The election results confirmed what we already knew: no one political party speaks for Britain. The kingdom is untied. Labour is becoming hegemonic in Wales, and is strong among the younger, liberal Europhile graduate classes in London and other English cities, but weak nearly everywhere else – including in its former Brexit-voting heartlands. Labour was once a coalition of the organised working class and the Fabian intellectual. Today the coalition is more fragile than it has ever been before, and a class culture gap has opened up. Something is missing. The invisible chain linking the nation together is broken.
In Scotland the SNP remains a formidable election-winning machine, despite its patchy domestic record, and the unionist vote is split among the three opposition parties. Behind the SNP’s triumphalism the results reveal that around 55 per cent of Scots voted for unionist parties just as a similar majority voted against independence in 2014. Scotland is deadlocked on the independence question. Can anything break the impasse? This much we know: because of the rise of Sinn Féin two constituent parts of the UK (I’m reluctant to call the contested province of Northern Ireland a nation) will be controlled by secessionist parties that are also more than parties: they are movements.
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