Labour's loss this week

There will be a lot of analysis of Thursday's British election and varying and conflicting lessons drawn from it.

Here are two different perspectives from The Independent:

General election result: Nearly twice as many Labour voters defected over Jeremy Corbyn's leadership than party's Brexit stance, poll finds 12/13/2018

Jon Stone, General election: How Labour really lost seats in Leave-voting areas 12/13/2019:

... the story [of the election outcome] is one of a Tory surge, often sustained from an initial one in 2017, rather than a complete Labour collapse of anything other than extra voters gained in 2017 [compared to their votes in 2015]. In some cases, the Labour share is marginally lower than the historic average since 1997, but this is not a defining factor: in most places it is more or less the same. What’s changed is the Tories are well up.

If we look at the overall vote shares of the parties, this is actually fairly obvious. Labour seems to be heading for around 33 per cent of the vote ... not far down on what it won in 2005 when it won a majority (35 per cent) and better than it won in 2010 and 2015, but lower than 2017. But Boris Johnson’s Tories appear to be on course for a historically huge share of the vote.

There are some implications of this. One is that the idea that voters have somehow historically “abandoned Labour” in its traditional heartlands ... any more than they did in 2005, 2010, or 2015 –is not really correct. Rather, in most cases, a temporary boost that Jeremy Corbyn won in 2017 has unwound. More research will be needed to understand better why this happened in 2019 compared to 2017 – it may have been that negative stories about Jeremy Corbyn stuck more. But the fact that these losses are overwhelmingly in Leave areas, while Remain areas stood firm or even were added to Labour’s collection, suggests there is some kind of Brexit connection. Labour went into the election promising another referendum and the Tories hammered home the message that the party wanted to “block Brexit”. [my emphasis]

The exit polls indicating more Labour defectors citing Corbyn's leadership as a more important factor than the voting statistics Stone cites aren't necessarily incompatabile explanations. Given the Leave-related voting patterns, it's safe to assume that Leavers also had a low opinion of Jeremy Corbyn.

Labour voters were divided over Brexit in a way the Tory base was not. If Labour straight-up endorsed Leave, they had to worry about losing Remain voters. So they adopted a Mugwump position that they would hold another election on Brexit. And the result was that they notably bled Leave voters in some traditionally Labour districts. While the Tories got a large turnout with their pro-Brexit, nationalist position.

We can always fault the losing party for being insufficiently persuasive. Austrian political commentator Natascha Strobl had some impassioned thoughts in a German-language tweet thread in which she argues that Labour scattered its election pitch across a variety of themes, while the Tories pounded on the Brexit issue. But it's hard to see how Labour could have threaded the Brexit needle more successfully. (Or, in the case corporate Demcorats in America, blame on the Russians and whatever left-leaning politician they a re irritated about at the moment.)

And in America, the usual suspects were drawing the usual lessons:

One lesson from the UK: if the Democrats don't stop their hard-left slide, they'll suffer the same fate as Labour. If they don't move off their support for mass immigration, they're toast. Ditto the wokeness. Left Twitter is not reality.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) December 12, 2019

To me, this vote was an even more substantial endorsement of Brexit than the original referendum, which was non-binding and was a perfect vehicle for an "I'm feeling grumpy" protest vote. This one gives a clear parliamentary majority to a party that made immediate Brexit its central issue in the campaign.

That doesn't mean that Johnson's government can actually get Brexit accomplished. Actually leaving the EU without serious economic disruptions and internal consequences (Northern Ireland, Scotland) requires some serious political leadership, "serious" not being the first quality that comes to mind with Boris Johnson. Also, to get substantial beneficial concessions from the EU, the British Prime Minister would have to be willing to go down to the wire with the threat of a hard Brexit. Johnson hasn't yet shown he has the stomach for that.