Post Election Musings

OK, I've calmed down since the early hours, when I was in a state ecstasy over the election results rolling in.  Since then, Theresa May has, incredibly, clung on to power, despite losing her majority, by doing some kind of deal with a bunch of sectarian extremists from Northern Ireland (I thought Corbyn was meant to be the one who pandered to extremists).  It will all end in tears, mark my words.  The sheer arrogance of May is breathtaking: announcing that she was going to carry on with a minority government, she failed to acknowledge the fact tat she had just lost her parliamentary majority in an election she hadn't needed to call.  Most significantly, she failed to address the fact that she had justified calling said election on the basis that she was asking the electorate to give her a mandate to negotiate a 'hard Brexit' ('no deal is better than a bad deal') and that they had patently refused to grant her such a mandate.

Anyway, I thought I'd offer some final thoughts on the election, particular with regard to the opinion polls.  It is now clear that most of them were overestimating Tory support.  Or rather, they underestimated badly the turnout of Labour voters, particularly young Labour voters. The only polling organisation which consistently got it right, even correctly predicting a hung parliament, was YouGov, yet they were vilified throughout the campaign, with accusations that their methodology was wrong.  We now know that it wasn't.   It's obvious that mobilising the youth vote was key to Labour's unexpectedly good showing in the election.  Without taking anything away from Corbyn's role in this, I'm sure that the youth turnout was in large part down to lingering anger over the EU referendum, where the 'Leave' vote was fueled by older voters, much to the chagrin of predominantly 'Remain' younger voters.  What's essential now is that Labour continues to engage these voters and try to harness their support to try and further improve their electoral standing.  The high youth turnout can't be allowed to be a one off.

OK, that's it for now.  I'm sure I'll return to this subject, but for now, I'm exhausted from staying up too late reveling over the results.  I'm going to make myself a toasted cheese and bacon sandwich and doze through some bad TV.