How to lose elections XXXX

I have remarked here before about our era’s tendency to accept election results if your side wins but to reject them if they lose. Happily in the UK there is no significant body of opinion which believes that Jeremy Corbyn won the 2019 election. True, there are a few Momentum loons who still think that Corbyn would have won had the Tories not somehow got more votes. But even among the most diehard Momentum-ites few actually come up with stories of ballot rigging, high-level corruption and more.

Still, our country is not immune to the ‘I only accept the results if my side wins’ tendency. After all, we had Carole Cadwalladr and others insisting for years that the Kremlin had somehow mysteriously manipulated the 2016 Brexit vote. And I must say that after hating them for wasting our time, I have come to pity these obsessives. They have deprived themselves of one of the most important opportunities that elections give people – which is not just the opportunity to get your way, but the opportunity to learn why you didn’t.

Having lost in 2019, the Labour party recalibrated, appointing Keir Starmer to lead it into a more centrist direction. Imagine what good might have occurred in the past five years if the people who pretended that Brexit was somehow manipulated had likewise accepted the vote as a genuine expression of the public’s well-formed sentiments about the EU. Imagine if the EU had been able to accept the same, recognised where it itself had overreached and managed to course-correct accordingly. The fact that people as high up as the European Commission consoled themselves with lies about the reason for the vote is, in the end, to their disadvantage more than ours.

Elsewhere in the world the tendency is more pronounced. Obviously you have the case of the United States, where it is becoming almost impossible to agree on who has won a particular election.