IDENTITY POLITICS WINS BIG IN THE U.K. ELECTIONS

Audio Version

Not debatable: Inflatable Boris is also deflatable

by Kevin Scott

A Tory surge across most of England, particularly in white working class areas that voted strongly for Brexit in 2016, has smashed what remains of UKIP and its various offshoots and splinter groups. This includes For Britain, the party of former UKIP leadership contender Anne Marie Waters.

The governing Tories are largely benefiting from a combination of solving the Brexit impasse, after their 2019 general election victory, and a massive UK government spending splurge occasioned by the Covid crisis and lockdown. 

This boost led to significant local election gains across the Midlands and the north of England (i.e. Labour territory), and was further underlined by a thumping parliamentary by-election victory over Labour in its former safe seat of Hartlepool, in the north east of England. 

This defeat appears to have deeply rocked the increasingly London-centric Labour party. As a result, the UK Labour leader Keir Starmer, a ‘woke’ London lawyer, seems likely to face internal divisions over his leadership after barely a year in the job. And in London itself, Labour was pushed hard by a strong Tory showing across the city, with Sadiq Khan, another ‘woke’ London lawyer, needing second preference votes to retain his position as the capital’s mayor. Predictably, UKIP lost its two seats on the London Assembly and its mayoral candidate, a brave white bloke called Gammons, sank without trace.

In Scotland and Wales, there was heavy support for the SNP and Welsh Labour as incumbent parties that explicitly reflect the national and cultural identity of their respective voters. Despite winning the elections, both fell short of an overall majority in Edinburgh and Cardiff, though the results mean they will increasingly feel emboldened to strengthen devolution in their historic nations. Again UKIP lost all its seats in the Welsh Assembly thanks to an equivalent Tory surge in Wales.

Former SNP leader Alex Salmond, the potential nemesis of the current SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, following vicious SNP infighting, failed to win a seat, and his new breakaway separatist party called Alba also tanked. As did the strongly unionist electoral front led by George Galloway, a former Labour MP and, like Salmond, a television pundit for the UK ‘Russia Today’ news channel. The Scottish Labour party and its new Muslim leader failed to make any gains though it bizarrely benefitted from tactical voting by unionist voters seeking to stall the SNP’s drive for another independence referendum.

The overall lesson of these delayed elections is that national and cultural identity, whether Scottish unionist or English nationalist, increasingly drives the voting behaviour of most voters, while, oddly, Boris Johnson’s multicultural Conservative Party is the main recipient of both Scottish (and Welsh) unionist and English nationalist sentiment.

How this UK identity conundrum works itself out over the years ahead remains to be seen. But, for now, Boris Johnson (aka Alexander Kemal) has scooped the lot!