What Brexit gives, Brexit takes away. Theresa May owed her position to her predecessor’s failed EU referendum gamble. Now her own gamble on a Brexit mandate has failed. A remarkable campaign, which saw towering 20-point poll leads crumble to nothing, has culminated in an even more remarkable result.

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The Conservatives, who expected a landslide, have had their majority swept away by a resurgent Labour party. They owe much of their continued advantage in the House of Commons to a second failed political gamble by Nicola Sturgeon. The first minister’s call for a second independence referendum seems to have alienated unionist voters, who turned sharply against the SNP, with Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Conservatives the biggest beneficiaries.

Both parties gained ground in an election dominated by the two biggest parties to a greater degree than any since 1970. May was more popular losing her majority in 2017 than Margaret Thatcher was winning a landslide in 1987, while Jeremy Corbyn won a higher share in defeat than Tony Blair secured in his final 2005 majority. At the start of the election campaign, the polls suggested Labour was on course for its worst result since 1935, in terms of votes and seats. In the end, Labour increased its share of the vote by more than 10 percentage points, achieving its highest vote share since the second New Labour landslide in 2001. The Conservatives gained a lot of support too, rising more than five percentage points and achieving their highest share of the vote since 1983.

The long fragmentation of British politics has been abruptly reversed, but the geography of the new two-party politics leaves the Conservatives with a major advantage for now. Labour’s vote is more concentrated in very safe seats, while the Conservatives’ is more spread out – with resurgence in Scotland in particular helping the party to convert a two-point lead over Labour into one of nearly 60 seats. On the other hand, Labour’s remarkably broad-based increase in support has greatly expanded the political battlefield for the next election, leaving the party in second place in more than 50 seats with majorities of less than 6%.

BREXIT DIVIDES THE NATION



After a year in which Brexiters dominated the political agenda, it was the Remainers who struck back last week. While there was a small swing to the Conservatives in the seats with the largest Leave votes, Labour ran rampant in the Remain strongholds. Labour’s vote share increased by 12 points in the strongest Remain-voting areas, while the Conservatives fell back by two points. The Liberal Democrats also benefited from the Remain resurgence – four of the five seats they gained from the Tories voted Remain, and the Lib Dem vote was up by double digits in all of these.

It was a different story in the Leave strongholds, with a strong and stable Conservative vote, propped up by an influx from the wreck of Ukip. Seats in England and Wales with 60%-plus votes for Leave showed a swing to the Conservatives, while the rest swung to Labour. Yet the “purple bonus” for the Conservatives in such areas proved far smaller than expected – while the Conservatives did see larger gains in the seats where Ukip did best last time, Labour did no worse in such areas than elsewhere, limiting the impact of Ukip to Conservative switching. The national surge in Labour support neutralised the Conservative advance in Labour’s northern and Midlands heartland seats, enabling the party to hold on (though often with reduced majorities) in places such as Great Grimsby, Ashfield and Dudley North.

NEW POLITICS DELIVERS



A central plank of Corbyn’s strategy from the beginning of his first leadership campaign has been to mobilise disaffected sections of the electorate – in particular, young voters and former abstainers – by offering a “new kind of politics”.

The initial evidence suggests this strategy has been a resounding success. The rise in Labour support was larger in seats where turnout grew most, in seats with large concentrations of young voters, and in seats with large numbers of students, while the Conservatives did worse in all such areas. These effects combined to dramatic effect in Canterbury, a traditionally deep-blue seat with two large university campuses where a huge surge in support delivered victory for Labour for the first time in the seat’s long history.

THE EDUCATION DIVIDE DEEPENS



The 2017 surge in turnout, with particularly high engagement from the young, was something new. But other shifts in last week’s election reflect the continuation of well-established trends. One was the ever-growing education divide in politics. This grew sharply in 2015, when Labour under Ed Miliband did much better among graduates than school-leavers and was also very clear in the EU referendum. It looks likely to have grown again this year due to a shift at the other end of the scale, with May’s Conservatives gaining ground in areas where voters with few qualifications congregate, while falling completely flat in graduate-heavy seats. The education divide reflects major differences in identity, values and outlook between more socially conservative and nationalistic school-leavers and more liberal and cosmopolitan graduates. Similar deep divides were visible in recent elections in Austria, France, the Netherlands and the US. The clash between graduates and school-leavers looks set to be a central part of democratic political competition both here and elsewhere in the future.

CLASS POLITICS: UPSIDE DOWN?



While deepening education divides pull Labour-voting graduates and Conservative-voting school-leavers ever further apart, the traditional class divides that have structured politics in Britain for generations seem to have been inverted this year.

Labour, founded as the party of the working class, and focused on redistributing resources from the rich to the poor, gained the most ground in 2017 in seats with the largest concentrations of middle-class professionals and the rich. The Conservatives, long the party of capital and the middle class, made their largest gains in the poorest seats of England and Wales. Even more remarkably, after years of austerity, the Conservatives’ advance on 2015 was largest in the seats where average incomes fell most over the past five years, while the party gained no ground at all in the seats where average incomes rose most.

Britain’s class politics has been turned completely upside down in 2017. Wealthy professionals in leafy suburbs have swung behind a Labour leader who pledges to sharply increase their taxes, while it was struggling blue-collar workers in deprived and declining seats who were most attracted by the party of austerity cuts to public services and welfare.

SCOTLAND – STURGEON’S GAMBLE ALSO BACKFIRES



The Scottish election was once again a very different contest, dominated by a different leader taking a different risk. Like May, Nicola Sturgeon used Brexit as the basis for a major political gamble, calling for a second referendum on Scottish independence less than three years after the first. The SNP lost the first decisively but then, paradoxically, was propelled to total dominance in 2015 as pro-independence voters defected to the nationalists en masse.

This year the constitutional pendulum has swung the other way, with a sharp decline in support for the SNP and a resurgence of all three unionist parties.

While the second independence referendum is not the only factor driving such shifts, the SNP’s return to the issue so soon after a decisive referendum defeat may have been the last straw for many voters whose disaffection with a decade of SNP rule from Holyrood has been growing – as shown by the swings against the party in the Scottish parliament elections last year.

The Conservatives – seen as the staunchest defenders of the union – gained most, winning a swath of seats in south and north-east Scotland, and defeating the SNP deputy leader Angus Robertson and the party’s former leader Alex Salmond.

Labour also recovered strongly in its former Scottish heartlands – working-class areas that voted decisively for independence in 2014, then swung massively to the SNP in 2015. The party took back seats in Glasgow, Paisley and Gordon Brown’s former constituency of Kirkcaldy, and is once again competitive in a range of places where it was almost wiped out two years ago.

This vindicates another plank of Corbyn’s strategy – that a shift to the left would help Labour recover in Scotland – though in this case the Westminster Labour leader is also likely benefiting from shifts in Scotland unrelated to his choices.

Robert Ford is professor of political science at the University of Manchester