Book Offer
This will close in 10 seconds
You had to feel sorry for Conservative Steve Baker who was actually sitting in the BBC studio not only when the exit pool came out predicting a Labour landslide but also predicting that he had a less than 1% chance of holding his own seat. So sorry to tell you this, said BBC Laura Kuenssberg, but we think you will lose your seat. I doubt she was sorry at all.
The votes are still being counted, but final forecasts have Labour finishing with 408 seats and the Conservatives on 136. Labour got their crushing majority, but the big story from last night is Reform UK taking close to 5 seats, although the exit poll put them at 13, in the British general election. Nigel Farage was elected for Clacton, he became an MP on the eight time of asking. This was a big victory for the only other right-wing party in the UK.
The Conservatives were sent packing, and with good reason. At least ten cabinet ministers lost their seats, including Penny Mordaunt, Grant Shapps, Gillian Keegan and Johnny Mercer. Several other prominent Tories including former Prime Minister Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg (losing a majority of 15,000), Liam Fox, Andrea Jenkyns and Thérèse Coffey, also lost their jobs.
In fact, Jacob Rees-Mogg lost his seat as Dublin born Paul MacDonnell, took 7,000 seats for Reform UK, essentially splitting the vote on the right. If those votes had gone to Jacob Rees-Mogg he would have beaten the Labour candidate now MP Dan Norris.
It is a truth universally acknowledged by sensible people that out right loathing of your base is a vote loser. You can only triangulate for so long. The Tories have learned the hard way that this is what happens if you betray your core vote for years especially on the key issue of immigration. It also does not help if you trash your reputation on the one thing you are respected for, namely being responsible with the money.
Take immigration, as commentator Matt Goodwin explains,
“It sometimes seems incomprehensible to the British people that the UK’s level of immigration is running at such high and still rising levels.
More than fourteen years after the Conservative Party took office, promising annual immigration would decline to tens, not hundreds of thousands, net migration is now 600,000 a year while gross immigration into Britain is around a million.
While we are often told, erroneously, we are a nation of immigrants this is actually very misleading. By most estimates, Britain has in recent years had more immigration than in the whole period from the Norman Conquest to the Second World War.
And the effects of this seismic change have been enormous.”
Time and again the British voted to lower run-away levels of immigration, including voting for Brexit.
They got Brexit, but immigration continued to grow, in fact it exploded. The British government could no longer blame the EU and the inability to control their own borders – it was under Prime Minister Boris Johnson that legal immigration really started to get going.
Expect the usual bloodbath of infighting within the Conservative party, where the left of the party will tell you it is all the fault of the ‘Faragists’ and extreme right. Sure, that’s the reason the conservative base abandoned their own party in their millions – it wasn’t left wing enough.
When you travel around Britain what you always hear is, what we need is more immigration, fewer criminals in jail (John Major actually said that a few months ago), more transgender men in women’s prisons, toilets, and sports, and more trashing of our history by the woke-brigade. I just hate Churchill, said your average Englishman wearing his pronouns badge, can we please have more self-hatred.
That’s exactly the kind of talk you will hear at half-time during Sunday’s football match England v Switzerland, the likes of Rory Stewart and the odious George Osbourne and all the rest of the wets that have brought the party to its knees, would have you believe. This is how out of touch they are.
As for Labour, you knew Sir Keir Starmer KCB (Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath) and KC (King’s Counsel) was as clean as they come when the most the Tories could say about him was that the workaholic lawyer was in fact a closet slacker because he might not work after 6pm on Fridays instead spending some time with his family. (His wife is Jewish and perhaps observes Shabbat).
There was also a fantastic Twitter thread from a former pupil at the ultra-left wing Doughty Street Chambers saying Sir Keir wasn’t a very nice person as he a) never spoke to her, and b) once glared at her from across the street before cycling home. This concerned some love triangle that you could only get at an ultra-left wing barristers chamber. (Please someone do a TV series on that.)
The last Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, if you recall, had to deal with constant questions of just how much contact did he have with the former Russian federation and how much sympathy did he have with various terrorists. When you are forced to run the headline, “No evidence Corbyn was a communist spy, say intelligence experts” you know you are on to a loser.
Another classic is when you are ‘fact checked’ as to whether you are in reality a terrorist sympathiser.
Those really were the days, what an easy election for the Tories.
But the real story is Reform, who look set to take 5 seats. They split the vote on the right in some constituencies. And they killed outright the line that conservative voters must vote for the Tory party, otherwise it was a vote for Labour. It is another example of why the immigration issue is not going anywhere. The only question is can Farage, who has done so much damage to the Conservative party over the last ten years, build a leading political party that could really challenge Labour in the future.
As for Labour, they will enjoy their huge majority, but they are also stuck with it. When it becomes clear that the big issues – immigration, the national debt and deficit, cost of living, inflation and crime – are unlikely to be fixed in any meaningful way by Labour the voters will hold them solely responsible.
Expect the Starmer administration to be woke on steroids with a massive expansion of the State, which they keep promising will not require any major tax rises. That sounds like cake-ism to me. The voters are as guilty of it as Labour and the Tory party are.
This will close in 10 seconds