The British election results are in, and it’s a storming victory for Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party. A 79-seat majority is their best performance since 1987 with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and the Labour Party seat tally is the worst since 1935. But the real winner here is Brexit — it’s almost certainly going to happen, and quickly.
English politics has, for decades, run on the standard left-right differentiations. Markets and capitalism on one side, and a more inclusive social democracy shading into actual socialism on the other. The usual social attitudes were attached, although perhaps with less vehemence than the American norm. The Right was apparently more in favor of families and such conservative issues, the Left talking more about race, gender, homosexuality, and the like.
There was one issue that ran on entirely separate lines as those typical divides and differences: Brexit. I’m hugely biased on the issue, having worked and stood for a party that shouted against the European Union very loudly. Since the issue didn’t fit into the normal divides, a new party, the U.K. Independence Party was born to advocate for leaving the EU.
Largely, and not exclusively or entirely, the support for leaving came from a substantial part of the traditional right-wing vote plus a specific piece of the bedrock support of the left-wing Labour Party. The working classes of the old industrial cities (the U.K. equivalent of the American Rust Belt) were tribal and traditional Labour voters. There was simply nothing that would persuade them to vote for a Conservative – especially after the glee with which Thatcher aided the shut down of those industries and mines in the 1980s. That’s not an entirely accurate description of what was done, but it’s the way most thought it had been, which is what is important in matters of political allegiance.
But when we had that referendum on whether to leave the EU, we found that this very urban proletariat was significantly in favor of leaving. This is where the collapse of the Labour Party comes from. The party was much more concerned with those more metropolitan concerns of the fashionable left plus the illusion that the EU itself was going to be the saving grace.
Thus in the most recent election, we had the Labour Party running on a platform of remain in the EU, or at least think about it all again, or perhaps only leaving a little bit (the muddled plan to renegotiate, have a referendum, and then remain didn’t help) while the traditional hardcore Labour voters wanted out. Swathes of those northern industrial seats went Conservative – something that no one ever thought they’d see. That wouldn’t have happened without this being an election about Brexit instead of the usual left/right battles.
The metropolitan Labour Party lost contact with, perhaps stopped listening to, that bedrock vote. There was an issue large enough that people would change those tribal votes. It’s not all that different from the manner that Trump won those union votes out in flyover country.
In English terms, the change has been extraordinary. A Conservative elected to represent Bolsover, as has just happened, is as if Washington, D.C., elected a white Republican as mayor.
What’s going to happen now is that Johnson has a sufficient majority to govern for the next few years. Surely Brexit is actually going to happen next month, as promised. The deal that eventually gets negotiated over trade will be made of sterner stuff than has seemed likely these past few years.
It’s entirely open to people to argue that leaving the EU is a bad idea, but not actually going just isn’t politically acceptable anymore. We’ve had a referendum, now a general election, based upon the question, both won by those who said: “Let’s get out.” So, we are.
Brexit is about to happen, the United Kingdom is leaving the EU. Huzzah and hurrah and all that. My specific political party (now called the Brexit Party) didn’t win a single seat, and only ever won one in all its years of existence. But we have actually won the defining question of the political era, and will soon be waving bye-bye to the EU.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.