I voted after work on Thursday night, venturing out in the cold and dark to cast my ballot. I’m in one of the safest Labour seats in the country, but one can’t be too careful.
I was nervous. The polls had narrowed in the run-up to polling day, and there was chatter of another hung parliament. On Twitter it was suggested that big names like Dominic Raaaab and even Boris Johnson himself were in trouble, thanks to tactical voting in their constituencies. Even so, it was hard to ignore the opinion polls which still showed a big lead for the Tories.
I tried to distract myself by keeping busy. I answered some emails, wrote out my Christmas cards, scrolled through some photos from my sister’s wedding on Facebook. By 9.45 though, I was nervously pacing up and down, unable to concentrate on anything else. This election was a battle for the soul of our country, and would have effects far beyond this one Parliamentary term.
Then at 10pm, the bomb dropped:-
Exit Poll Forecast: Conservative Majority #BBCelection #GE2019 pic.twitter.com/epJYYpRo2y
— BBC Election (@bbcelection) December 12, 2019
I’m glad I didn’t write “Happy New Year” in any of those Christmas cards – it would have sounded sarcastic.
I remember crying after the 2015 election result. This time was different – perhaps because it wasn’t quite as unexpected, although the size of the majority was a shock. Just as on 24 June 2016, I felt numb – which certainly helped when I logged onto Facebook and the timeline algorithm promptly delivered a load of optimistic “we can do this!” memes posted a few days earlier by pro-Remain groups. When the statement from the People’s Vote campaign – accepting that there was no chance of another referendum – dropped into my email inbox mid-afternoon, it barely registered.
The election result wasn’t a surprise, but I am still deeply disappointed and disturbed by it. During the campaign, much was made of Johnson’s history – of his racist and homophobic statements, not to mention his dishonesty. He managed to make a virtue of it – for example, continuing to brazenly claim that 40 new hospitals would be built even when fact checkers confirmed the correct figure was six upgraded hospitals. He avoided tough interviews in favour of a selfie in the This Morning studio.
Now that lying, racist arsehole is in charge of the country for five, possibly ten, years. What message does this send out? That you can lie, avoid scrutiny and still win big?
And the Tories are going to rig the next elections – with boundary changes and voter ID rules – to try to ensure they are in power forever.
The finger is being pointed at Corbyn, but there’s plenty of blame to go around elsewhere too. The People’s Vote campaign, who decided to implode and descend into civil war at the exact same time the election was called. The “Tactical Voting” websites that recommended the wrong parties. The Lib Dems who refused to countenance working with Labour – standing a candidate in marginal Canterbury even when their original choice, Tim Walker, stood down. The Labour party for managing to convince Brexiters that they were a Remain party, and Remainers that they were a Brexit party.
The consequences of Brexit, and the damage it will do to the economy, our country and its standing in the world, will resonate for years, probably decades. Scotland is probably going to become an independent country, and who could blame the Scots for choosing to do so? There’s also a chance that Ireland could be reunified. That leaves us as Little England, a poorer place, culturally and economically. The racists and bigots are not just emboldened, they are in charge, and they’re planning to wreck the place.
In all likelihood, we will be dealing with the fallout from this for the next forty or fifty years – the rest of my life, basically. And I can’t stop thinking about how my beautiful, perfect, 21-month-old niece – the best thing to happen to our family in a long time – will now grow up in cold, cruel Tory Britain.
It still hasn’t quite sunk in for me yet, but I have some thinking to do about my own future. This is the country I was born in, the country I grew up in. But it no longer feels like home.