If I didn’t know where to start writing a blog about a Prime Minister hiding in a fridge I certainly don’t know where to start with a blog about that same Prime Minister winning a majority of almost 80 seats in the General Election. Yet somehow startlingly, chillingly, that is exactly what has taken place.
The whole situation defies belief and is, from that standpoint, almost impossible to analyse. It’s the morning after the night before so emotions are still running a little high, but I have not felt this negatively about British politics since I became old enough to vote. To give you an idea of how long ago that was the first General Election I was eligible to vote in was in 1997.
How could Britain do it? How could they vote so overwhelmingly to elect a man who not only hides in fridges to avoid interviews but also openly uses racist, homophobic and Islamophobic language and tells lies at an extraordinary rate? This is where we are now. Our politics is so broken that Johnson was viewed as the least worst option. Unfathomably there are people who call themselves centrist, even traditional Labour supporters, celebrating the prospect of another five years of austerity. Another five years of the continued deliberate underfunding and possible sale of the NHS. Another five years in which a further shift to the right and an anti-immigrant agenda is inevitable.
I’m not really a fan of Jeremy Corbyn. The right wing media will always be out to destroy a Labour leader so the terrible coverage he received was never enough in itself to produce this result. There had to be something else about him that didn’t impress the electorate. I can see why there is mistrust of him. There’s a doggedness about him that can be interpreted as arrogance. He is single minded, unwilling to deviate an inch from his course despite his unpopularity of which he must have been aware. I can’t go on social media without someone accusing him of being antisemitic. Do we really believe that the legions of media experts and image consultants who work in politics hadn’t noticed this perception and pointed it out to him? Why did they do so little to dampen it? No smoke?
I have never heard Corbyn say anything that could be considered antisemitic but the allegations are so widespread that they had to be dealt with regardless. That hasn’t happened. Even I as a Labour voter cannot be sure that he doesn’t hold those views. It’s fair to suggest that he hasn’t done enough to make those doubts go away. That cloud hangs over him to the extent where I can see why a lot of people have chosen not to vote Labour.
Here’s what I don’t get. In the red corner you have a man tainted by the whiff, the suspicion of these prejudices. But over in the blue corner you have Johnson, an openly racist, homophobic, Islamophobic miscreant. If we accept that they both have unsavoury prejudices why is Johnson’s bigotry more palatable than Corbyn’s? The statistical evidence shows that this result is not merely the product of Labour supporters abstaining from backing a man that they believe is antisemitic. In many of the key constituencies that changed hands the Labour vote compares favourably in terms of the actual numbers of votes cast with that of most General Elections since 1997. The result has come from a surge in Tory votes in these areas. There is actually an appetite now for right wing policy.
Of course Brexit is the variable which offers both a sinister explanation for that appetite but also a slither of hope for Labour. The failure to leave the EU since the 2016 referendum has been the biggest and often the only issue for some voters during this campaign. It is not by accident that Sky billed their coverage using the phrase ‘The Brexit Election’. There will be those who voted Tory simply on account of Johnson’s much repeated promise to Get Brexit Done. On the rare occasions that Johnson did turn up in front of the cameras he repeated this three-word mantra to the point where it became a parody. Whether discussing health, education, transport or changes to how we use VAR Johnson would always drag the conversation back to Brexit. He reinforced the message that he was the only leader of the three main parties guaranteeing Brexit. Labour offered a referendum on a newly negotiated deal with an option to remain while the Lib-Dems were totally committed to revoking Article 50 and remaining in the EU.
The trouble with Johnson’s position on Brexit is that it was and is another lie. Just like he will not recruit another 50,000 NHS staff, just like the 20,000 more police officers he pledged are the same 20,000 officers that his party’s austerity agenda took away, so he cannot just Get Brexit Done by the end of January. His so-called ‘oven ready’ deal requires much more negotiation to determine the UK’s trade relationship with Europe and any alternative deal with the USA could take years. In all of that delicate negotiating the futures of both the NHS and the peace in Northern Ireland could be frittered away or used as bargaining chips. This is the cluster-fuck we have allowed.
The good news is that even if voters believed him this time around (and why would they when he won’t even tell us how many children he has?) their support may be a one-off. The hard of thinking complained that Corbyn’s Brexit policy wasn’t clear but what they meant by that is that it wasn’t quite Brexit-y enough to reflect the 2016 result. It’s not difficult to understand the concept of a renegotiation within three months and a referendum within six. There was no confusion. Voters understood that fully. They just weren’t happy with it. It may be that Labour are being punished for that and that their support will return when EU membership is not the first item on the electorate’s agenda. Whenever that might be.
By then of course we will likely be out one way or the other. That is unless the notoriously duplicitous Johnson changes his mind again. If that happens there will be absolute scenes when all those people who flipped for him, who prostituted their morals on the altar of Brexit, get wind of it. But it could happen. The Prime Minister has written lengthy arguments for and against EU membership over the last few years. He’s a journalist. That’s what he does. He’s good at it. If he has problems securing the Brexit he wants he could just turn on the mumbling clown persona again, find someone else to blame and convince people who should be ideologically opposed to him that he’s on their side and will fix it.
Much also depends on how Labour respond to what is looking like their worst defeat since before the Second World War. Corbyn has not yet resigned even though he should have done so after losing to Theresa May in 2017. In losing to Johnson he has surpassed himself in the field of proving oneself incapable of electability. He has at least pledged that he will not contest the next General Election. So that’s something. The fact staring everybody in the face, and that Labour have failed to realise since Tony Blair came to power 22 years ago, is that the majority of voters occupy the centre ground.
If you can win the battle for the support of voters who are not tribally attached to one of the three main parties you usually put yourself in a position to win. If Brexit has dominated this result then the centre ground will continue to be crucial once EU concerns are out of the way. Many centrists have already acknowledged this and called for a Keir Starmer type figure to drag Labour back from its left edge. What they have not explained satisfactorily is why, if they are centrists unwilling to vote for the extremist Corbyn, did they choose to lend their vote to the extremist Johnson? It seems we can turn a blind eye to some forms of prejudice if we believe it will produce the Brexit we have all obsessed over since the referendum.
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