Making Sense of the General Election

Once again the indomitable John Curtice and his exit poll teams hit the nail on the head. Leaving members from all the major parties doubting the exit polls findings until the results started flooding in. The people of the UK had once again defied expectations and denied the conservatives the majority which had been predicted by the majority of polls and pundits.

Those fed up with Theresa May's robotic repetition of 'Strong and Stable' instead of anything approaching coherent policies decided to send a strong message and deprive her of the one thing she had called for in this election, a majority.

Those fed up with Theresa May's robotic repetition of 'Strong and Stable' instead of anything approaching coherent policies decided to send a strong message and deprive her of the one thing she had called for in this election, a majority. In England, this took the form of a huge surge for Labour across the country and Scotland was not immune to this with Labour seeing results, unlike anything they've seen since the independence referendum. A result that was achieved through a Corbyn bounce in support in spite of the hard-core unionism of Scottish Labour, despite what many of their terribly unsuccessful 'leading light's would have folk believe. Even with this bounce, Scottish Labour came a sad third place again behind the Tories. Likely in no small part to their relentless singing of the Tory 'no surrender to another referendum' hymn sheet.

The SNP had another historic night - not quite managing to reach the heady heights of 2015 when they took 95% of the seats in Scotland - winning a comfortable majority of seats in Scotland and showing once again that the people of Scotland trust them to represent the country in Westminster. Of course, big names like Alex Salmond and Angus Robertson will be missed (for however long they are out of the game) but this doesn't come close to detracting from what is the parties 2nd best performance in its history, quite an improvement from the 6 seats they had heading in to the General Election in 2015. This election is historic but shouldn't be confused for something it isn't, namely a referendum on having an independence referendum (which would have been won by the SNP). What this election is is a vote of no confidence in Theresa May and her ideological Hard Brexit obsession and all good.

This election is historic but shouldn't be confused for something it isn't, namely a referendum on having an independence referendum (which would have been won by the SNP). What this election is is a vote of no confidence in Theresa May and her ideological Hard Brexit obsession and all good democratics across these islands should commit themselves to fighting against it and for a different progressive vision.