Before trying to examine the outcome of the 2019 general election, before any attempt to analyse the social complexities of the electorate that it reveals, it is important to understand three things. The first is that the UK has always been a multi-party democracy: it is NOT, like the US, an actual two-party system. Unlike other multi-party democracies it does not have a voting system that is designed to match the distribution of votes to the distribution of seats.
The second is that traditional social democratic parties have been in decline the world over. Almost everywhere where they were once strong, they have lost votes in two directions: to the nationalist right among ageing, post-industrial communities; to parties of the green new left among younger urban and professional-class voters. Indeed, arguably, from a long-term and genuinely international perspective, the real story of Corbynism may be that it managed to shore up and consolidate the latter part of Labour’s coalition where so many equivalent parties have failed to do so, with fatal consequences: from Pasok in Greece to the French Socialist Party (both of which saw support eventually collapse into single-figure percentages). By international standards, holding onto 32% of the vote is a pretty decent result for a party like Labour in 2019.
