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Lawrie McFarlane: U.K. election reveals a new working-class revolution

So Boris Johnson is king hereafter, and Brexit is a done deal. The Conservatives have rolled up a whopping majority, while Labour suffered their worst defeat since 1935.
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In addition to leading the Conservatives to a resounding win in the British election, Boris Johnson put an end to caucus infighting that plagued two of his predecessors, Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

So Boris Johnson is king hereafter, and Brexit is a done deal. The Conservatives have rolled up a whopping majority, while Labour suffered their worst defeat since 1935.

How did this happen, and where do we go from here?

The first of these questions is more easily answered than the second.

Johnson won because he offered an end to the bickering that had reduced the House of Commons to a parliament of fools. And he could make this promise because, before the election, he had rid his party of the 20 or so dissidents who wanted to remain in the European Union.

This was no small accomplishment. One of the MPs expelled was Winston Churchill’s grandson.

Yet the deed had to be done. Both Margaret Thatcher and her successor John Major were plagued by caucus infighting over whether to remain in the EU. At one point while premier, Major even resigned the leadership of his party, ran for re-election and won. He thought that would silence the conspirators. It did not.

Johnson absorbed this lesson. Either the dissidents were purged, or there was no guarantee he could make his promises stick.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, notably failed to take this step. He tried instead to straddle the divide in his own caucus by refusing to take a stance.

But the entire election was all about Brexit. There was no ducking the issue.

Where Britain goes from here is another matter.

Corbyn has said he won’t fight the next election, but that’s five years away. The suspicion is he wants to hang around long enough to hand-pick his successor.

Will his colleagues put up with this? They may have no choice. Corbyn still has backing in the party’s radical wing.

More important, whither Labour now? Some of the party’s proposals, for instance re-nationalizing industries such as utilities and rail, clearly backfired. And Corbyn himself was a polarizing figure.

But the real damage to Labour lay in its loss of working-class ridings that had been bastions of support since the party’s founding. Some of these voted Tory for the first time ever.

And here there are signs of a sea change. The Tories, once seen as a party of landed aristocrats and upper-class toffs, did best in districts with the fewest university graduates and the poorest workers.

By contrast, Labour collapsed in the industrial north, but clung on in cities with socially liberal voters. In effect the Conservatives are, for now, the party of low-income families, and Labour is the party of highbrow globalists, a complete reversal of roles. There are echos of Donald Trump capturing the rust-belt states across the American midwest.

Can Labour recover? There is some guidance here, and it’s not encouraging.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives defeated Michael Foot and the Labour party by a smaller margin than Johnson achieved.

It took Labour five elections, four different leaders and 18 years to get over that drubbing, in part because Foot had moved the party far from the centre. Indeed, Tony Blair, who finally turned the ship around, felt obliged to dub the party New Labour, pointedly burying the past.

Yet Corbyn has marched even further to the left. How long it will take the party to reach firm ground again is anyone’s guess.

What then of the Tories? A rough ride, I think.

Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit party, noted that Johnson’s deal with Brussels leaves intact some of the most intrusive instruments of EU officialdom. This will all too soon become clear.

Then you have the Scottish Nationalists, who gained 13 seats and basically own most of the country. As the price of their success, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon is demanding a second referendum on seceding.

From a Conservative perspective, that’s not all bad. If Scotland, which used to be a Labour stronghold, actually separated from the United Kingdom, it would strengthen the Tories’ hold on power.

However, if Johnson refuses to permit another referendum, as he has said he would do, Sturgeon will take her case to the Scottish courts. And the latter might very well support her.

Bottom line? On the 230th anniversary of the Bastille being stormed, Britain’s working-class voters have carried out their own revolution.

At what cost remains to be seen.