Tagged with General Election 2017

General Election 2017: For the many, not the few

The British general election has produced an impressive list of casualties.  Theresa May may survive for the time being but her gamble on a snap election so as to increase her majority – and her authority, especially in the forthcoming Brexit talks – has spectacularly misfired.  Even with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland, it seems unlikely that she or her government will survive a full further term.

Other casualties were even less expected.  The Scottish National Party’s losses seem to have put paid to any talk of a second referendum on Scottish independence. And the loss by Nick Clegg of his seat in the House of Commons demonstrates the price that has been paid by the Liberal Democrats for the coalition arrangement Clegg took them into with the Tories. Continue reading →

Two key reasons for Corbyn’s stunning advance

This post first appeared on Socialist Economic Bulletin.

Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership the Labour Party has staged a stunning revival, prevented Theresa May achieving a landslide which she would have claimed as a mandate for ‘Hard Brexit’ and has caused a crisis of Tory government which will make it harder to make new cuts in public spending, apart from rising inflation. None of Corbyn’s opponents could have possibly achieved that outcome.

This point can be factually established in two ways. First, there is the record of the election campaign itself. None of Jeremy Corbyn’s internal or external opponents would have conducted anything like the same campaign or written anything similar to the manifesto that was produced. On the contrary, the tactic of Corbyn’s opponents was to ‘give him enough rope to hang himself’, believing that his programme would prove massively unpopular. Continue reading →

A nation divided

The June 2017 general election will be remembered as an occasion where the political map of the UK was dramatically and unexpectedly redrawn. This was the case no more than in Scotland where the outcome indicates the birth of a three-party system. The major headline was the SNP losing its hegemonic status, going from 56 to ‘only’ 35 — still a majority of Scotland’s 59 seats. These setbacks were compounded by the loss of nearly 500,000 votes, with the SNP total vote falling from over 1.45 million to under 980,000. This is partly explained by a decline in turnout, from 71% to 66%. Major losses sustained by the SNP to both Conservatives and Labour will have profound long-term significance. The Tories gained over 320,000 votes and increased their number of seats from 1 to 13. On the other hand, the number of votes for the Labour Party only increased by around 10,000 to a total of 717,000, but this secured an additional 6 seats. These results majorly alter perceptions of the 2015 result as a generational shift, revealing the fluid nature of Scottish politics and that the forward march of political nationalism in recent decades could in fact be halting.[1] Continue reading →

Reflections on the General Election in Scotland

After last nights results, pundits from across the political spectrum will today be racing to produce their analysis. In that vein, here’s mine: Scotland last night represented a victory of sorts for Labour. It was a vindication for the left of the party and in particular the Campaign for Socialism.

The result means the decline of cross class politics in this country. Firstly, it’s prudent to address the simple statistics for Labour in Scotland. Before this election many outside the party, and an alarming number of voices within Bath Street, predicted another poor performance for Scottish Labour. Iain Murray represented our best (and perhaps only) hope as a staunch unionist fighting back against an evil Scottish National Party in middle class Morningside. Instead, last night Labour gained six former industrial constituencies across Scotland, electing fantastic representatives to a parliament with an increased voice and mandate for Jeremy Corbyn. Perhaps most notably, the constituencies where Labour gained were not those associated with staunch Unionism; Glasgow North East and Coatbridge and Chryston were in fact within the ‘Yes’ voting areas of Glasgow and North Lanarkshire in the 2014 independence referendum. Continue reading →

Labour and 21st century class politics

It’s taken me almost a week to write about Labour’s result, that’s how shocked I was. Just as that exit poll plunged millions of Labour supporters into gloomy depression in 2015, the one from last Thursday was an occasion of such jubilation that it will live on in the party’s collective memory forever. I know it’s been said, but it should always be said: we have not seen such an upset since 1945, we have never seen a turnaround of its like in such a short period of time, nor have we seen a politician with such abysmal ratings rise as quickly in the public’s estimation. Labour did not win the election, but that banal statement reminds us the formalities of official politics cannot grasp the significance of what has happened. Continue reading →