itemprop=description content=‘NOBODY mention 2017” has become an unwritten rule of British politics. The explanation isn’t com-plicated: 2017 was a General Election which…
‘NOBODY mention 2017” has become an unwritten rule of British politics. The explanation isn’t com-plicated: 2017 was a General Election which – for very different reasons – all our political parties now feel uncomfortable remembering, given its compromises, its setbacks and the challenges it posed to all the main players’ understandings of their appeal and their support.
Before devolution, the SNP used to dub Scottish Labour MPs “the Feeble Fifty”. Beneath the sense of displaced jubilation, this historical jibe ought to have prompted reflection on what this new, necessarily feeble fifty were supposed to achieve having annexed the LibDems’ old corner of the But 2017 showed the electoral record isn’t quite so straightforward. Corbyn won more votes in 2017 than Gordon Brown did in 2010, or Blair in 2005 and 2001. The “things can only get better” landslide in 1997 alone recorded a higher popular vote.election as the best result the party had achieved in years – scrubbing out the successes of 2017 amid the authorised version that the Corbyn experiment must be understood as an unmitigated failure from start to finish.
THIS kind of recrimination has a real toxicity to it – pretending there are easy solutions where none are to be found, criticising people’s motives and convictions as if all the practical challenges would suddenly fall away if the right people were put in charge. Spoilers: they won’t. Old timers who left their fingerprints all over the failed 2014 campaign might try learning a little modesty.
The issue of tactical voting is also interesting. The Tory vote in Rutherglen shrunk to 3.9% – despite efforts from some curious sources to present the Conservative candidate as the salt-of-the-earth working-class representative the constituency was looking for. Do Tory Unionists now hate the SNP sufficiently to vote for anyone in a position to beat them?
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