I wrote this essay in March 2019, in the midst of the European election campaigns. The rise of the far right was largely blocked or reversed around the continent – with the exception of the UK. This piece was published in September, in the book “Corbynism From Below”. It has not previously appeared on the internet. In this moment after the landslide, when many in Britain are despairing, it sharpens grief over the road not taken. But it may also help to resurrect the manifold reasons for hope, which are always to be found more in movements than in men.
Our final Datapraxis report on the 2019 UK general election, “Tory Landslide, Progressives Split”, combined over half a million polling responses during the campaign with cutting-edge data modelling. We hoped and worked for a better outcome, but we were not surprised by this disaster. We anatomised how the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn crashed to its worst result since 1935, how liberals and Remainers’ hubris became their undoing, and how Britain’s first modern national-populist government under Boris Johnson achieved their devastating victory.
