Here we are again, another shock election result blindsiding the political and media establishment, making a mockery of everything we thought we knew about politics. The United Kingdom general election produced an extraordinary result, with Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister Theresa May failing to win a majority of members of parliament against arguably the weakest and most extreme Labour Party leader in British history.
As things stand, the Conservative Party are set to win 318 seats, down 12 from the 2015 election, even though they increased their share of the total vote by 5.5 percentage points to 42.4 percent. Labour gained 29 seats and added 9.5 percentage points to their vote share. May’s Conservatives made a significant comeback in Scotland but lost ground in England and Wales, both rich with pro-Brexit seats.
It is hard so soon after the vote to properly internalize the magnitude of May’s failure and Jeremy Corbyn’s success. Corbyn may not be prime minister any time soon, but he has exceeded all expectations while May cratered in spectacular fashion.
But what is even more striking than May’s failure to secure a Conservative majority is the total and utter analytical failure on the part of the U.K.’s political punditry class.
(Full disclosure: I was predicting a Conservative majority of 90-110 seats just 30 minutes before the exit poll.)
From left to right, political commentators had absolutely no idea what was happening. Originally, the commentariat was confident the Conservatives were heading for a landslide win. When the polls narrowed, they continued to predict a strong conservative majority. What we actually got was a hung parliament, with the Conservatives now reliant on the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland for support.
This is not the first time the U.K.’s professional pundit class has so massively misread the mood of the nation. In 2015, the vast majority of pundits predicted a hung parliament, what happened was a Conservative majority for the fist time since 1992. Similarly, most commentators thought Remain would win the Brexit referendum, but Leave won 52 to 48 percent. Those who ventured to write about U.S. politics thought Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in, but Trump is now the White House.
For nearly seven years, Britain’s commentariat has written extensively about the end of two-party politics. The 2017 General Election saw the smaller parties cannibalized by a re-united right and left.
Not only has the gaggle of columnists and pundits who shape so much of the U.K.’s political and policy conversation been wrong yet again, but this latest failure will prompt precisely no reflection on the part of those who attempt to “explain” politics to us.
On the day after the election, column inches were already being filled with assertions and half-baked analysis of why Corbyn did so well and May did so badly. One of my favorites so far is an article from the New Statesman titled, “No, a Labour leader different to Jeremy Corbyn would not have won.” A bold assertion not even 24 hours after a surprise election result.
The principle reason political commentators will fail to learn from their mistakes is the misguided belief that anyone is even capable of being an “expert” in politics. Dominic Cummings, the brains behind the successful Vote Leave Brexit campaign highlights the problem with “political expertise” in a lengthy post about why his campaign was successful:
Fields dominated by real expertise are distinguished by two features: 1) there is enough informational structure in the environment such that reliable predictions are possible despite the complexity and 2) there is effective feedback so learning is possible.
Neither condition applies generally to politics or the political media. In the most rigorous studies done, it has been shown that in general political experts are little better than the proverbial dart-throwing chimp and that those most confident in their big picture views and are most often on TV – people like Robert Peston.
The herd mentality among so-called political experts was painfully visible in the 2017 campaign. For my sins, I followed the political podcasts from the Guardian, The New Statesman, The Times and the Spectator throughout the election.
What was most striking about these programs was the almost identical analysis, with minor exceptions. When the Conservatives were riding high this was supposed to be like the 1983 election, when the far-left Labour leader Michael Foot drew huge crowds and enthusiasm but was ultimately crushed by Margaret Thatcher.
When the polls narrowed, the narrative changed to the 1987 analogy, when Labour leader Neil Kinnock had a good campaign by common consensus but the conservatives ultimately won a crushing victory.
Both these analogies bear no relationship to what actually happened. But commentators can continue to pontificate with an air of expertise because there is precisely no accountability mechanism for them being wrong.
Now the pundits are busily explaining the reasons for the result, which will just so happen to coincide with the views the pundit already had in the first place.
The U.K.’s election result has put an even greater cloud of uncertainty over the country’s economy, Brexit negotiations, and whether Prime Minister May will be able to cling onto power. So, with a shock result and political earthquake turning British politics upside down, what happens next?
The answer to that is this:
I have absolutely no idea, and neither does anybody else.
Guy Bentley (@gbentley1) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a consumer freedom research associate at the Reason Foundation and was previously a reporter for the Daily Caller. His opinions are his own.
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