The UK electoral record books will need to be rewritten after 5 July. In January the BBC reported that Labour would need a bigger swing than Tony Blair managed in 1997 (10.2%) or Attlee achieved in 1945 (12%). This is just to get a majority of one. With a swing of 8.3% Labour would be the largest party in a hung parliament. Starmer needs 12.7% to obtain a bare majority. But, unless all pollsters have really messed up, it appears Labour will finish up with one of the biggest majorities they’ve ever had, well over 150 seats.
This would be more understandable if Starmer had the charisma of Barack Obama or Nelson Mandela, but even his most ardent supporters don’t claim that. He may be hard-working and clever but charismatic he is not.
It takes a special sort of incompetence to lose an 80-seat majority in one parliament but the Tories are on track to manage it and worse, much worse in fact. Things are so bad the FT reports an air of fatalism has infected the Tories. According to them, the party has diverted activists to campaign in James Cleverly's Braintree seat, described as a "once impregnable Essex stronghold with a notional majority of over 25,000."
And in some cases, the party’s candidates — not activists — who are supposed to be fighting northern seats have been deployed to knock on doors in natural Conservative areas in the south of England. Make of that what you will.
So, what happened? Peter Kellner has the answer and guess what? It’s Brexit.
Leave voters are abandoning the party in droves. From 74% in the ‘get Brexit done’ election of 2019, support for the Tories among those who had chosen to leave the EU has dropped to just 47%. A lot have switched to Reform, but others have gone to Labour. It’s pretty clear that the leave vote is being split between those who think Brexit was a mistake and the others who still believe in it but think it hasn’t been done properly.
The Tories are haemorrhaging support both ways because they delivered Brexit and it hasn't worked out and because they haven't delivered it and it hasn't worked out. This was always bound to happen when you oversell your product, which Johnson did in 2019 in spades.
I assume Iain Martin at The Times is in the 47% of leave voters who are sticking with the Tories, but he’s in a very small minority because in The Times he argues: You may hate Brexit but it’s working out well
This is the same man who pre-referendum toured the TV studios campaigning for a leave vote but breaking into a cold sweat at the thought of anyone asking the question: Which EU laws would you scrap? He personally had no idea but said in 2021: "In fields such as finance, trade and life science there were and are nerdy Brexiteers who can produce lists of Brussels red tape that needs to be slashed to improve competitiveness."
I wonder what happened to those nerdy Brexiteers and the list of red tape that "needs to be slashed"?
In his latest self-justifying piece he admits Brexit is unpopular, has made importing and exporting to the EU harder, has increased paperwork (i.e red tape) and made travel in Europe for UK citizens more complicated with the prospect of disruption and chaos when the EU's Entry/Exit system comes into force in October.
Despite that, he still maintains Brexit has been a success. Why? Well, sovereignty: "For those of us who voted for Brexit — and would vote for it again — this was about ensuring there was no one else to blame. This is working. The Tories are getting marmalised in part for losing control of immigration numbers and that is down to post-Brexit British policy."
But Brexit has contributed to that loss of control!! Next, the economy:
"And it is not as though leaving the EU has been an economic disaster. At worst it has made surprisingly little difference. Even the Office for Budget Responsibility’s claim — often misquoted — that Brexit has cost 4 per cent of UK GDP is shaky. The OBR claims this will happen over the long term: by some economists’ interpretations, over 15 years."
The figure is "shaky" - it could easily be worse and some economists think it already is. Four per cent of GDP is £100 billion a year in output and about £40 billion in tax revenue, equivalent to about 8p on income tax. But that's just dismissed as a mere trifle.
Brexit, Martin says, "comes with considerable upsides and it contains the seeds of our future prosperity."
He sounds like the Bolsheviks circa 1925. Yes, we know. Comrades, communism comes with considerable downsides but give it a few years and it will all work out fine. They were still saying that sixty years later.
In December 2016 he told us Brexit was a success before it had happened which reveals a certain mindset. For him, Brexit was always going to be a success even if we're reduced to eating grass and washing clothes in our own polluted rivers.
Eight years on he's already having to defend it because he acknowledges it's unpopular. Look out for plenty more where that came from.
