday

Depending on how rapidly Boris Johnson wants to move, the debate on the Queen's Speech could continue into Friday.

This may be interrupted for a second reading debate on the Withdrawal Agreement Bill.

MPs in the previous Parliament backed Boris Johnson's bill at its first stage but rejected his plan to fast-track the legislation through Parliament in three days in order to leave the EU by the then 31 October Brexit deadline.

After the debate on the Queen's Speech is concluded, MPs will vote on whether to approve it. Not since 1924 has a government's Queen Speech been defeated.

Read more from the BBC's parliamentary correspondent, Mark D'Arcy

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2019-12-16 01:05:56Z
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Nicola Sturgeon: Scotland 'cannot be imprisoned' in UK - BBC News

Scotland "cannot be imprisoned in the union against its will" by the UK government, Nicola Sturgeon has said.

The Scottish first minister says the SNP's success in the general election gives her a mandate to hold a new referendum on independence.

However, UK ministers are opposed to such a move with Michael Gove saying the vote in 2014 should be "respected".

Ms Sturgeon told the BBC that if the UK was to continue as a union, "it can only be by consent".

She told The Andrew Marr Show that the UK government would be "completely wrong" to think saying no to a referendum would be the end of the matter, adding: "It's a fundamental point of democracy - you can't hold Scotland in the union against its will."

However Mr Gove told the Sophy Ridge programme on Sky that "we were told in 2014 that that would be a choice for a generation - we are not going to have an independence referendum in Scotland".

The SNP won a landslide of Scottish seats in the snap general election, making gains from the Conservatives and Labour and unseating Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson.

However UK-wide the Conservatives won a comfortable majority, returning Boris Johnson to Downing Street and setting up a constitutional stand-off over Scotland's future.

The Scottish government wants a referendum deal with UK ministers similar to that which underpinned the 2014 vote, to ensure that the outcome is legal and legitimate - but are facing opposition from the UK government.

Ms Sturgeon said it was "fundamentally not democratic" for Mr Johnson to rule out a referendum when his party had been "defeated comprehensively" in Scotland - losing seven of its 13 seats while standing on a platform of opposition to independence.

The SNP leader said: "I said this to him on Friday night on the telephone - if he thinks saying no is the end of the matter then he's going to find himself completely and utterly wrong.

"It's a fundamental point of democracy - you can't hold Scotland in the union against its will. You can't lock us in a cupboard and turn the key and hope everything goes away.

"If the UK is to continue it can only be by consent. If Boris Johnson is confident in the case for the union he should be confident enough to make that case and allow people to decide.

"Scotland cannot be imprisoned within the United Kingdom against its will. These are just basic statements of democracy."

'Contempt for democracy'

Ms Sturgeon added: "The risk for the Conservatives here is the more they try to block the will of the Scottish people, the more utter contempt they show for Scottish democracy, the more they will increase support for Scottish independence - which in a sense is them doing my job for me.

"The momentum and the mandate is on the side of those of us who think Scotland should be independent, but also on the side of those who want Scotland to be able to chose its own future."

Mr Johnson spoke to Ms Sturgeon on the phone after being returned to government, and told her that he "remains opposed" to a second independence vote.

A Downing Street spokesman said the prime minster was "standing with the majority of people in Scotland who do not want to return to division and uncertainty".

This was echoed on Sunday morning by Mr Gove, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who said the result of the previous referendum in 2014 should hold for "a generation".

He said: "In this general election we have just seen what happens when politicians try to overturn a referendum result, and in the same way we should respect the referendum result in 2014 in Scotland.

"Scotland is stronger in the United Kingdom. You can be proudly Scottish and proudly British together.

"The best of this country are British institutions like the NHS and the BBC, and therefore we should be proud of what we have achieved together and confident that the UK is a strong partnership that works in the interests of all."

Scotland

After 59 of 59 seats

• Scottish National Party SNP

  48 seats

  , +13 seats compared to 2017

• Conservative CON

  6 seats

  , -7 seats compared to 2017

• Liberal Democrat LD

  4 seats

  , +0 seats compared to 2017

• Labour LAB

  1 seats

  , -6 seats compared to 2017

Labour went into the election opposing independence in principle, but open to the idea of backing a referendum should pro-independence parties win the majority of seats in the 2021 Holyrood election.

The party lost all but one of its Scottish seats, shedding votes in every constituency, and former MP Paul Sweeney said it was important for Labour to "reflect" on the constitutional position.

He told the BBC's Sunday Politics Scotland programme: "The way the British state is currently constructed is not sustainable. I think we need to develop a clear policy which is in the form of an ultimatum to the UK government.

"You have to say to the British government that unless you recognise that the Scottish body politic at large is not willing to accept the current status quo, unless you recognise that there has to be a major engagement with the Scottish body politic to reform the British state and recognise the difference of opinion in Scotland, then the UK is unsustainable.

"A more federal relationship is something that urgently needs to happen, and I think we need to be galvanised to present an argument that that needs to happen."

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2019-12-15 09:42:27Z
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Nicola Sturgeon: Scotland 'cannot be imprisoned' in UK - BBC News

Scotland "cannot be imprisoned in the union against its will" by the UK government, Nicola Sturgeon has said.

The Scottish first minister says the SNP's success in the general election gives her a mandate to hold a new referendum on independence.

However, UK ministers are opposed to such a move with Michael Gove saying the vote in 2014 should be "respected".

Ms Sturgeon told the BBC that if the UK was to continue as a union, "it can only be by consent".

She told The Andrew Marr Show that the UK government would be "completely wrong" to think saying no to a referendum would be the end of the matter, adding: "It's a fundamental point of democracy - you can't hold Scotland in the union against its will."

However Mr Gove told the Sophy Ridge programme on Sky that "we were told in 2014 that that would be a choice for a generation - we are not going to have an independence referendum in Scotland".

The SNP won a landslide of Scottish seats in the snap general election, making gains from the Conservatives and Labour and unseating Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson.

However UK-wide the Conservatives won a comfortable majority, returning Boris Johnson to Downing Street and setting up a constitutional stand-off over Scotland's future.

The Scottish government wants a referendum deal with UK ministers similar to that which underpinned the 2014 vote, to ensure that the outcome is legal and legitimate - but are facing opposition from the UK government.

Ms Sturgeon said it was "fundamentally not democratic" for Mr Johnson to rule out a referendum when his party had been "defeated comprehensively" in Scotland - losing seven of its 13 seats while standing on a platform of opposition to independence.

The SNP leader said: "I said this to him on Friday night on the telephone - if he thinks saying no is the end of the matter then he's going to find himself completely and utterly wrong.

"It's a fundamental point of democracy - you can't hold Scotland in the union against its will. You can't lock us in a cupboard and turn the key and hope everything goes away.

"If the UK is to continue it can only be by consent. If Boris Johnson is confident in the case for the union he should be confident enough to make that case and allow people to decide.

"Scotland cannot be imprisoned within the United Kingdom against its will. These are just basic statements of democracy."

'Contempt for democracy'

Ms Sturgeon added: "The risk for the Conservatives here is the more they try to block the will of the Scottish people, the more utter contempt they show for Scottish democracy, the more they will increase support for Scottish independence - which in a sense is them doing my job for me.

"The momentum and the mandate is on the side of those of us who think Scotland should be independent, but also on the side of those who want Scotland to be able to chose its own future."

Mr Johnson spoke to Ms Sturgeon on the phone after being returned to government, and told her that he "remains opposed" to a second independence vote.

A Downing Street spokesman said the prime minster was "standing with the majority of people in Scotland who do not want to return to division and uncertainty".

This was echoed on Sunday morning by Mr Gove, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who said the result of the previous referendum in 2014 should hold for "a generation".

He said: "In this general election we have just seen what happens when politicians try to overturn a referendum result, and in the same way we should respect the referendum result in 2014 in Scotland.

"Scotland is stronger in the United Kingdom. You can be proudly Scottish and proudly British together.

"The best of this country are British institutions like the NHS and the BBC, and therefore we should be proud of what we have achieved together and confident that the UK is a strong partnership that works in the interests of all."

Scotland

After 59 of 59 seats

• Scottish National Party SNP

  48 seats

  , +13 seats compared to 2017

• Conservative CON

  6 seats

  , -7 seats compared to 2017

• Liberal Democrat LD

  4 seats

  , +0 seats compared to 2017

• Labour LAB

  1 seats

  , -6 seats compared to 2017

Labour went into the election opposing independence in principle, but open to the idea of backing a referendum should pro-independence parties win the majority of seats in the 2021 Holyrood election.

The party lost all but one of its Scottish seats, shedding votes in every constituency, and former MP Paul Sweeney said it was important for Labour to "reflect" on the constitutional position.

He told the BBC's Sunday Politics Scotland programme: "The way the British state is currently constructed is not sustainable. I think we need to develop a clear policy which is in the form of an ultimatum to the UK government.

"You have to say to the British government that unless you recognise that the Scottish body politic at large is not willing to accept the current status quo, unless you recognise that there has to be a major engagement with the Scottish body politic to reform the British state and recognise the difference of opinion in Scotland, then the UK is unsustainable.

"A more federal relationship is something that urgently needs to happen, and I think we need to be galvanised to present an argument that that needs to happen."

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2019-12-15 09:41:47Z
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What did the UK elections teach us about 2020? Trust the polls - CNN

Maybe you think Republican President Donald Trump has reason to smile after his friend, Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, won a big mandate.

Maybe you think the crushing defeat of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party shows the peril of the Democrats potentially nominating Bernie Sanders.

Those theories may prove to be true, but I think the clearest lesson is staring us right in the face: The polls are still pretty good as we head into the 2020 presidential election in the US.

Take a look at the average of polls for the four parties that have earned at least 10 seats each in the House of Commons (the UK Parliament's lower House). The average of the final UK polls had the Conservatives winning 43% of the vote, Labour 33%, the Liberal Democrats 12% and the Scottish Nationals 4%.

The actual result was Conservatives taking 43.6%, Labour 32.2%, the Liberal Democrats 11.6% and the Scottish Nationals 3.9%. In other words, each of these parties got within 1 point of its final polled vote share.

This remarkably accurate result was better than we'd expect based on history. The final 2019 polling average missed the margin between Conservative and Labour by about 1.9 points. Since the 1945 election (i.e. the prior 20 UK general elections), the average final poll had missed by 3.9 points.

Indeed, despite a lot of cries that the polls are broken, the UK elections taking place during the Trump administration show that isn't true. Beyond this year, the difference between the Conservatives and Labour margin in the final 2017 polling average and election result was 4 points. In other words, it's right in line with what we'd expect, given the historical polling accuracy rates.

The US's own polls have likewise been fairly accurate during the Trump era. The average House, Senate and governor's polls were about a point more accurate in 2018 than they had been in similar elections over the prior 20 years. The same was generally true for House special election polling in the 2017-2018 cycle and the three governor elections of 2019 (Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi).

Another key point is that just because one side outperformed in the polls in the last election doesn't mean the same party will outperform in the next one. I know some people were expecting (and a lot of Labourites were hoping) that because the polls underestimated Labour in 2017 they would do the same in 2019. It didn't happen. The Conservatives were actually slightly underestimated.

Again, we saw this same lesson play out in the US over the past few years. After the polling underestimated the Republicans almost across the board in 2016, there was less of a systematic error in 2018. The polls slightly underestimated the Democrats on average. Now, the polls weren't perfect in 2018 in the US, but they were better than average and correctly projected a strong Democratic year. Similarly, the polls, if anything, underestimated the Democrats in the gubernatorial elections of 2019 and special elections over the course of 2017 and 2018.

The direction of the polling errors is most often random. If something is methodologically amiss in surveys, good pollsters tend to figure out what's wrong before the next election.

None of this guarantees that the final polls will correctly gauge who is going to win or lose in 2020. There are still margins of error, so someone slightly ahead in the polls may end up losing. Likewise, someone slightly behind may end up winning.

But in an era with a lot of disinformation out there, the polls continue to do a very good job of separating the signal from the noise.

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2019-12-14 13:32:00Z
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Peter McMahon: UK election was 'a great, big stonking rejection of Jeremy Corbyn' - Fox News

Peter McMahon joined wife Dana Perino and Fox News Digital Politics Editor Chris Stirewalt to break down the result of this week's general election in McMahon's native United Kingdom on the latest edition of the "Perino & Stirewalt: I'll Tell You What" podcast.

The Conservative Party dominated Thursday's election, winning 365 seats in the 650-member House of Commons to give Prime Minister Boris Johnson a clear majority of 80 seats. The opposition Labour Party, led by hard-left parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn, could only win 203 seats, their worst result in a general election since 1935.

"First of all, kudos to Boris Johnson," McMahon told Perino and Stirewalt. "He's only the second prime minister I've known in my lifetime who has had the guts to say, 'Back me or sack me.' The only other one was Ted Heath when the miners were on strike back in [the mid-1970s] ... Boris did the same."

However, McMahon took issue with Johnson's characterization of the result as "a great, big stonking mandate for Brexit," saying it was actually "a great, big stonking rejection of Jeremy Corbyn."

"Labour's worst enemy was actually Jeremy Corbyn because he was unelectable," McMahon said ... "He's probably the worst Labour leader in living memory, and that says something, there's been a few ... He's pro-Hamas, he was pro-IRA [Irish Republican Army] in the days when those big, brave heroes were murdering children in the name of Irish unity. The man's a disaster."

When asked by Stirewalt whether the Labour Party would moderate its hard-left policies in the wake of Thursday's defeat, McMahon said: "I believe that they will probably keep going the way they've been going. They have a lot of people who are, they're not just socialists, they're Marxists and they have a lot of power in the Labour Party."

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Stirewalt noted that Thursday's landslide for Johnson is "the election Donald Trump is hoping for."

"The election Donald Trump is hoping for is, 'Look, you may not like me, I may have unusual hair, I may be not your exact cup of tea. But this other person is a kook and a socialist and a crazy person and they want open borders and late-term abortion and all of this stuff.' And that's why for Democrats, they feel this urgent need about, 'We've got to find somebody who's moderate enough to talk to people in the suburbs and to talk to working-class white voters."

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2019-12-14 03:26:41Z
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General election 2019: PM to visit north after Labour heartland gains - BBC News

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Boris Johnson is to visit the north of England later, hours after celebrating his party's biggest election win for 30 years by sweeping aside Labour in its traditional heartlands.

The prime minister has said he hopes the Conservatives' victory will bring "closure" to the Brexit debate and "let the healing begin".

He won a Commons majority of 80, his party's largest since 1987.

In contrast, Labour suffered its worst election result since the 1930s.

Jeremy Corbyn said he did "everything he could" to get Labour into power but expects to stand down "early next year" when a successor has been chosen by the party.

The Labour leader said the election was "taken over by Brexit", while others within the party blamed Mr Corbyn's leadership for the defeat.

He said he would not step down as leader yet because the "responsible thing to do is not to walk away from the whole thing".

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Mr Johnson, however, is expected to announce a minor re-shuffle possibly as early as Monday.

MPs will then return to Westminster on Tuesday and begin the process of swearing in, before the Queen formally opens Parliament on Thursday with "reduced ceremonial elements".

The prime minister has also vowed to reintroduce his Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB) to Parliament before Christmas, which could happen by the end of next week.

It would see MPs begin the process of considering legislation that would pave the way for the UK to leave the EU on 31 January. Talks about a future trade and security relationship will begin almost immediately.

There were protests in London on Friday following Mr Johnson's election victory.

Demonstrators in Westminster carried signs that read "Defy Tory Rule" and "No to Boris Johnson".

The Metropolitan Police said two people were arrested in relation to the protests - one person on suspicion of assaulting a police officer and another for suspected affray.

Following the Conservatives' election win, Mr Johnson spoke to SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon on Friday evening and reiterated his opposition to a second independence referendum in Scotland.

It came after the first minister said the PM had "no right" to stand in the way of a second vote following her party's "overwhelming" election performance. The SNP won 48 of Scotland's 59 seats.

Speaking on Radio 4's Any Questions on Friday, senior cabinet minister Thérèse Coffey insisted there would be no referendum on Scottish independence during Conservatives' five year term.

After speaking to Ms Sturgeon, the PM also took phone calls from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar to discuss the next steps on Brexit.

The Conservatives won a total of 365 seats in the election, while Labour finished on 203, the SNP 48, Liberal Democrats 11 and the DUP eight.

Sinn Fein has seven MPs, Plaid Cymru four and Northern Ireland's SDLP two. The Green Party and NI's Alliance Party have one each.

The Brexit Party - which triumphed in the summer's European Parliament elections - failed to win any Westminster seats.

The Conservatives swept aside Labour in its traditional heartlands in the Midlands and the north of England and picked up seats across Wales, while holding off the Lib Dem challenge in many seats in the south of England.

Voter turnout overall, on a cold and damp polling day, was 67.3%, which is down by 1.5% on the 2017 total.

'Let the healing begin'

Speaking outside No 10 on Friday, Mr Johnson said he hoped his party's "extraordinary" election victory would bring "closure" to the Brexit debate and "let the healing begin".

He also thanked lifelong Labour supporters who deserted Jeremy Corbyn's party and turned to the Conservatives, saying he would fulfil his pledge to take the UK out of the EU on 31 January.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats are looking for a new leader after Jo Swinson lost her Dunbartonshire East seat to the SNP by 149 votes.

While she admitted her "unapologetic" pro-Remain strategy had not worked, she said she did not regret standing up for her "liberal values" and urged the party to "regroup and refresh" itself in the face of a "nationalist surge" in British politics.

Sir Ed Davey and Baroness Sal Brinton will be acting co-leaders for the party now that Ms Swinson is no longer an MP.

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2019-12-14 03:21:11Z
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UK election results: Labour’s crushing defeat, explained - Vox.com

The British electorate voted Thursday in one of the most important elections in the country’s modern history. And the results show that they voted overwhelmingly for Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson and for Brexit: a 78-seat parliamentary majority for Johnson and the worst showing for the opposition, the left-wing Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, in nearly 100 years.

This does not appear to be because Johnson was a particularly adept or well-liked political figure. His approval ratings were deeply in the negative, according to prelection data from YouGov. His central campaign promise, finally getting out of the European Union, divided the country in half. He has a reputation as an untrustworthy buffoon and an even more sinister history of racism: He has compared women in burkas to “letterboxes” and claimed that Muslim immigrants lack “loyalty to Britain” because of their religion: “Islam is the problem,” as he put it. He once penned a column describing Africans as “pickanninies” with “watermelon smiles.”

Johnson appears to have benefitted not from his own unique political talents, but from his opponent’s problems. Brexit put Corbyn in a much tougher position than Johnson, needing to appeal to both Leave and Remain voters while Johnson could focus on the former. But Corbyn was also profoundly unpopular personally: While Johnson was at minus 12 in the YouGov approval rating polling, Corbyn was at negative 40.

Corbyn’s attempt to straddle the line on the decisive issue of Brexit ended up with a wishy-washy and incoherent muddle that neither Remainers nor Leavers could believe in. Some of his leftist economic policies polled well, but Corbyn himself wasn’t viewed as a credible leader — even on issues like health care where his policy approach resonated with a lot of the public. He also presided over a significant rise in anti-Semitism in the party’s ranks; he had recently been condemned by the leading Jewish Labour organization for turning their party into “a welcoming refuge for anti-Semites.”

Corbyn is, in some ways, yesterday’s problem. He has already vowed to resign before the next UK election, his political ambitions in shambles.

But the question of how Labour can recover — and what this tells us about the global fight against parties like the Conservatives that embrace right-wing populism — is still very much unsettled.

Historically, both British and European politics more broadly have been heavily determined by class divisions. Left-wing parties like Labour dominated among the industrial working class, while right-wing parties like the Tories did well among society’s upper crust.

But in the past several decades, this historical pattern became unglued. Educated urban professionals have drifted left and the working classes have tiled right, a shift that social scientists attribute to the rising importance of immigration and identity issues in European politics. In Britain, Brexit supercharged this long-running process, as highly educated city dwellers tended to oppose Brexit (making them more likely to vote Labour) while rural and less educated voters tended to support it (making them more likely to vote Conservative).

The 2019 election results reflected the post-Brexit realignment. Labour was absolutely devastated in its traditional working class constituencies (the UK equivalent to congressional districts), with the Conservatives — long caricatured as the parties of the rich — making historic inroads. “The resounding Conservative victory was driven by a dramatic swing of working-class support away from Labour,” as the Financial Times put it in a post-election data analysis.

“In seats with high shares of people in low-skilled jobs, the Conservative vote share increased by an average of six percentage points and the Labour share fell by 14 points. In seats with the lowest share of low-skilled jobs, the Tory vote share fell by four points and Labour’s fell by seven,” the FT said in its analysis. “The swing of working class areas from Labour to Conservative had the strongest statistical association of any explored by the FT.”

This is extremely preliminary: We don’t yet know which voters in these constituencies voted which way, so we can’t yet say whether class itself is the key. Indeed, another analysis by Will Jennings, a political scientist at the University of Southampton, suggested that education level — the percentage of college graduates in a constituency — was actually more important than income level or class per se, which would be consistent with long-term data on European political realignment.

But what’s clear is that Labour’s theory of the case — that its socialist policy manifesto would be able to win back Brexit voters in its traditional working-class heartland and secure the cities — was a failure. The question is why.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, now and for quite some time.

Stefan Rousseau/WPA Pool/Getty Images

The debate among British analysts has largely polarized along pro- and anti-Corbyn lines.

The pro-Corbyn analysis is that Brexit was a unique event that swamped their otherwise popular economic agenda, creating an impossible task for Labour of appealing to both its Remain supporters in London and the Leavers in the north of England.

Anti-Corbyn analysts suggest that his attempt to have it both ways on Brexit — calling for a second referendum but not saying which side he would support — was a poor way of handling the dilemma, depressing Remain voters everywhere without winning over Leavers attracted to Johnson’s simple message. In this view, Corbyn was so incredibly unpopular, his socialism so out of touch with the British public, and his failure to tackle the anti-Semitism crisis so toxic, that he had doomed the party by leading it.

As is often the case in situations like this, the answer is somewhere in the middle. “In a shock move,” UK politics analyst Torsten Bell writes, “the ‘it was Brexit’ vs ‘it was Corbyn’ debate misses the blindingly obvious fact that it was both.”

It’s true that Labour was in a tough position on Brexit, needing to hold support in Leave constituencies and turn out Remain voters. The Tories, by contrast, figured out a way to win on a simple Leave message.

But it’s also clear that Labour did badly across the board: Jennings’s analysis finds that Labour lost support even in cities, a result that suggests that Corbyn’s personal unpopularity was depressing voters who should (on the Brexit theory) be supporting the more Remain-friendly party.

This early analysis suggests that Labour was simply unprepared to fight the battle on the terms the Tories were waging. Though Johnson was widely unpopular, his party also moved to the center on economic issues, a strategy that helped sideline Corbyn’s class-based appeal and emphasized the largely identity-based fight over Brexit. Brexit carried the day by appealing to British insularity and hostility to outsiders. Johnson mobilized voters who found this vision attractive, as well as those simply frustrated with the dragged-out Brexit process, and won a huge victory.

Due to a combination of legitimate strategic difficulty and the gross incompetence of its leader, Labour simply didn’t have an effective response. The question of how to fight back against the Tory embrace of right-wing populism, to mobilize a counter-movement in favor of a more inclusive British identity, is still an open one.

For those of us troubled by the illiberal drift among advanced democracies — not just Britain or Europe, but also the United States — these results cannot be taken as a good sign.

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https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiWmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnZveC5jb20vd29ybGQvMjAxOS8xMi8xMy8yMTAwNDc1NS91ay1lbGVjdGlvbi0yMDE5LWplcmVteS1jb3JieW4tbGFib3VyLWRlZmVhdNIBZ2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnZveC5jb20vcGxhdGZvcm0vYW1wL3dvcmxkLzIwMTkvMTIvMTMvMjEwMDQ3NTUvdWstZWxlY3Rpb24tMjAxOS1qZXJlbXktY29yYnluLWxhYm91ci1kZWZlYXQ?oc=5

2019-12-13 15:00:00Z
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