We can quibble about the numbers. It is technically true, that because the Tories also gained votes, this election result did not (as was widely misreported) see the biggest swing to Labour since 1945. For that to happen, the Conservatives would have had to lose votes to Labour. Instead what happened is that Labour won votes from UKIP (far more than anyone expected), the SNP and Greens, while the Tories gained far fewer than expected from UKIP and rather more anyone foresaw from the SNP. But the overall result saw the biggest direct increase in Labour’s General Election Vote Share since 1945. In 1945, there had not been an election for 10 years, because of the war. In 2017, the last election had been just 2 years earlier. So this was, by any reasonable standard, a historic result. What it actually meant, and what produced it, is, of course, a matter for debate. At least two popular explanations have been widely circulated. [...]
There is a slightly different explanation on offer, which is far more credible, although it also can be accused of seeking to downplay the significance of what looks like a historic result. From this perspective we are, more than ever, in an era of extreme voter volatility, with non-voters mobilisable, and swing voters swinging, in greater numbers than ever before. Perhaps a better way to describe this situation would be to say that it is one of greatly increased reversibility. Political outcomes and events which looked like they could not be altered any time soon can now, it turns out, quickly be turned around. The return of the Tories in Scotland surely stands as some evidence for this idea – nobody saw it coming, and nobody really thought that it was even physically possible. But this leaves open the question of why this peculiar form of reversibility has emerged, and should draw our attention to the fact that ‘voter volatility’ is not a new political phenomenon. Commentators have been commenting on it since the early 70s. [...]
I think it can. In recent years, post-Fordism has itself been increasingly displaced by a new form of capitalism relying on a new generation of technological innovations. The corporations which define our age – Facebook, Google, Apple, Uber, YouTube – do so not through their specialised fragmentation in pursuit of niche markets, but through the constitution of massive monopolistic platforms which enable them to profit directly from the creative activity and labour of their users. Andrew Goffey and I actually interviewed the great British economist, Robin Murray – the person responsible for Marxism Today adopting the term ‘post-Fordism’ – in 2015 , and he explained in that interview that post-Fordism was now being displaced by this new form of capitalism: what Nick Srnicek calls in his recent book ‘Platform Capitalism’ (see also Alex Williams in ‘Control Societies and Platform Logic’). [...]
One thing that is now evident from the election result is that May’s strategy of appealing to socially conservative, pro-leave Labour voters proved catastrophically unsuccessful, even in Birmingham (a traditional redoubt of working class conservatism, since the days of Joseph Chamberlain). Labour achieved its result by inspiring a new social coalition which included working class voters from all but the most traditionally conservative of the Labour heartlands, young voters of almost all class backgrounds, across every region , and many affluent voters in the South, frightened for their children’s future at a time when even the offspring of the professional classes have seen their historic privileges eroded out of existence by neoliberalism and austerity.
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