I stayed up until about 4am watching the UK general election results, but due to xmas parties over the weekend after was not able to write down any thoughts until now.
I was expecting the Conservatives to be the largest party, but I was not expecting them to get a majority, let alone one of the size they did. At least with the earlier results it was a case of the Brexit Party tearing away something like 10 percentage-points from Labour, letting the Conservatives slip through on a maintained vote share, although some later gains required straight Conservative-Labour switches on a large scale. They targeted the Labour heartlands with a simple message, and it paid off. They now have five years to do what they like.
For Labour, this is worse than 1983. They tried to campaign on bread-and-butter issues but the Brexit fence-sitting left them exposed. Yet another tax-and-spend campaign just sounded like a broken record. Although I personally don’t buy the argument that Corbyn himself was toxic and for all I know this stuff about Russian influence could just be character assassination. However there are issues with a lot of the people within the Momentum movement that surrounds Corbyn, with anti-semitism allegedly cropping up all too often. They are realistically looking at a decade-long climb back to electability, and likely longer of the unions continue to call the shots.
While the LibDems did pick up a lot of votes in London and south-east England, it was not quite enough to translate into seats, and the absence of the Brexit party in itself probably saved the likes of Dominic Raab. People will point fingers are certain missteps but by modern standards at least they did not do anything particularly dodgy. I suspected Jo Swinson was going to lose her seat, but I thought that would be part of a clean-sweep by the SNP rather than just the one Scottish loss. The LibDems need to decide whether they really want to become a British equivalent of the German FDP, because doing so means they will likely become a London regionalist party.
The Greens did well in Bristol West but it was too much of a mountain for them to actually gain it. As with the independent Conservatives and other members of the remain alliance at the end of the day it is seats rather than votes that count.
When I saw the exit-poll prediction of 55 SNP seats it was clear that there were going to be strains on the union, although as it turned out the Scottish Conservatives hung onto half their seats and LibDems ended up evens. If Scotland really does want independence, I think they will have to riot to get it.
And finally there is the DUP who are utterly stuffed. They are coming to the harsh realisation that to Boris Johnson everyone is expendable, and that they are merely the first to be thrown under a bus. The DUP have now passed the peak of their influence, and losing a seat to Sinn Fein does not bode well for them ever reaching this high water mark again.