What this means is that the issue of Brexit has been settled for a generation. (That's about eighteen months if you live North of the border.) What will they all argue about now?
It seems that the Labour Party is going to be riven (at least for the three months that it will take them to coalesce jubilantly around a new leader) by the question of what is to blame for its ignominious defeat. The analysis from the Left (for how could it be otherwise) is that the party was effectively run down in the street: it had been minding its own business, embracing ideals that were being warmly endorsed by the population in general, when it was brutally mown down by the issue of Brexit.
Labour Centrists, on the other hand, argue that holding a Marxist rally in middle of the South Circular was asking for trouble in the first place. A muddled message on Brexit was as nothing to the suspicion with which Corbyn himself was viewed by “traditional Labour voters”.
There’s room for both sides to be correct.
The sunny days of Corbyn’s Indian Summer, when he gambolled at festivals in the company of gaggles of doe-eyed supporters, seemed already long past when this election was called. He had done little enough to earn their adulation in the first place and little enough to estrange it in the last two years. It was just gone.
Certainly there was still enthusiasm for Corbyn, but it was the grim resolve of Jonestown rather than the febrile tunnel vision of a popular mass movement. The “Youthquake” had moved on to Extinction Rebellion with a more direct means of expression than the quiet anonymity of the ballot box.
Boris’s advantage was not that he was easy to like but that he was difficult to hate. Many managed to do so but nowhere near enough. It’s difficult to associate the image of a racist, sexist hard-Right politician with the photo ops that he gave in a fishmarket or delivering milk. Boris’s lies were legion, but they appeared, somehow, to be little white lies.
Corbyn’s truths were also legion, but they were great big scary truths full of class envy & social division. There was much in them with which voters widely sympathise, but ideals such as Corbyn’s are perhaps best viewed through the prism of a more pragmatic leader.
Finally, a word about Jo Swinson, the “blink and you missed her” leader of the Liberal Democrats. She has never appeared before in these pages as a label, nor is she likely to do so in the future, but there was something bitterly unfair about her constituency defeat. Her candid & straightforward approach to politics was a refreshing alternative to the cynicism of the Right and the fanaticism of the Left. This is one nutshell, however, where the middle of the road is a bad place to be.
