Society

In the immediate aftermath of an election, its meaning is established. Once this is fixed, it is almost impossible to shift. There are plenty of such mythical explanations for defeat. Most famously, in 1959 Hugh Gaitskell and his supporters claimed Labour had lost its third election in a row because of the party’s association with nationalisation. It soon became the conventional wisdom and, on that basis, Gaitskell tried to revise his party constitution’s Clause IV, which committed it in principle to the public ownership of industry. But it wasn’t necessarily true: Labour lost for many reasons, with Gaitskell in particular having made a terrible mistake over tax policy during the

This “Brexit election” was about a lot more than Britain and the European Union. It was about the future of globalisation. As Gordon Brown underlined after the referendum, voters who chose to leave the EU had suffered unrelenting indignities on the “wrong side of globalisation”. These voters rang the alarm bells again in the European parliamentary elections in May this year and once again at this general election. As prime minister, Boris Johnson’s test will not be whether he can deliver Brexit. Rather, history will judge him by his ability to counter his party’s conservative ideology and promote new opportunities for those who, with their children, are trapped in a

This week, politics becomes a little less volatile as Boris Johnson achieves the biggest Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher. So what happened in this election, and what next (00:50)? Katy Balls talks to Fraser Nelson and writer and broadcaster Steve Richards. Plus, China has interned over a million Uyghur Muslims in so-called ‘re-education’ camps – what is going on in Xinjiang (17:55)? Last year, Harald Maass went undercover to the region, and writes about his findings in this week’s issue. He talks to me on the podcast, together with Professor Rachel Harris, an Uyghur expert at Soas. And last, what are the rewards of mudlarking (31:25)? Lara Maiklem has found

In 2016, it was Sunderland that signalled what was to come. The North-Eastern town voted for Brexit by a margin of 61 to 39 per cent. That announcement was seen as a turning point on the night of the EU referendum – if a town as reliant on foreign manufacturing (namely the Nissan plant) could vote so decisively for Brexit then surely the rest of the country could well follow suit. The pound duly dropped three per cent in the minutes after the result, those cheering Leave supporters seared into the memories of those who stayed up to watch the count. This time around, will Blyth Valley become that symbolic