Britain’s new political landscape: what the voting numbers tell us

The exit poll stunned us all again. In 2017 it raised the curtain on a night of humiliation for Theresa May and the Conservatives and triumph for Labour and Jeremy Corbyn. This time the roles were reversed. Boris Johnson succeeded where May failed, mobilising Leave voters’ frustration at Brexit deadlock to secure the largest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher’s third victory in 1987, and the largest share of the vote (44%) won by any party since Thatcher’s first win in 1979. Corbyn secured a “glorious defeat” in the summer of 2017, when a surge in Labour support saw the party advance in defiance of expectations of disaster.

The defeat this time was not glorious. Labour fell everywhere, but the party collapsed in its northern and Midlands heartlands where voters have returned Labour MPs for generations. The “red wall” collapsed, and Corbyn’s party was left to pick through the rubble of its worst defeat in more than 80 years.

Last Thursday I worked at BBC HQ with the team headed by Professor John Curtice to produce the poll released at 10pm on the BBC and ITV that predicted the new political shape of Britain. The security was watertight – our phones were taken from us, and we had to be escorted to and from the toilets.

The early declaration of Blyth Valley made clear why the exit poll was projecting the largest Conservative majority for more than 30 years. The Tories took this north-east mining seat for the first time since 1935 on a dramatic 10-point swing. Further shock defeats soon followed in Workington, Darlington and most dramatically in Leigh, the rock-solid north-west seat formerly held by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham.

This set the pattern for the night: a general slump in Labour support, with huge swings to the Conservatives in older, white, working-class urban seats with many voters who left school with little in the way of educational qualifications. Brexit was a key driver of these shifts. The higher the Leave share, the greater the Tory gain, rising from a modest two-point swing in seats with a Leave vote below 45% to a whopping eight-point swing in seats where 60% or more voted Leave in 2016.

Abstract voting statistics cannot capture the crushing emotional blow of this defeat. Seat after seat that had backed Labour in every vote since at least 1945 abandoned the party, many electing Conservative MPs for the first time ever. Rother Valley, Labour since 1918: gone. West Bromwich East, Tom Watson’s former fortress: gone. Stoke-on-Trent Central and Stoke-on-Trent North, both Labour since 1935: gone. In the former mining seat of Bolsover, the former miner Dennis Skinner was ejected after 49 years serving a seat that has returned Labour MPs for nearly twice as long. Then, at 3.30am, minutes after Corbyn delivered a defiant address from his Islington count, the returning officer in Sedgefield announced the first Tory victory in 88 years in Tony Blair’s old seat.

This was total repudiation. Labour returned its smallest cohort of MPs since 1935, and the prospect of power looks more remote than at any time since the early 1980s. Yet even in 1983, the party was suffering just its second successive defeat, and even this could be blamed on a divided vote following the SDP split. In 2019, Labour faced a fourth, crushing defeat in a row to a Tory party that has governed for nearly a decade, yet grown its vote each time it faced the electorate.

Labour was not the only party bitterly disappointed by last week’s results. The Liberal Democrats entered the campaign with high hopes of mobilising opposition to Brexit to secure an electoral breakthrough, returning the party to relevance after four post-coalition years in the wilderness. Party leader Jo Swinson even sought to present herself as a prime minister in waiting. It was not to be. The party that had sought a Remain realignment finished with fewer seats than before, as just three gains in strongly Remain areas were more than offset by four losses of seats won in 2017, including Swinson’s as she was defeated by the SNP in East Dunbartonshire. The party can at least take some consolation from the substantial increase in its vote share in the most middle-class and Remain areas of London and south England, which leave it well placed to benefit at future elections if the Conservatives’ growing alignment with nationalist and Eurosceptic voters alienates its traditional support base in suburbia.

The Brexit party also proved an electoral flop, its thunder stolen by a prime minister who talked of little else but “getting Brexit done”. Nigel Farage’s new outfit secured just 2% of the overall vote, though this low figure in part reflects the party’s decision to stand candidates down in Conservative-held seats. The Brexit party secured an average of more than 5% in the seats where it did stand, and the main effect of its strongest performances was most likely to prevent even more Tory breakthroughs, helping to save Labour incumbents including Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper and John Healey by splitting the Leave vote.

This was also a night of crushing disappointment for the many defectors and independents who sought to put principle before party. The Liberal Democrats fielded new recruits from both Labour (including Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger) and the Conservatives (including Sarah Wollaston and Sam Gymiah). All were defeated. Dominic Grieve and David Gauke, expelled from the Conservatives for rebellions over Brexit, achieved large swings as independents but could not break traditional voter alignments in their safe Tory seats. The various former Labour and Conservative MPs who broke away at the start of the year to form Change UK, and mostly now stood as independents, fared even worse, while Chris Williamson lost his deposit standing as an independent after being expelled from the Labour party.. Local roots matter more than national arguments, with the strongest independent performances on the night both coming from homegrown independent candidates in Ashfield and Devon East.

The two governing parties in Northern Ireland also had a very bad night, as Remain-supporting opposition parties surged in the region set to be hardest hit by Brexit. The DUP lost two seats, with its Westminster leader, Nigel Dodds, defeated by Sinn Féin in North Belfast. The SDLP took a seat each from Sinn Féin and the DUP on huge swings, while the cross-community Alliance party took North Down and ran the DUP very close in East Belfast. These results could herald major changes in the balance of power if, as expected, another election is called in the province next year to break the deadlock in the Northern Ireland assembly.

The Conservatives were not the only governing party to advance. The SNP, which has ruled at Holyrood since 2007, secured its second Westminster landslide in four years. The SNP slumped in 2017, when its campaign for a second independence referendum turned unionist and Leave voters against it. Two years later, the imminence of a hard Brexit under Johnson has renewed the appeal of independence, and the SNP has 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats.

The Scottish Conservatives gave up more than half of the seats gained in 2017, but the biggest loser was Scottish Labour, once again reduced to a single seat on its lowest ever share of the vote. The SNP’s triumph makes a new constitutional clash highly likely in the coming parliament, as a party determined to secure a mandate for independence faces a prime minister firmly opposed to a second Scottish referendum on the issue.

The return of a large and loyal majority will transform the Brexit legislative process. The narrow votes and high drama of the past two years will be at an end. Johnson can go to Brussels safe in the knowledge that any deal he negotiates will pass smoothly through the Commons. Brexit will get done.

The harder task comes after that. Johnson’s party may be united (at last) over Brexit, but the places it represents are now drawn from opposite sides of a deeply divided nation. The newly elected Conservative MPs represent some of the poorest parts of the country, joining party veterans who represent some of the wealthiest seats. The government will face a new pressure to spend and invest from the party’s new MPs, who will want to show that “getting Brexit done” delivers some tangible results for constituents in their marginal seats. But big spending runs very much against the ideological grain for the Conservative party, and the challenges such seats face after decades of stagnation and neglect cannot realistically be addressed in a single term of government. Voters who discover that Brexit brings little positive change to their lives may soon turn against a party they have long disliked and still distrust.

The Conservatives’ future troubles are as nothing compared with the existential crisis facing Labour. The electorate has rejected Corbyn and Corbynism, but loyalists to the radical cause control the commanding heights of the party. Its future direction now lies in the hands of the huge membership Corbyn attracted, who will soon be asked to choose his successor. Will they see this electoral mauling as a signal to change course, or will they regard it as an aberration driven by Brexit fever?

Further strife seems inevitable whatever answer the party’s members deliver. The dramas of a gridlocked Commons may be over, for now. But those hoping for a return to boring politics in the new year may be disappointed.

Dr Rob Ford is a professor of politics at Manchester University