Hope dominates reaction to General Election

The amazing events in the Election, that saw the Tories lose their majority and need to form a coalition with the Ulster Unionists, is the subject of a lot of soppy stuff in the Guardian today about the importance of the youth vote in Labour's success. The rag, the Labour leader (Corbyn)  and some of the young themselves are using a borrowed US slogan and seeing it as the 'election of hope'. Rather a backsliding compared to the solid, rather Keynesian, economics in the Labour Manifesto that got my vote.

I was only ever remotely likely to vote Tory to consolidate Brexit, but was reassured by Labour's slow realization that they would not be able to renationalise the railways or subsidise industry (probably not HE either) if we were still in the EU.

Of course, luvvies saw it the other way around. For them, it raised new hopes for a 'soft Brexit' (ie not really a Brexit at all), because the Tory policy of 'hard Brexit' had also been defeated at the polls. In what a later comtributor to the programme called a 'typical BBC love-in', Newsnight luvvies E Davis and N Watt were slyly and smugly nudging and winking that Brexit might be over.

'Hopeful' discussion also turned on whether the EU would be prepared to delay talks (clinging to straws) but the answer seemed to be no. The EU leaders seem as childishly hurt and vengeful as ever but also in their own acceptance phase of bereavement.

Overall, this election is hard to interpret, of course. You might have expected the BBC and the Guardian to have discussed some of these other options. People might have voted against Tory austerity as well as Tory Brexit. The Tory weakness in Parliament might actually deliver more power to the real Eurosceptics in the Conservative Party -- any small group will now be able to threaten the Government. A former darling of the Remainer luvvies was N Sturgeon, leader of the Scot Nats, who was very pro-EU -- Scot Nats lost a third of their seats, mostly to Tories. Was that a vote against anti-SNP policies, a new Scottish Independence referendum, or the EU? (There was a sizeable minority for Brexit in Scotland, of course, although you would never know it.)

As always, we can now expect an ideological struggle to hegemonise the situation... (NB I would use terms other than 'hegemony', blighted forever for me by its association with 'designer Marxism' and Britiish Cultural Studies), but Guattarian terms would take too long -- perhaps 'discursivisation of materio-signaletic expression, semiotized via a tensor of consistency')