On Thursday, the United Kingdom—in its third general election in the past five years—gave a large majority to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, all but assuring that the United Kingdom will leave the European Union in a matter of months. Johnson, who replaced Theresa May as the leader of the Conservative Party this past summer, was forced to call a vote because his narrow parliamentary majority was not sufficient for him to pass the Brexit deal he negotiated with Europe. The results will likely lead to a renewed independence push by pro-European Scottish nationalists. They have already caused a shakeup in the Labour Party, which has been led for the past four years by the leftist Jeremy Corbyn and had its worst election results in decades. On Friday, Corbyn said that he hoped to lead the Party during a period of “reflection” but would not do so in any future election. Corbyn, who ran on a platform of left-wing economic policies, such as nationalizing utilities and raising taxes on corporations, is distrusted by many voters, in part because of his reluctance to take a clear position on Brexit and recent incidents of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party.
To analyze the results, I spoke by phone with David Runciman, a professor of politics at Cambridge University, a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and the host of its “Talking Politics” podcast, and the author of the book “How Democracy Ends.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the roots of Boris Johnson’s remarkable political success, the future of Labour, and the election’s lessons for center-left parties around the world.
You wrote in an essay last month, “Because Corbyn has proved so intransigent while remaining so incompetent, all the cards keep falling Johnson’s way.” Is Corbyn’s leadership failure the main reason you think this election went the way it did?
Yep. I think there were two things going on here. It was clearly a Brexit election and clearly a Corbyn election. The Labour Party is going to gain some votes in some parts of the country. It is going to do O.K. in London, it is going to do O.K. in some university towns where Corbynism is popular. But Corbyn and Corbynism are catastrophes in a lot of traditional Labour seats that voted Leave. People will argue for a long time about whether Corbyn or Brexit takes a bigger share of the blame, but they go together, and the Corbyn project is done.
Corbyn is both a strong leftist and someone who basically hedged or triangulated on the single biggest issue of the campaign: Brexit. Do you view his political failure as being more about one of these things than the other?
I think that the hedge was a problem in the sense that something beats nothing in politics, and one party had a very clear position on Brexit, and one party had a much less clear position. But, more than that, I think the Labour position, for a lot of voters, meant more of the same, including another deal and another referendum. I think a lot of voters intuitively felt that that meant more confusion. When Theresa May last time tried to claim that she stood for something and Corbyn stood for confusion, people didn’t really buy it. People who were tempted to vote Labour thought the confusion was equally shared. This time, his position on Brexit just reinforced the idea that, if you wanted to know what would happen next, you had to vote Conservative.
And then there is also the fact that, since Brexit happened, Corbyn and the Labour Party have made a series of missteps. A lot of people are already saying that Theresa May’s deal could have passed if Labour M.P.s had backed it. That would have kept Theresa May in her post, and British politics would look very different. Corbyn never gave a lead on that. Corbyn was hedging it all the way along. There have been moments where the Conservative Party could have been boxed in, and now Johnson and the Conservative Party have broken through, and Corbyn carries a lot of responsibility for that.
Is there a specific thing you think he should have done?
There will be people who will say that he should have resisted the election. Who knows? I think, in hindsight, what we are going to see is that there were opportunities, and yet there is a feeling that, when we look at seats that voted Conservative, these are seats that voted Leave, and it was always going to be challenging for any Labour Party to know how to deal with those seats. But it is hard to imagine anyone doing it worse than Corbyn has done. All the evidence from people canvassing was that, in these seats, Corbyn’s name was being mentioned a lot, and a lot of traditional Labour voters had turned on him.
What is the profile of these voters?
Essentially, they are working-class voters. This is not unique to this country, and it is not unique to the election. [The economist] Thomas Piketty has made this point repeatedly, which is that the workers aren’t voting for the parties of the center-left—our party is called the Labour Party, but it is no longer the party of labor. It is the party of university graduates, of big cities, and of young people, and the other crucial thing that will emerge when people break down the vote in this election is that there is here, as there was in the Brexit vote and the Trump election, a big, big generational divide. Younger voters will still vote Labour, but we are learning with every one of these elections that younger voters will consistently be outvoted by people over the age of forty-five, and older voters in this election have gone overwhelmingly to the Conservatives, including older working-class voters.
Corbyn became more pro-Remain as the campaign went on. Should he have not done so and triangulated even more? Or do you view this election as essentially the same realignment based on education levels that we have seen over the past several years well beyond the United Kingdom, with not much to be done?
Education and age are the new divides, and you need to be a very skillful politician to triangulate. He doesn’t have those skills. I don’t think there is an extra level of triangulation he could have pulled off, because he is not a convincing triangulator, and that is another part of the problem here. He never really actually became more Remain. What he did was accept that his party was going to have to commit to a second referendum. The problem was that he didn’t say how he would go in that vote. I think people continued to suspect that, in his heart of hearts, he was fine with Brexit happening, but that then makes him seem even weaker.
What’s interesting about this election is that Corbyn is the same guy who ran against Theresa May, and people were gobsmacked on Election Night about how well he had done, picking up these seats that no one thought he could. And now here we are. He is still the same guy. He hasn’t changed much, and certainly the anti-Semitism charge has stuck much more, and it does seem that the Tories have hit home more on national-security questions. That seems to have made a difference. But he hasn’t changed in thirty years. What has changed is what the electorate thinks this election is about. And Johnson did have a stronger pitch than May did, not least that Johnson had a deal. And that deal will now pass. We are going to leave the European Union in six weeks. It is going to happen.
You said this means the end of the “Corbyn project.” Did you mean the Labour Party moving left on economics?
By the “Corbyn project,” I mean something more distinctive than that. I think the Party will continue to move left. Its constituency is clear now. It has a strong appeal with younger voters and, crucially, in London. That is the other thing about the Corbyn project—it was a London project. And it is still holding up in London. But you can’t win Britain from London. You can’t win England from London. So I think the move to the left probably is here to stay for a while, anyway, and the membership—which is still a large membership—is still, I think, committed to many of the ideas. But the Corbyn project and some of the people around Corbyn are still tainted by not just the charges of anti-Semitism but the catastrophe of this election. And so the next version of Labour will have to have a different feel to it. And it will have to have something to say to older voters, and it will have to have something to say to voters who live not just in cities but in towns. And you can’t do that from North London.
And you assume this means a different leader?
Yeah. Even in this campaign—it has been a Brexit campaign, and it is not at all clear that people are totally sold on a Johnson agenda. It is always said about Corbynism that many of the things he stood for are popular and have broad appeal. He found no way of communicating that appeal in electoral terms to older voters or voters in the North of England. The policies could appeal, but you need a different political skill set.
Does this election make you change the way in which you thought about Boris Johnson as a political figure?
Certainly, I am surprised by the scale of this. It is worth pointing out about Boris Johnson that, if you take a step back, even before tonight, he is an amazingly successful electoral politician. Unlike Tony Blair, who won the elections he was expected to win, Johnson won elections he was not expected to win. He became Mayor of London when people said he couldn’t, then he won the Brexit referendum, then he became leader of the Conservative Party when people said he couldn’t, and now he has done this. Not even Margaret Thatcher has that track record of confounding what people like me sometimes naïvely think. He has something, and part of it is courage. He took a chance on Brexit and took a chance on this election. We still don’t know what kind of Prime Minister he will be with the power he has. For now, he is the great winner in British politics.
Are you concerned that Boris Johnson poses a threat to British democracy?
I’m not super concerned, nor do I think Trump is the end of democracy, although I think Trump is more of a threat than Johnson is. Johnson cut some corners, to put it mildly, in trying to force this issue and force Brexit through. Now that he has the parliamentary authority to do it, he doesn’t need to cut corners and can do it the conventional way, the way that Blair and Thatcher ruled, which is that his party will do what he tells them. That’s our version of democracy, but we have lost sight of it because we haven’t had a party with a large parliamentary majority since Blair in 2005. I don’t think Johnson is a firebrand and a wrecker in that sense. But it is a big problem with the British system that, if you give a Prime Minister a big parliamentary majority, there are very few limits on his power—especially in this case, because the Party has been purged of its dissidents, so this is a Johnson party. It is still democracy, but where the opposition is going to come from, I am not sure.
Johnson ran a campaign that stepped away from the austerity that his party had pursued for much of the decade and promised increased spending. Is your sense that Johnson will change the Tory Party, or that, like a lot of populists, he understood that these promises were popular but will govern like we would expect him to?
I don’t think he is going to go back to austerity and fiscal discipline. I think he is instinctively a deregulator. He and the people around him have some quite close connections to the think tanks in your country that push a deregulatory agenda, which is different from austerity. On the other hand, he is winning seats that are made up of people who are not just working class, but many of them are dependent on welfare and living fairly precarious lives. And, though he doesn’t need to have another election for five years if he doesn’t want one, the people who have been elected in these constituencies will remind him that that is the new Conservative base. He will spend some money on welfare, and he will also deregulate, and part of the Brexit project is getting out of regulations.
Once Brexit occurs, how much will that settle the issue of Europe, and how much will a pro-European agenda be a feature of left-liberal politics going forward?
The first stage of Brexit will be leaving the institutions, and then the future of the economic relationship and trade relationship will have to be negotiated, and that will be another huge fight. Johnson will be under pressure from some people in his party for a harder break, and from others who will want to make sure it doesn’t damage these new constituencies in industrial areas. I think it will be hard for the main party of the left to become a Go Back In party. It will be too soon for that. A lot will happen in European politics, too. We are not the only country where a lot is up in the air. Before the next British general election, Europe will have changed Europe, too. And Johnson is going to be a dominant figure in European politics, too. They now look at a politician who is more secure than any of they are.
What is this likely to mean for the future of Scotland?
It looks like the Scottish National Party has won almost every seat in Scotland, which would be a remarkable thing. The map will be a very conservative England with a Labour London, and then Scotland will be another country completely. The showdown that is coming is the demand of the Scottish nationalists for another independence referendum, and Johnson having said he would refuse. Both sides have been strengthened by the result, and that will be a massive fight, and I can’t tell you how it will play. I suspect that, in twelve months’ time, that will be as big a fight as Brexit.
One of the remarkable things about this result is that it is incredibly hard to win a majority at all in British politics, because Scotland has gone [to the S.N.P.]. Now you have to win a majority without any chance of winning more than a couple seats in Scotland. There is no one who has done this. Even when Thatcher was winning big majorities and struggling in Scotland, she still managed to win some seats in Scotland. It looks like Johnson is winning big without Scotland.
I don’t want to read this all through an American lens, but there have been a ton of Johnson and Trump comparisons. And I do find it shocking how well Johnson did. The Conservatives have presided over a circus these past few years, and a bad economy, and they are still going to win a huge majority of seats. Trump is presiding over a good economy and has very little chance of getting a plurality of votes.
I will say a few things on that, and I am really interested in this transatlantic comparison. I think the economic conditions are different in 2019 than they were in 2017. May called an election when wages were falling, and you should never do that. Wages have been rising for a while, although not dramatically. That makes a huge difference. The economy is not going like the American economy is, but in some ways it is in slightly better shape than it was a couple years ago. The Tories are getting a plurality, but less than Trump. Blair won a huge majority of seats on about thirty-five per cent of the vote.
Right, I meant that Trump wasn’t going to win a huge plurality of the popular vote, as Johnson will.
I take your point, and the Electoral College has its own quirks, too. You can tell me the extent to which people in the Democratic Party have been looking at Corbyn as a bellwether, and after tonight it doesn’t look good. The central demographic fact of Western democracy is that there aren’t enough young people, and whoever is taking on Trump needs to focus on the crucial fact that we are the first societies in human history where the old outnumber the young. There are lots of different ways to appeal across generations, but at the moment these kinds of projects do not look as though they have done so successfully, and that would be one of my takeaways from this result. Corbyn is different from [Bernie] Sanders in lots of ways, and tainted in lots of ways, not the least of which is that he has been the leader of an opposition that has to do real politics in Parliament, and he has struggled.
People will say that this shows what will happen to Sanders. I wouldn’t buy that for a minute. But there are some broader lessons, and I think the generation divide and the educational divide are the new divides, and they play out geographically, because of where college towns are and where older and younger people tend to live. The left has got to bridge those divides or the left is going to lose, because there are more old people and people who haven’t been to college.
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How Boris Johnson’s Brexit Won - The New Yorker
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