I note that my post on Labour's broadband plans has reached a respectable 72 hits (not the largest for the year, but nor is it the smallest), so emboldened I guess I'll have a quick go at thoughts on Thursday's general election.
I may have given it away in the title of this post, but I'm not best pleased.
The Conservative party is in unassailable control of Parliament, to the point that it no longer needs its confidence and supply deal with Northern Ireland's DUP. The Liberal Democrats at their second-lowest level in their history, with their own leader, Jo Swinson, losing her seat in Scotland and being forced to resign. The Scottish National Party rules in most of Scotland, with Labour marginalized to a couple of constituencies but the Tories holding more seats in Scotland than them. And Labour is knocked out of a number of its heartlands in the industrial north and midlands by the Tories, as it looks for a new leader to replace the outgoing Jeremy Corbyn.
The SNP is talking about another independence referendum for Scotland, but in the meantime its presence in Westminster deprives Labour of a significant portion of its traditional power base - kind of like if California suddenly elected a whole bunch of third party candidates to its congressional delegation, knocking a hole in the national Democratic caucus.
For Labour the question remains of what to do next, and for starters, who to lead them in 2020. It may be reductive, but I see two major poles within the party: the Blairite wing that sees hewing rightward as the path to success, and the left Momentum wing that sprang up around Corbyn. Momentum will likely not tolerate a Blairite leader; the Blairites will be too scared of seeming leftwing to support a Momentum-approved leader. It's not unthinkable to imagine that the two split into separate parties and weaken Labour further.
(By the way, if I seem scathing of what I call the Blairite wing, it's because I am - he swept to power by being younger and hipper than John Major, admittedly not a difficult trick, but essentially moved the party rightward because he wasn't a natural Labourite, the same way JJ Abrams approached Star Trek as not a fan. He then led the country into an epochally unpopular war, did nothing to staunch the divisions between the Southeast and everywhere else, and his followers moved so far right that they let the Tories stake out ground on their own patch)
Without Scotland, though, the question of power remains academic. The SNP is a party of the left, and so, starting in 2015, they and Labour have duked it out for left voters there across three general elections and counting. But Labour comes second (presumably) because much of the Scottish electorate still hasn't forgiven them for siding with the Tories in the 2014 independence referendum.
As far as I can tell, the only way forward for the left in Britain is for the SNP to stand as a national party - but what relevance does its agenda have for voters in the Home Counties? Still, the UK could do worse than Nicola Sturgeon as PM.
I don't know if I'm qualified to talk about what went wrong with Labour's campaign, though I'll guess that it was a combination of undefined position on Brexit, personal animosity toward Corbyn (which is a shame as he always struck me as fundamentally honest and ethical - more so than Boris Johnson, though that's another quite low bar) and confusion over the party's platform. I addressed part of that in my post about the free broadband plan, but it does seem like the agenda wasn't very straightforward - you can bitch about modern elections being reduced to soundbites all you want but admittedly "Get Brexit done" is quite a bit snappier than Labour's "Time for Real Change".
Which itself isn't bad, but doesn't capture what was on basically everyone's mind.
The other question is, where does the UK go from here? If it leaves the EU as promised on 31 January, I'll need to see what happens to my relatives who live there, such as my sister and my cousin - will they be able to stay, or is the Home Office going to tell their respective employers to get all EU citizens off their books? It may seem fanciful, but this is exactly what happened to a Russian colleague in 2012-13, as companies were forced to reduce the number of non-EU workers they sponsored.
If they are allowed to stay, what services will they and my British friends have access to? Austerity seems to have lasted a lot longer in Britain than in the rest of Europe, presumably because the Tories since 2010 have been gutting public services and selling off as much as they could to business interests both inside and outside the country - this means more funding going toward London and the Southeast, and less to the rest of the country, thereby worsening the underlying condition that led to Brexit.
And as I put it back in August, kicking all the EU citizens out does nothing to lower house prices, because those (at least in the capital) are being driven up by rich Americans, Russians, Chinese, Middle Easterners and anyone else who has enough money that the government wants them. If this had been the case in 2001, when I first moved there and had maybe a couple thousand dollars to my name, they'd have shipped me back home at the first opportunity.
So I'm finding it hard to be sanguine about these results. We'll see more poverty, more homeless, more tragedies like Grenfell Tower, worse outcomes for the sick because of the dismantling of the NHS and increases in hate crimes and regular crimes. And who knows what terrorist plots will march on in the city thanks to the government's cuts in policing?
The UK will soldier on, as I've already said, but it'll be a smaller, meaner place.
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