Opinion
General
election 2019
If the exit
poll is right, this election will transform British politics
Martin
Kettle
It looks
like a triumph for Boris Johnson, and an epochal collapse for Jeremy Corbyn’s
Labour
General
election 2019 – live news
@martinkettle
Thu 12 Dec
2019 22.41 GMTLast modified on Thu 12 Dec 2019 23.20 GMT
For the
last four UK general elections, bar 2015, the 10pm exit poll on election day
has been almost exactly correct, even if sometimes the predictions have been a
shock to many experts. So the likelihood is that the pollsters have got it right
again in 2019. But whereas in 2017 their correct prediction of a hung
parliament guaranteed a embattled legislature, the 2019 prediction may even
transform British politics.
The Jeremy Corbyn project has taken what is
surely a terminal beating
This election
looks to be a triumph for the Conservatives under Boris Johnson. Their strategy
of calling an early election and their campaign and messaging tactics during
the last few weeks has been vindicated, with a predicted 368 seats in the new
parliament, a majority of 86 over all other parties, and an incontrovertible
mandate to take the UK out of the European Union in January.
If the exit
poll is even broadly right, the message for the Tory party is of an historic
recovery after the humiliations of the New Labour era. It transforms all recent
analysis of the party’s place in UK politics, reuniting it with its reputation
as the most resilient and successful election-winning party in Europe. The
party has not won a comfortable working majority since 1987. A majority of 86
would mean Johnson can govern for a full five-year term, even though his
promise to repeal the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act means he is likely not to take
the country into another December election in 2024.
The victory
is undeniably Johnson’s. A year ago he was on the backbenches. A majority of
Tory MPs did not want him as their leader in the summer. Now he is the master
of the British political scene, and will be able to pick his own cabinet,
demand his MPs’ backing for his Brexit strategy (which may differ significantly
from the one he has led his party to expect). He now has little reason to worry
about Nigel Farage’s Brexit party either.
The
question is whether this apparently emphatic victory is about “getting Brexit
done” or whether it is a wider endorsement of Johnsonian Conservatism. The
night’s detailed results will do much to supply the answer to this question.
But if this is a Brexit victory, it may – possibly – prove in the end to be
pyrrhic. If Johnson delivers Brexit and the Labour party reorganises, their
position may prove a more fragile one than it seems immediately.
The second
huge message of this election is that the Scottish National party has received
a mandate – with a projected 55 seats in Scotland – to press for a second
referendum on independence. Johnson has made clear he will not do what David
Cameron did and concede a second indyref poll. His mandate is to defy the SNP.
But the SNP has been prepared for this fight for months. The confrontation in
Scotland will be at the very top of the political agenda now.
The final
big message is Labour’s epochal collapse. Labour has lost four general
elections in a row. Its projected 191 seats is its lowest in modern times. The
Jeremy Corbyn project has taken what is surely a terminal beating. But the
Liberal Democrats have not prospered at Labour’s expense. That achievement
belongs to the Tories. Corbynites will doubtless blame everyone but themselves
for this total disaster. But the question on the left of British politics is
now the one that was embodied in the title of a book published after the last
time Labour lost four elections in a row in 1992. The title was: Labour’s Last
Chance? And one of the editors was John Curtice, whose exit poll this evening
now poses that self-same question once again, nearly 30 years on.
• Martin
Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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