Boris Johnson Will Change Britain Forever

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/opinion/sunday/uk-election-boris-johnson.html

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LONDON — Boris Johnson gambled everything on an election and won.

Called to resolve the intractable problem of Brexit, the election on Thursday — undertaken in winter, itself a sign of political crisis — delivered the Conservative Party its first commanding majority in over 40 years. The scale and shape of the victory surpassed projections: Parliament will be full of acquiescent Conservative legislators while the opposition Labour Party teeters on the precipice of civil war.

Mr. Johnson now has the means to do as he pleases. At the end of his term in five years, Britain will be a very different place. Out of the European Union for a start, but perhaps also no longer a union of nations. In its sinews and its structure, its economy and its culture, British society will be forever changed by Mr. Johnson’s premiership.

At the start, this election did not seem likely to usher in transformative change. Voters appeared displeased with the whole affair, and the course of the campaign itself was distinguished by evasion and mendacity, especially from the Conservative Party and its leader. The chief slogan, “Get Brexit Done,” was plastered over all their materials, while their spending promises — a partial reversal of the austerity worldview that has characterized Conservative economic policy since 2010 — were sold as being possible only after Brexit was resolved. The party presented Brexit as a simple hurdle, rather than a process likely to take a decade. For an election that hinged on the subject, there was surprisingly little detailed conversation about it.

Instead, Mr. Johnson and his campaign team concentrated on the threat from Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, whose tenure is in effect finished. They briefed vastly inflated figures in tax costs that then circulated in huge — often third-party funded — digital ad buys, as well as constant coverage in the press. Mr. Johnson’s advisers also shielded him from difficult interviews and effective scrutiny — depositing him in a fridge at one point to avoid an early morning interview. The press did little to counteract such slipperiness, and at times seemed even to connive in it.

By contrast, Labour’s campaign attempted to make the election effectively a referendum on austerity and the past decade of Conservative rule — and especially the risk to the National Health Service from an American trade deal. Its manifesto was by some way the most serious, especially on climate change. And it mobilized many thousands of activists in door-knocking campaigns, and mounted a huge digital campaign. But between Mr. Corbyn’s personal unpopularity, a media focused, often inanely, on Brexit, and four years of attacks on the leadership by dissatisfied backbenchers — as well as a sometimes dizzying number of policies — it was hard to cut through the noise.

The result is clear: The electoral map has been redrawn. Scotland, in disgust, returned a near full sweep for the Scottish National Party, all but wiping out both major parties. In England and Wales, the story was more stark still. Seats held by the Labour Party since the end of World War II fell to the Conservatives, as the party faced bruising losses in areas it has long regarded as its heartlands. The loss of dozens of seats across the Midlands and the North — including Blyth Valley, a former mining constituency ranked at 116 on the Tory target list — testifies to the depth of the defeat and ensures Labour’s vote is much more geographically constrained to the major cities.

Many voters will look at an unfamiliar country and grasp for explanations. Many, especially in the cities where Labour made its few gains on Thursday night, will reach for Brexit — that traditional Labour voters who opted to leave in the 2016 referendum wanted above all to see Brexit carried out, and so either voted for the Conservatives or abstained altogether. But Brexit is a symptom and an accelerant, not an explanation in itself. Many of the seats Labour lost in this election have been taken for granted by the party for a long time. It is little wonder that pro-Brexit voters in such seats felt scant loyalty to a party committed, after much agonized prevarication, to a second referendum.

Brexit is also an opportunity for Mr. Johnson: It offers him the chance to remake the economic and political foundations of Britain. He will likely pass his Brexit deal through Parliament before Christmas. But when Britain finally floats free of the European Union, some of the delusions driving Mr. Johnson’s Brexit — a swashbuckling Global Britain, Empire 2.0 — will be decidedly dashed. The trade world is likely to be much more brutal; Britain’s economy, already replete with ill-paying, gig-economy jobs, will surely suffer. Whether this sobriety hits before the June deadline for Mr. Johnson to request an extension — which his manifesto ruled out — to negotiations on a new trade deal with the bloc is an open question. But while traditional Conservative voters can afford the turbulence of a hard exit, his newly-acquired constituents cannot.

Though now less restive, Parliament will not all be plain sailing for Mr. Johnson, either. Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the ascendant Scottish National Party, has signaled her intention to hold a new referendum on independence next year. Meanwhile, the special status accorded to Northern Ireland in Mr. Johnson’s deal infuriates many Unionists — and could accelerate moves toward a United Ireland. Major constitutional showdowns seem likelier as Brexit shakes out. A confrontation between Ms. Sturgeon and Mr. Johnson seems inevitable.

Nor is it certain that the Tories’ spending plans, hardly extensive, will survive any economic impacts from Brexit. We may experience a bout of early Reagan-style spending from the right — some hospitals here, some schools there — but it’s unlikely to adequately stem the crisis in social care or holes in local government budgets.

What is certain is that the Conservatives will pursue their manifesto promises with zeal. They will pursue headline-grabbing measures, like redrawing constituency boundaries and legislating for voter ID checks, widely understood as locking in Conservative electoral advantage. They plan a sweeping review of the Constitution, including the powers of the Supreme Court, widely perceived as revenge for it stymying Mr. Johnson earlier this year.

They promise a euphemistic “update” of the Human Rights Act, more respectable than previous manifesto commitments to scrap it outright. They promise criminalization of Roma and Travellers, another traditionally nomadic population, along with powers to confiscate their property. They promise the conventional Tory red meat of more draconian sentencing and ever harsher borders. These are terrifying prospects.

As Britain has learned before, bitterly, Conservatives do not squander their majorities. Now they have a big one, and five full years to use it.

James Butler (@piercepenniless) is a co-founder of Novara Media whose writing has appeared in The Guardian, The London Review of Books and Vice.

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