May Will Get A Big Majority Which Will Legitimise Brexit

One of the things about general elections is that once they are over, suddenly everything that happened during the campaign seems a long time ago and it is almost impossible to think yourself back to how things seemed before. The biggest example was 1997.  The day before the poll it was far from obvious to anyone who wasn’t looking for it that anything was happening.  There were I think more canvassers out than usual, but not a huge number.  It wasn’t at all obvious despite the long lasting and clear Labour lead in the polls that Labour was even actually going to win.  The Tories had bashed Labour’s hopes down so often over the previous decades that it seemed hard to imagine it was really going to be a Labour politician that was heading towards the palace.


But once it was all over, retrospectively it seemed obvious.  Of course Labour were going to win.  Tony Blair was an electoral genius.  (Even though the Labour poll lead was in fact in place before he became leader.)  We were on the verge of a new dawn.

Only a few days before the 1997 eleciong C onservatives were still the natural party of government.  But it took years for them to get back to a position of being taken seriously again as serious competition.  

And so it will be on June 9th of 2017,  just over a month after the 20th anniversary of the Labour landslide.  The result will quickly achieve the status of being inevitable.  My guess at the time of writing this is that the Conservatives will comfortably achieve a large majority and Theresa May will have her own mandate.  She will then be able to last 5 years if she wishes and put into place whatever programme she sees fit.    Labour will have lost seats and will be demoralised.  There will be talk about whether they are in fact even going to survive.


So it is worth recording the current mood.  Because at the moment Labour supporters are elated by Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign.  He has outperformed expectations.  His large and well attended public meetings have been upbeat.  He has even achieved a big turnaround in the poll numbers, reducing the Tory lead by double figures.  To be sure, none of this success appears to have been achieved by doing the thing that  would actually lead him to win.  The Tory vote has solidified.   They look pretty impregnable in fact.

Once the votes are counted we’ll know the details.  But it is pretty normal for the polls to understate Labour’s actual seat haul.  It is not impossible that the new Labour contingent in parliament will be a lot smaller than the current one.   This means that Theresa May will be able to get her way on Brexit.   And Brexit will now have a proper parliamentary mandate.  This will make the leaving process feel a lot more legitimate.  And it will also seem that it was inevitable.  But it won’t make it any easier.