Election night will bring change in Britain

Best be prepared, for it will be a hard day’s night. You’ll need a blanket, snacks, and an additional screen, so you’re ready for the moment at 10pm on Thursday night when the chimes of Big Ben strike and the counting of votes in the British General election begins. In our elections, we wait until the morning, but that is alien to the British. It’s an all-night job and someone has to stay up to watch it.

Staying up all night is not something you usually look forward to doing in your forties. But this is one nighttime ritual that age has not dimmed in me. I’ve been doing it for years. Back in 1997, then a student, I spent the night in the Edinburgh University Student Club, cheering loudly as one Tory after another was defeated. And if defeating Tories is your definition of a good night out, then by all predictions on this Thursday night things can only get better.

Those who keep vigil overnight will see not just the votes being counted, but power slipping from the grasp of one party and moving to another. Because the British use first past the post rather than PR-STV, you will see this happening in a matter of hours, as seats change hands rapidly. In our system, you have to wait days before you know, and weeks before the coalition deal is done. By 7am on Friday morning, the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer will be preparing to deliver his victory speech outside Number 10.

That is, of course, if he wins. But it looks like he will, not least because no one else seems in any way likely to do so. The British Prime Minster Rishi Sunak has had a few weeks which no one would wish on their worst enemy. From calling the election in the pouring rain, to watching his poll numbers first collapse and then stagnate, he looks like a man who will be glad to have the agony over. The Tories aren’t even pretending they can win any more. They are simply trying to limit the scale of the defeat. And that is not a dignified look.

Labour’s likely victory will bring them back into power for the first time in 14 years. After their long spell in charge from 1997 to 2010, it wasn’t really thought that it would take them so long to get there again. But a quick look at the last 100 years would have provided clues. The Tories have dominated the last 100 years in British electoral life. They have had long spells in charge: from 1951-64, from 1979-97, and again now from 2010-24.

The question for Labour now is just how long it will take them to get out of the mire that the country is in. Immigration as an issue is tearing the country apart. The public finances are a mess. The National Health Service is under pressure, Britain has no effective social care system, and the education system is straining. Brexit has been the disaster we all knew it would amount to. Addressing all these issues will be a big challenge, and an even bigger one is that Labour have said so little during the campaign about how they are going to go about it. That means they have no clear mandate for whatever approach they take.

One of the commitments they have made is to not raise taxes or cut spending. But if you cannot cut spending, and you won’t raise taxes, the only way to generate more income is for your economy to grow. And the British economy has been sluggish for years, and Brexit has played no small part in that. Poll after poll has shown that a large majority of British people think Brexit was a mistake, and an even higher percentage think it hasn’t been successful. A majority – albeit a smaller one – say they would vote to rejoin. But Keir Starmer hasn’t pledged to do that because he is afraid of losing working-class voters who voted for Brexit in 2016 and for Boris Johnson and his ‘Get Brexit Done’ slogan in 2019. Starmer’s government will do sensible things to align Britain’s economy closer to the EU – and this will help in Northern Ireland – but without fully rejoining the Single Market, it is hard to see where the economic growth his government will need to pay the bills is going to come from.

On immigration, it is clear that Starmer opposes the Rwanda scheme of the current government, but it is less clear what he proposes to do about the issue when he is in charge. He talks in tough but vague terms about it. That is fine in opposition but in government vagueness won’t cut it. And any British government that does not deal with this issue in an effective way is going to find governing difficult.

That is the story of the main battle that will be addressed on Thursday night. But there are many others. How many seats will the Tories actually win? How low could it go? And what does the post-election Tory party do? Does it go down the road of Trumpism or does it try and pull back to the centre? Their decision on that will in many ways be determined by how well or how badly Nigel Farage and his Reform Party does in the election. If they do well, many in the Tory party will conclude that they need to unite with them. If they do, that party will make Donald Trump blush. And we can laugh about it here if we like. But if the Labour government fails – and parties like them all over Europe have been failing in government – then we had better be prepared for the election of an extremist Tory government sometime in the next decade. That will be more you ain’t seen nothing yet than things can only get better.

There is then Scotland. Will a resurgent Labour break the control of Scotland’s politics by the Scottish National Party, the SNP? The SNP has gone from tower of strength to leaky cauldron in less than a year. The result in Scotland’s 57 constituencies will have a major impact on whether there is any possibility of a referendum on independence. If Labour wins a majority of seats, that question will be over, at least for the noo, as they say there.

And then there is the question of how the Liberal Democrats and Greens will do. And that is before we consider what happens in Northern Ireland, which deserves an article or two on its own.

It all starts at 10pm on Thursday night. There will be an exit poll, there will be a prediction, there will be a lot of talk about ‘swing’, which is, in percentage terms, a number which tells you how many voters who went Tory in 2019 have gone for Labour now. If the swing is big, Labour wins big. And if it is, the election as a contest and a source of drama will be over before too long. But I will still be up to see the new dawn because that is what an election night should be all about.