There was something gut-punching about the election results on Thursday night that went deeper than mere disappointment; something to do with a sense of having lived through years of political shape-shifting, as tiring as they were thrilling, only to see institutional power crystallise for the final time into its worst iteration yet. All that is nonsense, of course. A great many things have churned up the political landscape over the past decade, and none of them have disappeared. Our current era of instability will continue and intensify, with all the hope and horror that entails. It’s true that the scale of this defeat lent it an amorphous quality, capable of seeping forward and pervading all thoughts of the future. In its immediate aftermath, the outcome felt like forever. But it’s not forever, and the future is still up for grabs. This is an early, messy attempt to work out how, and why.
What follows is ridiculously incomplete. Scrawling it down has been more about personal catharsis than anything else — a way of sorting through all the noise of the past few days, and navigating the pain that’s accompanied it. But I also wanted to collect in one place some of the smarter contributions I’ve come across regarding where Labour and the left goes from here, especially when they complement stuff I’ve been working on myself in recent years, stuff which has been on my mind a lot since the exit poll was first announced. I’m hoping that it will help me maintain some perspective and clarity in the hard weeks, months and years to come. If it’s vaguely useful to anyone else, then all the better.
Is it too late now to say sorry?
In the past, I’ve written much about those who got their election predictions wrong and displayed little intellectual curiosity as to the causes. Well, I got this one wrong, and the least I can do is to hold my hand up in apology and try to avoid the latter fate. For various reasons, some to do with polling methodology and parliamentary arithmetic, others long-term and structural, I thought that there was a real, plausible possibility of this election producing a hung parliament, and that the difference between the Labour and Conservative vote share would be smaller than the polls suggested. In the end, much of that analysis proved correct: the trend of younger people, regardless of profession, responding to the growing normalisation of precarity in their lives by shifting towards Labour persisted, as did the associated remaking of political geography in major urban and suburban areas, particularly in outer London, due to those same younger people being priced out of rapidly-gentrifying inner-cities. The polls did narrow in the last few days as support for smaller parties drained away, and sure enough Labour took Putney, cut Iain Duncan Smith’s Chingford and Woodford Green majority in half, and cemented their hold in erstwhile Tory strongholds like Enfield Southgate, Battersea and Canterbury.
