Democracy redux: the lessons of 2019

Britain’s parliamentary democracy is easily mocked: the medievalisms, the men in tights, the ayes to the right. But it has been preserved because it tends to work. It focuses minds and makes order out of chaos. Yet again we have a general election result that almost no one predicted — and one that offers plenty of lessons for those with an eye to see them.

The communities so often patronised as ‘left behind’, typically in northern and coastal towns, have now demonstrated that they are powerful enough to decide elections. During the Blair and Cameron eras they were written off as a declining demographic: older, poorer, less educated and often stuck in the past. The ‘modernising’ politicians, it was argued, needn’t worry too much about them.

Boris Johnson took a different approach, and it won him his historic majority. Voters in former Labour safe seats are now as important to the Conservatives as suburbia once was to Tony Blair.