On December 12th 2019, the Conservative Party was re-elected to UK government with 163 more seats than the Labour Party. It is the biggest defeat of the major left-wing party since 1935, and Corbyn, the only socialist leader of the organisation there’s been in the 21st century, is resigning. This merits reflection, and I want to talk about the significance of this event particularly to readers outside of the UK because I don’t think citizens abroad have realised how dire conditions have gotten for the British public.
Despite the UK being the fifth richest country in the world, an estimated 14.3 million citizens live in poverty, with 4.6 million of them being children and over a million being pensioners. The UN declared this year that this is not coincidental to government policy, but a direct product of it. Their special reporter on extreme poverty said that the economic struggle of the UK’s poorest was “systemic” and “tragic”, and came about because the government had “deliberately removed” the systems meant to help society’s most vulnerable, replacing them with a “harsh and uncaring ethos”. The Living Wage Foundation has calculated that the minimum wage in the UK falls below the £9.30 an hour salary that will let you afford basic necessities, and in 2012, the government tripled university tuition fees.
The National Housing Federation estimates that 8.4 million citizens are living in homes that they cannot afford, are overcrowded, or place them in direct danger, and although the housing charity Shelter has concluded that the government need to construct 1.2 million more homes to rectify this crisis, they’re building only 250,000 more by 2022. In 2018, 320,000 people were homeless, and between 2017 and 2018, there was a 22% increase in the number of homeless deaths. Many people only avoid death through food charitably donated to them. Between 2018 and 2019, the UK’s largest food bank network distributed 1.6 million food packages, a 19% increase on the previous year.
One factor in encouraging the widespread use of food banks is the Tory government’s controversial Universal Credit scheme which demands that those who require economic assistance for unemployment or disability wait around five weeks for their first payment. It’s been liable to force claimants towards debt, eviction, and other problems. Even when you receive your payment, it might not be enough to live on. In 2016, Tory work and pensions secretary, Ian Duncan Smith resigned over cuts to benefit allowance that stripped the average disabled person of £3,500 a year.
In hospitals and surgeries, things aren’t any better. In 2018, the proportion of emergency room patients who had to wait more than four hours for treatment was almost one quarter, with the head doctors from 68 A&E departments warning the Prime Minister that sick and injured people were “dying in the corridors”. In the same year, The Health Foundation cautioned that government spending on the NHS continued to fall below minimum targets, and despite the Chair of the Royal College of GPs’ finding that the government needs to increase the number of trainee doctors by 5,000 a year, the Trade Unions Congress has observed a loss of 1,000 GPs in the UK since 2015.
You get the picture: The situation is bleak, and it got that way under a Tory government that’s been in power since 2010. It seems inexplicable that citizens would vote for five more years of this, especially when the opposition party was offering to take them in a radically more caring direction. TV pundits rushed to demystify the issue mere minutes after the exit polls came in, but I think we need to put aside more time for analysis and consideration than that. What’s more, I’m sceptical of commentators who are taking something as complex as this historical vote swing and putting it down to a single factor. For example, claiming that the only topic the public made their decision on was getting Brexit done, as if voters don’t care about policy relating to their medical treatment, policing, or the environment. On which note, I can’t tell you conclusively why the public turned so strongly against Corbyn, but I can tell you which theories on it don’t make sense and point out possible causes that the media are conveniently sidelining.
First thing’s first: the public only appear overwhelmingly opposed to Labour if you count the election by the seats won, but not the votes cast. The Conservatives won 163 more constituencies than Labour but only 11.4% more of the vote. In fact, despite a lot of the media now describing the country as blue to the core, the Tories won less than half of the total vote. I’m not saying that the gap in this share of the polls is insignificant, or that Labour didn’t suffer a huge blow to their parliamentary power, but one reason for why the election went so disastrously against Corbyn was that in the UK electoral system, overall vote share doesn’t translate directly into parliamentary representation. And no election is decided by one factor because this and other structural issues in the system affect all elections.
For another example, our first past the post system pressures people into putting a cross not next to the party they believe in most, but also pressing them towards the parties that are the most popular. It’s a big part of why we frame elections in a Labour vs. Tory dichotomy in the first place. And we know that, statistically, younger generations vote left and older generations vote right. Sure enough, YouGov polling shows a strongly Labour voting intention among under 30s. So, it’s incredibly likely that the numbers look the way they do because the majority of voters were middle-aged or older. It’s also worth keeping in mind that only about two-thirds of the country turned out to vote anyway.
But okay, the numbers still show far more Tory support than there’s been at previous polls and there must be a reason why. Through some combination of changes in who showed up at the booths and voters shifting their allegiances, the Tories saw monumental gains, mostly from Labour. A lot of “experts” have been preoccupied with this idea that Labour policy was just too radically left-wing. That voters were alienated by hardline socialism and were looking for more middle-of-the-road governance, but if you review the figures, Labour’s financial policy wasn’t nearly that extreme. They were proposing public spending less than that of centrist countries Italy and Germany, and less than even France, a nation premiered by a former investment banker. It’s probably just that we’ve become so used to a drought of government spending under the Tories that any sizeable support for government services can be spun as radical by comparison.
Furthermore, when YouGov polled voters, they found them in favour of Labour’s tax increases for those earning above £80,000 and the party’s nationalisation of the rail service. Almost every interview with a Labour MP after the reveal of the exit poll has involved them being badgered over whether they’ll make a return to centrist politics in response to the results. However, these stats suggest that walking back their socialism is not necessary, and I’m sceptical that trying to toe the line between the left and right is the way to win votes. It wasn’t a workable strategy for the U.S. democrats to combat Trump, their own Johnson-like figure, it wasn’t a sustainable strategy for the Labour of the 00s, and it won the Liberal Democrats only 11 seats in this election.
Labour policy now is also close to what it was in the 2017 election, and in that instance, Labour saw significant gains from the Tories. The Conservatives notably overestimated how much weight they had to throw around. Similarly, if voters in this election were alienated by Corbyn, which is the explanation a lot of writers, presenters, and politicians have landed on, why wasn’t he the same liability in 2017? There, it would seem he was winning seats that Labour hadn’t had a hold of under more neoliberal leaders. I’ve seen no one who supports these theories able to explain the discrepancy. There were, however, other differences between what went down in 2017 and what occurred in 2019. The Tories had swapped mild-mannered May for blustering Johnson, more holes were opening up in the public safety nets, and Brexit had been dithered over for another two years.
This is where the theory that people just wanted Brexit over with comes in. Johnson had styled himself as the no-nonsense, hard-nosed negotiator that could push the deal through; he was going to “Get Brexit done”, and the news always told us that potential voters were reacting to that. But I can’t find any data that supports this assertion. And, in fact, when Opinium Research asked voters whether they wanted Brexit over and done with, regardless of outcome, two-thirds said “no”. Such polling is far from perfect in its representation, but it casts serious doubt on the joint narrative of the Tories and the media that people just wanted Brexit put behind them above all else. There’s little reason to believe that Johnson could close on that promise anyway. As Corbyn said during his campaigning, if you wanted Brexit done, it made more sense to vote Labour instead of Conservative. Labour could continue the UK’s current trading relationship with the EU, while, whatever Johnson said, the Tories are likely to be locked up in negotiations for years, because that’s how long it generally takes to establish such trade deals.
In these instances where there’s a huge gap between what may well be the public perception of an issue and the reality of it, it’s hard not to wonder how much blame the media takes. When talking heads discuss how the public hated Corbyn and loved Boris, there’s never any acknowledgement that the understanding of these figures, and of the majority of political issues, happens not in a vacuum but through mass media, meaning that mass media has some role to play in what they thought. You see where I’m going with this: while the exact whos and whens and whys are ambiguous, the media had a significant role to play in the public’s impression of politicians, strategies, and meaningful political goals. The media seems reluctant even to suggest this as an answer for why Labour lost so catastrophically, probably because they don’t want to paint a target on their back and because they’d like to continue the myth of the media as a completely neutral institution rather than one that actively shapes and is shaped by the surrounding political landscape.
Mainstream political media in the UK has long been split into two camps. Explicitly right-wing press directly funded by conservative billionaires to promote their self-interests such as the tabloids and Daily Mail, and the ostensibly non-ideological and completely objective press that constitutes most broadsheets and televised political coverage. The BBC, in particular, is keen not to be seen “taking a side” as being a state-funded broadcaster, they could be accused of propagandising. However, the concept of the sterile press outlet that prioritises no viewpoint and considers all perspectives equally has always been a myth, and fundamentally, a terrible idea anyway. If the press has any stake in informing the public of what’s true, then they should not be equally respectful to all viewpoints, they should forward the observations that are correct. As the journalistic adage goes “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true”.
What we have at the moment is a setup where you can have an interview with a lifelong activist for peace and equality, and an interview with a perpetually failing far-right nationalist and the interviewer will criticise both these figures equally. It’s an approach which I’ve long believed alienates people from politics, leading them to think that whoever you vote for, everyone is bad as each other. This has never been true; there are remarkable differences in parties’ policies and the empirical support that those policies being a good idea to enact. However, when all parties are presented in as equally a flattering and unflattering light, what are voters meant to conclude but that you can’t make a better country through picking any of the available options? And in actuality, there has never been as much air time or column space for the hard-left as there has the hard-right. Politicians and campaigners that advocate for free markets and deregulation are frequently given seats on current events shows or quoted in editorials, but how many times do you see anti-capitalists in the same position? We know that the nationalist right of UKIP and the Brexit Party has relied on the press routinely repeating their positions and plans, but is it possible to imagine them even occasionally doing this with communists or anarchists? Whatever you think of those hard-left positions, this is not what balance looks like.
For as long as Corbyn has been head of Labour, there’s been a double standard between how the press has covered the two main parties, and it’s one that continued into this election coverage. You could look at this election and see pundits pressing Johnson on the NHS and his bigoted statements, and interrogating Corbyn over the viability of socialism and his party’s anti-semitism and see some equality in that treatment. However, controversies seem to stick to Labour through the months in a way that they don’t stick to the Tories. We’ve had years of the media drawing attention to the anti-semitic verbal abuse that has taken place within the Labour Party, and rightfully so. This is a mark of shame on an organisation that styles itself as a refuge for the vulnerable, and the failure lies not simply with the occurrence of these attacks in the first place, but also on the lack of a thorough and expedient response from Labour. However, when the Conservative Party became rife with comparable instances of islamophobia and conducted no reform of their guidelines in response, the media didn’t make a peep.
Nor has there been any real focus on the fact that Tory austerity has hit racial and other minorities harder than anyone else, as they are the most economically vulnerable, to begin with. The media also seemed to have no cognisance of Yarl’s Wood, the abusive immigrant detention centre run under the Tories. Nor did almost anyone bring up the Windrush scandal, an event from 2018 where a governmental organisation destroyed the citizenship records of a whole racial demographic and then withdrew vital services from these racial minorities and threatened them with deportation for not having citizenship records. The Conservatives didn’t punish anyone over this. It also wasn’t considered pertinent to the discussion on race that Johnson has gleefully allied himself with Trump, a man whose presidential legacy is a large-scale network of concentration camps for Latin Americans, or that, in this election, the Tories had the vocal support of Tommy Robinson, the UK’s most famous white nationalist. And how many outlets cared that a Conservative MP and MEP publicly imitated a black man’s speech to mock him for supporting Labour?
While the press accused Corbyn of supporting terrorists for purportedly meeting with the IRA and attending a wreath-laying ceremony where visitors honoured individuals connected to the Black September attacks, they turned a blind eye to the Tories repeatedly violating international law to provide billions in weapons to Saudi Arabia, a country currently conducting a genocide in Yemen. They also seem to have happily glossed over conservative MPs backing islamophobic and anti-semitic Hungarian nationalist Viktor Orban through the EU parliament. Similarly, the fact that many senior Tories support Brexit and that Brexit is liable to hurt refugees has not been considered relevant.
To their credit, the press did grill Johnson on some of his bigoted remarks over the years from his use of a slur to describe non-white members of the Commonwealth to labelling gay men as “bum boys”. But more often than not, the press doesn’t care about minority oppression when it wears a blue ribbon. Today, a leading theory for the electoral backlash against Labour is that voters were intolerant of the racism within the party. And, for sure, I could see Labour’s anti-semitism debacle alienating people from the party, but the idea that those staunchly opposed to racism would instead vote for a man who has said that people in Africa have “watermelon smiles” and that Islam has brought the hate upon itself is ludicrous. That respected pundits forward this as a serious argument shows just how absurd media coverage of racism in this country is, and reflects a willing ignorance of discrimination from the right.
Overall, the Conservative Party exploits that you would consider to be the most damning were often passed over by commentators and debate moderators. No one seems to remember the UN report, and it’s remarkable how often these supposed truthseekers stayed silent on the UK’s epidemic of poverty, the Tories’ treatment of the disabled, the housing crisis, or other issues we should be screaming about from the rooftops. You’d think the media might be constantly questioning Johnson’s commitment to his aims when he resigned as Foreign Secretary during the Brexit negotiations, but no. By all rights there should also be severe scepticism that we can trust anything that Boris says after he built a career on broken promises. For example, while Johnson promised he’d stop a third runway being built at Heathrow airport, when it came time for the vote on its construction, he took a trip abroad using £20,000 of taxpayer money. He promised that we’d leave the EU in October and we didn’t, but he’s already making new promises about how lightning-fast we’ll progress in international politics. He promised to reduce rough sleeping in London as mayor, but instead saw it rise by 130%. The list goes on. Journalists selectively questioned Johnson on his flagrant lying, but many such fibs fell by the wayside, and they were unwilling to draw a definitive pattern of behaviour.
Another bigger picture that the media was reticent to illuminate was a terrifying pattern of anti-democratic behaviour from the Tories in the last few years. They trialled a voter ID system that we don’t have any reason to believe is tackling a real problem, and as we can tell from America, only serves as a tactic for voter suppression. In the last round of local elections, many EU citizens who were legally allowed to vote were turned away from the polls. During a key time for Brexit discussion, Johnson shut down Parliament, attempting to prevent democratic representatives from having a say. The Supreme Court ruled this illegal, but the Tory manifesto for this election included a worryingly fascist clause about limiting the court’s power over parliament. Johnson undermined the democratic process by stitching his mayoral, Brexit, and prime ministerial campaigning out of lies, with the Brexit campaign, specifically, breaking electoral law. During his general election campaign, he said he’d take away transport workers right to strike and threatened to shut down Channel 4 for their relatively mild criticism of him. We already seem to be forgetting that during the election, the Conservative press office misled the public about tax increases under Corbyn and posed as an independent fact-checking organisation for the purposes of discrediting their opponent. Johnson was widely criticised at the time for proroguing parliament, but the broader image of anti-democratic measures from the Tories has failed to emerge.
The BBC, in particular, made an abysmal showing during this election; worse than in elections past. During memorial day, Johnson laid a wreath upside down on the Cenotaph which was likely to be construed by the public as a sign of disrespect or incompetence, but while reporting on the day, the BBC misinformed viewers by airing footage of him laying the wreath at the 2016 ceremony, as though it was today. When audience members laughed at Johnson’s proposed policies at a leaders’ debate, the BBC edited out that laughter, but left in the audience laughter for Corbyn. Despite the supposed neutrality of the corporation, they were happy to describe Boris’s possible future election as “well-deserved”, and although the press is forbidden from speaking about election results before they are announced, for fear of influencing the vote, BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg was happy to say that she’d heard that Labour was falling behind in the postal vote, netting the BBC a warning from the Electoral Commission.
None of what I’ve described here represents even-handed coverage, and even if it did, having an explicitly right-wing billionaire press and a neutral BBC-style press doesn’t make for an impartial representation of national politics. It still makes for overall coverage of current issues that leans to the right. Even when the media does catch Johnson in a lie, it’s often unclear that it matters all that much. The relationship between Johnson and the UK media resembles the relationship between Trump and the US media. The media expects to combat Johnson by fishing out individual lies in his speeches and manifesto, but even when presented with undeniable evidence that he’s lying, Johnson just repeats the lie louder or calls into question how seriously we can take the reporter talking to him. And it may be that, as with Trump, that’s part of what Johnson’s voter base likes about him. Not that anything that he says is true if you look at the facts, but that he smacks down the naysayers and tells the right and centre what they want to hear: that a fast Brexit and another five years of Tory toxicity will be practical and beneficial for the country despite all evidence to the contrary.
In talking about the press, I don’t mean to fall into the same trap that many reporters have; of saying that they were the single issue that decided the election. That’s not the case; I also understand that amateur media had a big role to play, and even the mass media is guided by other societal factors. I’m also not saying that there aren’t better smaller media outlets out there or that the mass media only ever makes the wrong call. However, this election has only served to erode my belief in mainstream commentators and reporters further. An election is a test of the whole democratic system, and during this election, mass media consistently failed to furnish voters with the relevant facts, and in the wake of the election are making summaries of it that are unevidenced or transparently nonsensical.
I don’t know where Labour goes from here. New Labour centrism didn’t work, but running an actual leftist candidate also didn’t work. The proposed solution from centrists, the right, and the media has been clear: get rid of Corbyn, but as breadtube talking skull Shaun said, those who wanted to smear him would do the same thing to any other socialist in his position. The process I’ve described above could be applied to any other candidate considered too threatening to the elitist status quo. But I do know that even if it’s not the whole story, the bias and lack of attention from the UK’s journalistic sector had some sway over this election. It was a factor in convincing people that between a lifelong campaigner for civil rights and a rich Eton-educated serial liar, the latter would care more about the common person.
Things are liable to get much worse in this country before they get better. Johnson tested the public’s tolerance for lies, bigotry, and anti-democratic behaviour throughout his political campaign, and the message he got in response was that the public was overwhelmingly in favour of it. In the coming years, the Tories will be trialling even more severe propaganda and violations of human rights, but I still believe that there is hope for the left to counteract it, even if it may take time to tell how we do that. What I do know is that it has to involve empathetic, evidenced counter-messages to the mainstream press that tap into the issues the public most care about. Thanks for reading.
