After the UK election on Thursday there have been a lot of post mortems on the election, and the lion’s share of them have attempted to view them as some sort of historic rebuke of Labour, Corbyn and left wing populism in general. These are shallow, obviously motivated takes. They also miss some very important things. So I’m going to cover those.

1.The Pro-Brexit side did a better job of tactical voting, while it’s questionable that tactical voting even could have worked for the Remain side

Probably the most significant reason why the election turned out specifically as it did was the decision by the Brexit party on November 11th not to stand candidates in conservative constituencies. This ensured that they could only act as spoilers in Labour constituencies, giving an out to pro-Brexit Labour voters who wouldn’t have been willing to vote for Tory, as well as acting as a tacit endorsement of the Conservatives for everyone else. And, by all appearances, this strategy was very effective. A large proportion of the seats in the Northeast flipped by the Tories were won on margins smaller than the Brexit Party’s share, while elsewhere the decision was likely a pretty big signal to pro-brexit voters to support Tories.

In theory some might think this could have have been offset by tactical voting by the Remain side, but no such strategy materialized. Labour didn’t run on Brexit, generally, and the Lib Dems did so largely at odds with Labour. It’d be tempting to say that the lack of unity is to blame for their loss, but that would suppose the strategy would have worked in the first place. The Lib Dems were basically a non-factor in the Northeast, so you can’t blame them for acting as spoilers there. Meanwhile in the South, affluent pro-Remain Tories seem to have been totally disinterested in switching parties. The Lib Dem attempt to run on Brexit and their numbers tanked throughout the campaign, so doesn’t look like it was a good strategy.

In fact, in general it kind of seems like you can’t blame centrist undermining for the results because they were too irrelevant and ineffectual to have even made a difference. The Lib Dems lost half their seats, and all those defecting centrist politicians who either ran with the Lib Dems or tried to form a new party were wiped. So the election is hardly a vindication for them. I’m not even sure that things like the media’s constant monstering of Corbyn mattered that much either, except insofar as they sucked all the air our of the room.

2. The strategy that failed Labour in 2019 was basically the strategy that worked in 2017, the context was just different

Labour’s strategy in the 2019 election was largely the same as it was in 2017: avoid the base splitting issue of brexit to focus on economic issues where the Tories were more vulnerable. In 2017 this turned out to be a very effective strategy, Theresa’s May’s lead in the polls started to collapse when she was forced to address issues besides Brexit, which she bungled badly.

So it was understandable that Corbyn figured he’d try the same thing again this time around. It perhaps wasn’t even a bad strategy, Labour’s poll position increased consistently throughout the race. But unlike 2017, it wasn’t good enough.

Why exactly?

That’s open to debate, but one reason may just be that the media was more dismissive to the strategy this time around. When Corbyn revealed that Tories had put the NHS on the table in Brexit negotiations, the media more or less immediately dismissed the story as either irrelevant or old hat. It’s also possible that after 3 years the electorate is just a lot more exhausted by Brexit drama than they were in 2017, and were more likely to be won over by the Tory promise to just be done with it already.

As it happens, contexts change. Conservatives mostly benefited from having a particularly good window for them to run in. Had the election happened several months earlier it would have been a very different story.

The context is still changing. Things will look very different for Boris Johnson in about a year, when the consequences of “get Brexit done” set in. If it sets off a crisis that causes the Tory government to collapse and the Tories to get routed in the next election, which seems pretty likely, their win this cycle will have been entirely Pyrrhic. Similarly, if that is how things break down, then Labour could probably run on an identical platform and be swept into power.

As much as people think elections vindicate or disprove specific strategies it’s largely arbitrary. Sometimes all you can do is position yourself to be in the right place at the right time. That was probably the case in this election, and it will probably be the case in the next election.

3.Scotland is just kind of a perennial issue for Labour no one has an answer for

Before 2015, Labour was more or less assured something like 30-40 safe seats in Scotland. If they still had those Scottish voters they might have gotten something like 35% of the popular vote, about what they did the last time they won. At the very least the most recent election would barely have registered as anything more than a minor setback for Labour, as it was if you looked at it in terms of the popular vote. And considering that the SNP are mostly in line with the Labour Party on most issues, it’s questionable that their defection even means that much in practical terms.

The point of this is that you can basically ignore people who are trying to treat the election as being a historically bad result for Labour, the raw seat count is mainly just an empty technicality because that’s entirely based on Scotland. Take Scotland out of the equation and Labour did, well, not great, but not historically bad either.

Scottish voters’ defections from Labour are an issue, but they’re an issue that goes far beyond the most recent election or Corbyn. The collapse of Scotland’s Labour party happened during the Blairite era mostly under the leadership of Blairite MPs. And nobody in the Labour party actually has an answer for it.