Conservatism is Dead

There will be no compromise.

Good afternoon everyone

I hope this finds you well, and not too shell shocked.

This is just a very short post detailing some immediate thoughts on the election.

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Do you remember the Brexit referendum? Back in 2016? Something about Europe? Oven baked in the oven and on a bus or something? Ask your parents. Good times. Anyway. When the votes from that Referendum were tallied the results came back 52 to 48 for Leave.

Brexiteers like me were delighted. Leave had won, so we would, we understandably assumed, be leaving the EU.

Well maybe.

Elite Remainers were beside themselves. This wasn’t a victory they cried. It was practically 50/50 they spluttered. Leave barely squeaked over the line they said.

But of course it was close. If support for each side wasn’t reasonably balanced there would have been no need for a vote in the first place. It’s why we don’t have referendums on whether we should ban Netflix or microwave kittens. The result is a foregone conclusion.

And yet because of the ‘closeness’ of the result the ruling Remainer class asserted that Leave had no mandate. And so they demanded ‘compromise’.

Their argument was that although we voted to Leave, the vote being so tight, we should only Leave a bit. That we should also be careful to ‘respect the wishes of Remain voters.’

And so the UK should consider staying in Customs Union, or the Single Market, or maybe even apply for an ‘Associate EU Membership’.

And actually, and let’s remember the result was so incredibly close, we should probably ask the public again, a second time, simply to ensure fairness, and a more definitive, and correct answer.

Now can you imagine the counter factual? If Remain had won by the same margin and the Leave side had demanded a compromise to reflect the closeness of the results? That we should Remain, sure, but maybe Leave a little bit? Maybe just dump Free Movement. That argument would have been laughed off as ridiculous sour grapes.

There are similarities with today’s Labour landslide.

Don’t get me wrong. Labour won fair and square. Starmer played a blinder and the Tories deserved everything they got. Or in this case didn’t get.

But Labour’s crushing victory hardly represents a compelling mandate.

Labour gained just 1% more in vote share than it received in 2019 under Jeremy Corbyn, about 33% , and yet won an extra 209 seats. Romping home with 412 . That means a majority of around 178.

How can this be? It’s the First Past The Post system obviously. Which skews the result in favour of any party that can shore up its vote in demographic redoubts.

What this means, (and I know YOU know this, this is for everyone else), is that if your party’s votes are spread evenly across the country, rather than concentrated in specific regions you will get far fewer seats compared to a more geographically focused party.

It’s why Reform only got 4 seats with four million votes. While the Lib Dems got a massive 71 seats with less, just three and half million votes.

It’s how the late, unlamented SNP could garner 48 Westminster seats back in 2019 with just 1.2 million votes. (1.2 million!!) Which is, to use an arcane psephologist’s term, absolutely mental. (So mental in fact that I felt to check it again here.)

I’ve crunched the numbers, (actually read this excellent Daily Telegraph article here) and it’s clear that Labour has simply benefited from the fact that the entire country had reason to despise ‘the natural party of government’.

As I say. I’m not taking anything away from Starmer’s stunning victory. But a mandate for fundamental social, economic and constitutional reform, this is not.

And you could bet that if the situation had been reversed and the Left had been ousted with a similar result we would be already hearing the shrill demands for compromise.

Commentators, grandees and ‘constitutional experts’ would have been lining up on the Today programme this morning to denounce the Tory victory as shallow and perhaps even illegitimate.

That such a victory must not represent a free hand for the Right. That Conservatives should avoid making sweeping, irreversible changes which ‘no one voted for ‘.

Of course this won’t happen. We’ll be told by our left wing progressive elite that today’s result is a truly historic endorsement of Labour and ‘Change’.

That the result represents nothing less than a call to arms, the full throated demand for a ‘People’s Revolution’.

How this victory gives Labour clear licence to repudiate our past, condemn our own history, to dismantle and decolonise the Old Order.

That this result is nothing less than the universal endorsement of whatever crackpot anti wealth, anti woman, anti British, pro Palestine, pro EU, pro immigration scheme they can come up with.

Conservatism is dead.

There will be no compromise.

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Thanks, as ever, for reading Low Status Opinions.

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Now the election is over I’ll be posting on Tuesday next week as normal.

Thanks again and all the best

LSO