The country didn't suddenly becomes heartless overnight. Sorry, I should rephrase that. I don't believe that Britain is (enitrely) a place of selfish, intolerant, poor-bashing Tories. And, really, the statistics agree with me on that.
More people voted for progressive ideas (Labour-Lib Dems-Greens) than voted for the conservative ideas (Tories-BXP), both in the UK as a whole and more narrowly in England. And I'm inclined to believe that the conservative vote was artificially inflated by Brexit, the divisive issue of the day.
For those who see "Getting Brexit Done" as the main issue, it is not a simple matter to write them off as secret Tories voting for privatisation. I'm sure many of them want to save the NHS. I'm sure many of them care about the least well off.
But are electoral system is flawed and our institutions painfully rigged up for hostility to radical progressive change. And last night, that resulted in Boris winning 50 more seats and a majority with an increase in support of just 1%.
More damaging for progressives was that Labour lost 8% of their vote compared to 2017, which spread out across the other parties. Conservative gains where less impactful than - or perhaps rather depended upon - Labour losing votes to other parties.
The stats present a picture of progressives playing the electoral game less well than the Conservatives.
Part of that, but only a part, was Brexit. The Conservatives identified themselves clearly with one polarised side of the debate and got their message through. Labour hedged bets.
But the reasons people voted for Brexit were more complicated than people perhaps like to admit - and Brexit supporters, even in the North, were more middle class than people like to admit.
Sure, former industrial towns in the North voted for Brexit, and then for the Tories yesterday. Yet, as Anoosh Chakelian of the New Statesman wrote, it's a long time now since these places were industrial. I'll be keeping an eye out for a demographic analysis of Tory voters in the North.
However, none of this will be terribly reassuring for those who wake up to the terror of a five year Tory majority.
Those people are on my mind this morning. I think those people were on George Monbiot's mind too when he put together a thread of what we can do next - stressing that community action becomes imperative now, to protect as many people as we can.
And that, I think, feeds how progressives fight back politically.
Something has to change to make the outcome different next time. I think Monbiot is right, we need to start in our communities. And I think Chakelian is right, too: Labour's problems in the North didn't start with Corbyn and won't end there.
People are terrified by their declining living standards. Others are helpless, their living standards having hit rock bottom with food banks and mounting debts. We need to start organising help for those most in need and maybe find there, or build there, a sense of optimism with which to appeal to the 'squeezed middle', to bring them back into a progressive coalition.
For that, progressive politicians need to get their heads out of Westminster. Labour vs Lib Dem vs Green infighting serves no one but the Tories. They need open, amiable leaders committed, not just willing, to cooperating to offer something optimistic.
And I think maybe more needs to be done on top of that. This can't just be won in Westminster and on social media. There needs to be some tangible movement behind it.
A proper electoral alliance. A proper progressive front. And beneath it all, community action. Municipal movements, rallying individual, concerned citizens together with campaign groups on homelessness and rent, payday lending and benefits debt, on all these cause and more than leave me cold and afraid.
The government for the next five years is not going to represent the majority. Well, nothing new there. But there are plenty of people - the most vulnerable, mostly - who depend upon the state.
We need to do what we can to try and pick up the slack for those people and start building towards winning back the support they need and put that central to our thinking as we move forwards.
References
'Election results 2019: Analysis in maps and charts'; on the BBC; as 13 December 2019.
Anoosh Chakelian's 'I'd say this is so much more than *just* Corbyn or *just* Brexit changing the electoral map. Labour was slipping like this already under Ed Miliband (remember Ed Balls losing marginal Morley and Outwood after a big Ukip surge in 2015?)'; of the New Statesman, on Twitter; 13 December 2019.
Lorenza Antonucci, Laszlo Horvath & André Krouwel's 'Brexit was not the voice of the working class nor of the uneducated – it was of the squeezed middle'; from LSE Blogs; 13 October 2017.
George Monbiot's 'OK, so this is what we're going to do. We double down on support/giving networks for the people this government is going to dump on. It won't make up for the failures of the state, but we'll do our best. We support each other with love and strength through the dark times Thread/'; on Twitter; 13 December 2019.
Phil Reilly's 'If the LDs are now in 2nd place to the Tories in 100+ seats & Labour 2nd to them in 200+, the next election needs to be more like 1997. Labour needs a leader who is warm, not hostile, to the LDs, as Blair was. And the LDs need to be open & not antagonistic in return'; on Twitter; 13 December 2019.
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