I’ve been saying for a while now that I was going to start writing stuff but haven’t found the time due to work. I figured that I should probably just bite the bullet and write something, even if its shitty. So here it is.

The Dawn Of The Brexit Era





I think its fair to say that regardless of your political stripe, the GE result was a shock.

For the left, an absolutely shocking defeat on a scale unimaginable and exile to the wilderness for at least five years (and probably more).

For the right, a glorious victory that paves the path to a transformation of the political and economic landscape.

Sure, the broad result (Tory victory) was never really in doubt from the moment that Bojo announced the election, but I dont think anyone was expecting to win (or lose) by nearly 90 seats.



And because it is such a shock, I don’t think that a lot of people realise exactly how much the political ground has shifted underfoot and what this election really represents for any one of the future of the UK, the scene of UK politics or the parties and individuals concerned. Indeed, the scale of what this election represents is such that it is really deserving of a thesis rather than some shitty blog post by an internet blowhard, but I’ll take a crack at it anyway.



But there is one central theme that I would like to hang all of this argument off and that is simply: Brexit, how it is the defining moment of our era; and how Labour completely failed to recognise that and mould themselves around it in the same way that the Tories did.



I would put it to you that in the past hundred years, the state of the UK has been broadly delineated by the following: World War I and the Great Depression; World War 2, the post-war consensus and the beginning of the Cold War; Thatcher and the rise of neoliberalism; Blair; The GFC of 2008; and now Brexit, which has dominated the UK political scene and establishment for the better part of four years and will shape the next 50.



Rather than fighting the election of today, Labour were intent on re-fighting the lost battles of the late part of the last century and political idealism rather than engaging with the realpolitik of the UK as it is today. They treated Brexit as something to be postponed or delayed, to resist the momentum of zeitgeist around Brexit and try to arrest or halt it via a second referendum, rather than accepting that it is something that is going to happen and trying to steer it. Their messaging was nuanced – which is to say, confusing to the electorate at large – and left plenty of ambiguity that the Tories used to hammer first small wedges into Brexit policy, and then larger wedges into their policies about everything else.



The result of this was that Labour lost virtually every Leave seat they held and the Tories gained them, aided by the splitting effect of the Brexit party.



The Tories, by contrast, have completely grokked Brexit. They have become one with Brexit, moulding and moulded by it in turn and focused their whole policy around Getting Brexit Done. What it actually turns out to be is probably a subject for another blog post, but this relentless focus on the central issue of the age is paramount. The Tory party now are reinvigorated from the quagmire of the last three years and have now driven a stake through a lot of the issues they were facing, not least members of their own party; and now emerge into a new era of politics where they hold both the lock and the key.



They recognised that we are now in a new era, changed themselves to suit that new era and now sit at the top of a pile of corpses of political questions and issues, a lot of which are both unpalatable and difficult to comprehend for remainers at large and Labour party members in particular.



This election result means that there is now no ambiguity over Brexit. It is happening and there is not a damn thing that remainers can do to stop it.



An 80 seat majority means that the Tories can do what they like and the rest of us are just along for the ride. It means no more amendment fuckery (although that is more a function of Bercow stepping down from the Speakers chair than the election) to hold the government of the day from fulfilling its aims. And even if such a thing was brought and debated, the vote wouldnt matter anyway.



It means that the Tories have, borg-like, assimilated the Brexit party and made them an asset twofold; one in the sense of gaining their votes and the other by splitting voters off from Labour.



It means that Labour are shit out of luck and need to completely reconfigure themselves for the next election or local elections. An 80 seat majority is a message of “Fuck you and everything you stand for” that needs to be heeded, or the next election will be just as, if not more, bruising.



It means that political identities (and results) are now more predicated on whether a voter is leave or remain rather than whether they are left or right or traditional Labour or Tory voters. The north voting in spades for Tories, their political enemy for the last fifty years, shows that the established order is not so much put out to pasture as staked out on the beach and drowned by the tide.



The debate is over, a consensus has been reached by the mechanism of driving all practical opposition to it off the edge of a cliff. We are now in the new era; defined by whether a person is for or against brexit in the same way that they were formerly defined by whether they are left or right. Debate over what Labour or remain can or should do now about Brexit is academic and irrelevant.

Labour needs to come to terms with the era we are now in and change course, otherwise they will continue on this tangent path into a wilderness they will not return from for years, if ever.