Corbyn sends May reeling as young voters flex muscles
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Loading... - Havel Romero
- 09 Jun 2020
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Jeremy Corbyn has defied the pundits and the pollsters to restore the Labour party as a serious electoral force and deliver a devastating blow to Theresa May’s political authority.
This remarkable election saw a surge in both Conservative and Labour votes as first-past-the-post amplified the return of the two-party system after an absence of nearly 20 years.
Young people have spoken. And they said Jeremy Corbyn
More than anything else it was a night in which Britain’s younger generation flexed their political muscles to real effect for the first time.
Despite their calamitous campaign, the Conservatives increased their share of the vote to 42% – up five points since 2015 – which in any other election in the past three decades would have been enough to build a commanding majority.
But Corbyn’s Labour outperformed even that achievement as a unique alliance of enthused younger voters and previous non-voters combined with older austerity-hit anti-establishment Ukippers to deliver a 10-point rise in Labour’s vote compared with two years ago, to 40%. This is just below the 41% secured by Tony Blair in his 2001 landslide victory.
The really unexpected factor proved to be the large share of the 4 million Ukippers who backed Labour this time. The local elections in May had seemed to confirm Boris Johnson’s claim that they were “a lost tribe of Tory voters”. But Thursday night showed that was not the case.
There were fears during the campaign that the Corbyn surge, fuelled by big Labour leads among voters under 35, would simply stack up bigger majorities in the party’s safe seats. But Labour made gains across the country in unexpected places such as Canterbury, Plymouth and Ipswich, while the Tories saw their more modest but still substantial increase in support concentrated largely in the seats they already held.
The national swing from Conservatives to Labour was 1.8% but there was a sharp Brexit variation between remain and leave seats.
The results show an 8% swing from Conservatives to Labour in those seats that voted remain in last year’s referendum. In seats that voted leave there was a 1% swing from Labour to the Conservatives. It appears that Corbyn’s fudged Brexit stance proved highly efficient in minimising defections among leave voters while still proving positive enough for unhappy remain voters, especially in London.
It was also very much a personal triumph for Corbyn. The Conservatives, fuelled by a stratospheric +28-point approval rating for May, far outstripping her party’s standing with the voters, chose to base their campaign around her. The word “Conservative” was reduced to a footnote.
Corbyn’s ratings began at -23 points and he faced a campaign of vilification in the Tory papers not seen since their 1980s assault on Michael Foot. Corbyn minimised the damage through his unplugged style of mass rallies growing in strength through the campaign and eschewing May’s itinerary of highly targeted marginal visits.
He ended the campaign with a remarkable YouGov personal rating of +39. May, whose wooden leadership and shortcomings became painfully plain to the public in the full glare of the campaign, finished on a rating of +6. She was no longer the electoral asset that her party had invested in so heavily.
But the election was not a uniform national story. Labour gained most in London and produced good results in Wales. Meanwhile, the most effective part of the Tory surge came in Scotland, where they won more seats from the SNP than Labour.
It was, however, overwhelmingly a realignment among the parties’ voters that produced this hung parliament. Labour gained strongly among younger, more affluent urban voters while the Conservatives reached working-class voters who had never supported them before.
The big casualties were the minor parties. Ukip was the biggest loser. Its vote fell from 13% in 2015 to 2% and the party faces implosion. It was a happier story for the Liberal Democrats, despite losing Nick Clegg. Their national vote share was little changed at 7% but their strategy of fighting their campaign as a series of individual byelections paid off, increasing their number of seats from eight to 12 – their first advance since 2005.
