The elections – in memes

It started with a Tory apparently not aware that part of Ireland was still in the United Kingdom.

Might that set the tone for a bad day for the Conservative Party? No. Soon, it instead became very clear that a lazy assumption of the last forty years simply was not true.

And it then became clear that the Labour Party had made a calamitous choice of leader, and it was destroying their electoral performance.

And other senior Labour figures began to realise that their fervent desire to shift to the centre ground of British politics was absolutely not the guarantee of better times that they had imagined.

The loss of Hartlepool was almost expected, due to poll news over the previous few weeks, even though Labour had held the seat since its creation. But the bruising margin of defeat was beyond even their worst fears.

Keir Starmer was nowhere to be seen for most of the day, clearly hiding from view as he struggled to think of a response to the unfolding catastrophe.

Starmer’s cowardice did not go unnoticed by a lot of the public.

Then the Scottish Parliament results started to come in. The news was shocking for Labour, which did not secure its first seat until almost 7:30pm. By that point, the Scottish National Party had raced out to over thirty-five seats. Even the Tories had managed two seats north of the border before Labour got off the mark.

Starmer finally got in front of the TV cameras to make a show of looking and sounding ‘defiant’ and ‘determined’, but instead his barked, angry answers to questions simply made him sound like a Dalek. He was evasive, tried to offload the blame onto his predecessor, and sounded agitated instead of a man in control.

But by lunchtime on Saturday, the outlook had still not improved for Labour, least of all in Scotland, where their number of seats had risen to the dizzy heights of two. The SNP, by this point, had secured forty-three, and needed just twenty-two to form a majority.

The only glimmer of happy news for Labour was winning a small-but-sustainable majority in the Welsh Assembly. But that was won under the leadership of left-winger and Corbyn-sympathiser, Mark Drakeford.

But the most dismal development was of course the non-development of the Labour Party mindset. They just seem constitutionally incapable of admitting that they made a terrible mistake in rejecting leftism and then, when it refused to die out completely, declaring war on it.

What do the Labour centrists do in the face of all this overwhelming evidence? They see every development as confirmation that they were correct to move away from the left. If they did well in these elections, they would interpret it as approval from the public for the shift away from Corbyn, and an encouragement to move even further right. Because they did so badly in these elections, they interpret it as disapproval from the public for not shifting far enough away from Corbyn, and an encouragement to move even further right. Whichever door is open to them, they will always try to walk through the same one.

Anything, it seems, other than face the very obvious reality, the true lesson of these elections; the left have stopped supporting Labour once and for all. Most of them briefly rallied to the red flag while Corbyn was leader, but now that they have been purged and bullied to the point of unassailable hatred, the party has lost its most important core support base. Without them, the Labour Party is becoming just the Liberal Party of the 1930s. But still, they do not want to see it.