The British electoral system is very different from the American one. Campaigns in Britain are short, barely a month long. Much less money is spent on broadcast and digital media advertising than in America. Voters in Britain make only one mark on their ballots, for the member of the House of Commons from their district. Because Britain has a multi-party system, many candidates are elected to Parliament with less than 50 percent of the vote.
Still, there are some lessons from last week’s victory for Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party that should be learned by American politicians. Perhaps the most important is that in Britain, as in other European nations that have gone to the polls recently, class-based politics turned out to be much less important than cultural politics in explaining the election result.
Britain’s Labour Party was, for several generations, the electoral voice of those voters who identified as working class. From the 1940s through the era of Margaret Thatcher, Labour’s base was made up of constituencies in the Midlands and the North of England, and in Scotland, areas where the Industrial Revolution began in the early 19th century and, for nearly 200 years, remained dependent on manufacturing and mining for their economic prosperity.
As in the Great Lakes states of America, these traditional industries have faced hard times in the last two decades, as manufacturing has shifted from North America and Europe to Asia, and as technological developments and the climate crisis have substantially reduced the demand for coal.
The Labour heartlands in England were among those parts of the U.K. where voters most strongly supported leaving the European Union in the Brexit referendum in 2016. As the Brexit campaign put it, these voters wanted to “take back control” and remove what they saw as a threat to their jobs from workers from Eastern European nations newly admitted to the E.U. and willing to work for much less than traditional British wages.
The Conservatives ended up gaining 48 House of Commons seats in last week’s election, going from 317 to 365 seats in the 650-member House, more than enough for a comfortable majority. Most of the gains took place in lower-income, manufacturing-oriented constituencies in the English Midlands and North, the same areas that voted heavily for Brexit in 2016.
Twenty or 30 years ago, most working-class voters in these districts would never have even considered voting for the Conservatives, seeing them as a party of upper-class “toffs,” aristocrats, and other elites. In this year’s election, Johnson and the Conservatives successfully portrayed the opponents of Brexit, those who advocated a second referendum or otherwise delaying Britain’s departure from the European Union, as the out-of-touch elites who did not recognize the legitimate concerns of working-class voters.
Last week, Labour had its worst showing in any general election since 1935, reduced to a rump of 202 seats, less than one-third of the House of Commons. Most of the Labour members were elected from London-area districts strongly opposed to Brexit, from university cities, and from constituencies with a large number of voters from Caribbean, African and South Asian backgrounds.
Boris Johnson and the Conservatives successfully used the cultural politics of Brexit to attract the support of millions of working-class voters in traditionally Labour constituencies. This is basically the same approach that Donald Trump has used to win support from traditionally Democratic constituencies in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The Labour Party’s platform in last week’s election included proposals similar to those of many Democratic presidential candidates in the United States: raising taxes on the wealthy, spending more on health care and education, and starting a “Green New Deal” to encourage economic development and to combat the climate crisis. In the end, for many traditional Labour voters, these issues mattered much less than Johnson’s boast that he would “Get Brexit Done.”
Eric L. Davis is professor emeritus of political science at Middlebury College.