by At midnight on Thursday I tuned in to Radio 5 Live for the exit poll. I’d expected a Conservative majority of 50 to 60, but as Big Ben struck ten and the bells of Catedrala Mitropolitană struck twelve, I thought, I bet it’s 100. The projection, that the Tories would fail to win a majority at all, took just about everybody by surprise. That can’t be right, can it? The initial handful of declarations in the North-East did cast some doubt on the predicted seat totals, but they ended up being pretty much bang on. The Tories finished on 318 seats, eight short of an overall majority, and they now have to rely on the DUP, a party from Northern Ireland. And just who are the DUP? The U stands for Unionist, so they want to remain part of the UK (the opposite of Sinn Féin, who don’t even take their seats in parliament). They have strong Protestant links, they’re anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, anti-climate-change, and seemingly anti the planet being more than 10,000 years old. Obviously they’re just what Britain needs right now.
But I must admit I was pretty happy with the results. I had high hopes for Theresa May when she became PM last July, but she’s turned out to be hopeless. She speaks only in soundbites, she’s wooden, she lacks warmth and a personality that people can relate to. All of those frailties became glaringly obvious during her awful campaign. May kept repeating her “strong and stable” mantra. Did she borrow that from John Key, I wonder? (Although he said “shtrong and stable”.) One journalist branded her “weak and wobbly” which was closer to the truth. She’s in the wrong job.
As usual in recent times, the Tories neglected the young, which in their eyes are anybody under about 45, but this time they managed to piss off older people too with their “dementia tax” and removal of winter fuel payments to pensioners. They also wanted to bring back fox hunting. Seriously? On the other side Jeremy Corbyn, who had been viewed as little more than a joke by people across the political spectrum, ran a good campaign. He looked comfortable in his own skin, he was approachable, he actually looked like he gave a shit about people. As a result, turnout among under-35s was up sharply, and they voted in large numbers for Labour.
May called the snap election because she thought the Tories would win a stonking great majority and they’d be able to ram through a hard Brexit and whatever else they wanted. Her arrogance backfired spectacularly; she has been greatly weakened. For all of us who dream of a fairer society in Britain and elsewhere, there’s still a long way to go – the Tories got 43% of the vote across Britain after all – but this is a good start.
Between them the Conservatives and Labour polled in the low eighties, so this really was a return to two-party politics which the awful first-past-the-post system encourages. It would be fantastic if some sort of PR could be introduced (New Zealand-style MMP would work well), but I’m not holding my breath. John Cleese tweeted that he wouldn’t vote at all because he lived in Kensington, a safe Tory seat. In the event Kensington was the very last seat to declare following multiple recounts, and Labour scored a major upset with a razor-thin 20-vote win. It goes to show you never can tell.
