We lost, big time, and now I fear Johnson will turn Great Britain into Little Britain

In the end, it wasn’t even close. The Conservatives have returned to power in Britain with their biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 victory. No more hung Parliament and no more doubt that Brexit will go ahead, with the withdrawal bill likely to pass Parliament before Christmas.

For my party, the Labour Party, the result was devastating. Despite nine years of crippling austerity, Labour’s promise of real change just didn’t cut through. Instead, the result laid bare the deep divisions in the UK that we first saw so clearly with the 2016 Brexit referendum vote and which only feel to have grown in the years since.

I represent a very diverse constituency in north London, where thousands of European Union citizens have made their home and where the overwhelming majority of people voted to remain in the EU. Here in Hornsey & Wood Green, Labour’s promise of a final-say referendum and the chance to stop Brexit was extremely popular on the doorstep. Across the capital, our vote held up and we won back Putney, a south-west London seat that has been Conservative for the past 14 years. Had the remain supporting vote not been split in other London seats between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, that tally would have been higher.

But in many of the northern, traditionally Labour, heartlands that voted to leave the EU back in 2016, Labour has lost and it has lost big. That can’t all be explained by Brexit, and Labour needs a serious period of reflection before we attempt to move forward. But without doubt, Brexit played a role.

I believe it was absolutely right to back a final-say referendum, and it was something I’d long called for, but I fear we didn’t succeed in explaining why to leavers. As a result, and helped on by a hostile media, it was all too often seen as an attempt to “thwart the democratic will” rather than to protect jobs, our National Health Service and precious workers’ and environmental rights.

Three-and-a-half years of parliamentary stalemate and voter fatigue made Boris Johnson’s “Get Brexit done” slogan sound appealing to many, despite the fact it couldn’t be further from the truth. The mammoth job of negotiating the future relationship with the EU lies ahead, coupled with years of complex trade deals. With the Scottish National Party’s landslide result north of the border, a second Scottish Independence referendum and the potential break-up of the union looks ever more likely.

As we warned during the election campaign, our precious NHS is at risk in trade deals with Trump’s America, and US pharma giants may leave us paying more for the drugs that so many rely on.

The strength of the Conservative’s victory is particularly devastating because Johnson ran a campaign based on stoking fear and division. He condemned the three million EU migrants who have made Britain their home, our friends, our neighbours, for “treating the UK like it’s part of their own country”. He refused to apologise for the shameful language he’s used in the past against Muslim women, black and gay people, and he was accused by the bereaved father of the London Bridge terrorist attack victim Jack Merritt of treating his son’s murder as a “political opportunity”. At the same time, he played fast and loose with the truth.