Labour wants to blame Brexit, but that’s not the whole story. It not only lost traditional, working-class voters in the north who want to leave the EU; it also lost more affluent, more liberal voters in the south because of Corbyn’s far-left economic and foreign policies.
It’s a mixed night for the Scottish nationalists. They look to be regaining the seats they lost in 2017, but with a Conservative majority in Westminster they are unlikely to get a second independence referendum.
What went wrong for the Liberal Democrats: The British electoral system and the party’s policy of stopping Brexit without holding a second referendum conspired to convince many Brexit skeptics that Labour, once it threw its support behind a second referendum, was their best hope of keeping the United Kingdom in the EU. That split the anti-Brexit vote, allowing the Conservatives to prevail in prosperous southern constituencies the Liberal Democrats had hoped to flip.
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