This is one of the most frustrating threads to read on here, and that’s saying something!
When using the 2019 general election to try and say that the Tories ‘landslide’ showed that everyone in the country really wanted Brexit, let’s not forget that more people voted for Labour and the Liberal Democrats than voted Conservative. The fact that the Tories got loads more seats than those two parties combined, despite having less votes (??) is just a sign of our broken and illogical electoral system.
Yes. Which is why they were like a dog avoiding bath time when it came to a second referendum, but they weren’t afraid to have more than one general election that wasn’t due between 2016 and 2019. Despite the fact that people had “already decided” what they wanted their government to be, and so it was undemocratic to keep having more elections until they got the result that they wanted. That was their own argument as to why a second referendum would be naughty and bad - you can’t keep making people vote again because it didn’t suit the last time. Apparently.
They knew what would most likely happen if there were a second referendum, but they also knew that because of the way the electoral system works, they could win seats in a GE purely by taking all of one side of the argument, while several other parties split the vote on the other side of it. As I said earlier, you can win a seat in a general election with 40% of the vote in a constituency (not even in some cases), purely because you get all of Side A while Side B split their votes across several options, thus losing the seat. The hard facts and the numbers are there if you look at the popular vote of the last GE (you can even throw the EU elections in for a laugh if you like), and if you want to make claims about the ‘mood of the nation’ then given the referendum was apparently reflective of exactly that - it was expressed via a method of one vote, for or against, and adding them all up at the end - then you can’t suddenly move the goalposts if you want to claim nothing has changed. The general election was a single issue election, and the number of people who voted for ‘remain / second ref’ parties versus those who voted for ‘leave’ parties is there in black and white. The trouble is, 99% of one side went entirely for one party, and the other side split across multiple options in various ways up and down the country. That’s the way the system works, and that’s why they wanted another GE desperately last year but would never, ever have stood for any form of second referendum. If you make a general election about one single topic, and you are the only player on your side of the argument, you are very likely to win even if only 40% or so of the country is on your side. It’s no more complex.
How it went was tactically sound - checkmate, goodnight, got ‘em. Nobody can say it didn’t work, but they also can’t claim it means something it doesn’t. If someone wants to pretend that a popular vote is irrelevant in terms of validating a popular vote - and that’s all the referendum was, so that’s the only way you can measure it in terms of who thinks or wants what later on - they’re either incredibly disingenuous or too stupid to realise they’re comparing apples to oranges.
As I said before, absolutely nothing wrong with a smash and grab win. Greece circa 2004 will tell you that - they’re the ones with the medals and the trophy. It was a moment in time, and it was theirs. You’d think winning would be enough.