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The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Friday, December 20, 2019

A Fourth Labour Loss

So Labour lost – and badly!
Seats in the north of the country which had been Labour for a hundred years turned Conservative.
The Conservatives now have a clear, governing majority of 66 seats.
Brexit can and will proceed.

Even after a week I have no stomach for the centrist political analyses of the whys and wherefors. I go to the few people I trust – particularly Paul Mason who, instead of dashing off an immediate post-mortem, took the trouble to prepare a special 23 page folder called After Corbynism – where next for Labour?

Labour gained just 32% of the popular vote and lost 42 seats. Only one of the Tory held seats we targeted in southern England fell to us; we lost heavily in the former-industrial towns of the North and Midlands of England, plus 6 out of our 7 seats in Scotland.

The simplistic narrative says: "we lost because our Brexit position alienated the working class". If we examine the evidence, rather than the media rhetoric, the defeat is the story of two swings:
• by Labour voters in small-town England towards the Tories
• and a bigger swing by Labour voters to the Libdems, SNP and Greens.

The stark fact is that Labour lost 2.5 million votes while the Tories and Brexit party combined picked up just 335,000 votes.

Table 1: party voting 2017 and 2019

2017
2019
Gain
Share

Seats
CONSERVATIVE
13,636,684
13,941,200
304,516
43.6

364
LABOUR
12,877,918
10,292,054
-2,585,864
32.2

203
SNP
977,568
1,242,372
264,804
3.9
48
LIBDEMS
2,371,861
3,675,342
1,303,481
11.5
11
Brexit
594,068
624,303
30,235
2.0
-
GREEN

864,743
339,000

1
PLAID

153,265


4
Alliance (NI)




1
DUP (N Ireland)

244,127


8
Sinn Fein (NI)

181,853


7 (they never sit)
SDL (NI)

118,737


2
Where did the rest of the Labour vote go? Take a glance at Table 1 (above) and it's clear. Allowing for the fact that some Tories switched to the Libdems, the polling analyst firm Datapraxis calulates that a maximum of 800,000 Labour voters switched to the Tories.
Meanwhile the Libdems gained at least 1.1 million votes from Labour, the Greens 339,000 and the SNP a quarter of a million.
Labour, in short, lost nearly twice as many votes to progressive pro-Remain parties as it did to the parties of Brexit and racism.
Once Farage stood down in 319 seats, the only thing that could have stemmed the Tory advance was (a) an electoral pact between progressive parties, (b) an unprecedented turnout by young voters, or (c) tactical voting, seat by seat, by three out of every four pro-Remain voters.
Young voters did turn out in large numbers for Labour and other progressive parties: 56% of under 24s voted Labour and 55% of 24-35 year olds.Tactical voting happened among progressives but not on the scale needed. In fact in numerous key seats - Stroud, Kensington, Chingford - votes for the so-called "Remain Alliance" of Greens and Libdems handed victory to the Tories. ….We were facing an alliance of the right and far right, with one relentless message. But the progressive parties refused any kind of tactical unity and fought each other instead.

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