It could hardly have gone worse for Labour. A catastrophic night saw them record their worst election result since 1935, and Jeremy Corbyn announced he would not contest the next election as leader.
What was behind the devastating collapse?
Brexit
From the moment the unequivocal exit poll was released at 10pm, ashen-faced Labour supporters sought to blame Brexit for the collapse. The party’s messaging had not been clear enough, they said, particularly when pitted against the pithy positivity of “Get Brexit Done.”
Meanwhile, the Conservatives’ plan to transpose the Leave coalition from the Brexit referendum went exactly to plan.
Jeremy Corbyn
As the night progressed, bringing news of the loss of more and more of their colleagues, a second pattern emerged, with Labour MPs beginning to vent their frustrations with the party’s leadership, directly blaming Corbyn for the poor showing.
As well as a Brexit election, many considered it a presidential contest between two divisive leaders. Seen through this prism, there was only one winner.
“The Labour party cannot win if it doesn’t have a leader who commands the confidence and trust in the British public,” said Helen Goodman, ousted from her seat in traditionally-Labour Bishop Auckland. “Until we do have such a leader we’re not going to win. As long as we don’t, we’re letting down the very people we were set up to support.”
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Tories raze the ‘Red Wall’
Bishop Auckland was one of many newly marginal seats that made up the “Red Wall” – constituencies that for decades have been comfortably Labour, but became the subject of a massive Conservative campaign push after they voted for Brexit.
Last night proved that the campaign was a resounding success. Bishop Auckland itself voted Conservative for the first time in its 134-year history, while Labour lost Tony Blair’s old constituency of Sedgefield, and the Teesside seats of Redcar, Darlington, and Stockton South – to name only a few.
The Brexit Party
Bolsover’s 87-year-old Labour MP Dennis Skinner also lost his seat after holding it for 49 years. A miner’s son, the “Beast of Bolsover” had the ignominious honour of being the 326th seat to fall to the Conservatives – handing them their official majority.
Bolsover is one of a number of seats where the presence of the Brexit Party apparently reduced the Labour vote share, as voters who wanted Brexit but couldn’t bear to vote for the Conservatives then had somewhere to go.
The Brexit Party, which did not win any seats, chose not to stand candidates in any seats contested by Conservatives. “I killed the Liberal Democrats and I hurt the Labour Party,” boasted party leader Nigel Farage.
The Remain split
In other seats, distrust between Remain parties precluded any form of “Remain alliance”, and the parties contested the same seats, splitting the vote. Of course, what the Brexit Party did for the Conservatives by unilaterally standing down in all Tory-contested seats would always have been difficlut for, for example, Labour and the Lib Dems, as both had pretensions to power.
Nevertheless, the Labour party was hurt by the Lib Dems in seats such as Kensington, where Labour’s Emma Dent Coad lost narrowly to the Conservative Felicity Buchan, with the Liberal Democrat Sam Gyimah taking many of the Remain votes from his Labour rival.
All recent Labour defectors who left citing anti-Semitism or Brexit equivocation, including Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger, failed to win their seats, whether they stood for the Liberal Democrats, Change UK, or as independents.
