The (Anti-)Politics of the General Election: Funnelling Frustration in a Divided Democracy

‘All general elections are interesting; some are surprising; only a few can be described as astonishing,’ David Denver notes in his contribution to this volume, ‘The latter certainly applies to 2017.’ This is certainly true but what also made the election remarkable was the emergence of anti-political sentiment as a key resource for a mainstream party, channelled through a particular blend of hybrid populism. To develop this argument and dissect what might be termed the (anti-) politics of the General Election this chapter is divided into three sections. The first section seeks to place the General Election within its broader historical and comparative context and places particular emphasis on the post-Brexit collapse of UKIP and how this changed the political landscape in ways that Labour would later exploit. The second section develops this argument by arguing that ‘the Corbyn effect’ was essentially synonymous with the adoption of a populist strategy that sought to re-frame the Labour Party as a fresh, new, anti-political, anti-establishment ‘outsider’ party. This re-positioning of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn represents arguably the most ‘astonishing’ element of the 2017 General Election and helps explain how the party exceeded expectations to secure ‘a glorious defeat’. The final section reflects on the long-terms risks of this strategy in terms of the perils of playing with populism.