My reflections on the election result for any who are interested:
If they wanted to win an election the (hard left of the) Labour party chose the wrong strategy. The jerk to the left is super appealing to mainly students, young graduates; young middle class/highly educated people who aren't well distributed enough for a first past the post election (e.g. very useful for holding onto Cambridge and Canterbury, not so great in, uh, most of the country). Sure, there's the Brexit element too, which I imagine made quite a bit of the difference in many of those leave-leaning seats in particular. And sure, the leadership's pretty unpopular, but I don't think that makes as much of an impact.
It's perfectly fine for them to adopt the policies they like if they'e happy to lose every election … their shift to the left has pulled the Tories more to the centre too (perhaps not evident from the pre-election cabinet) and ideas that get branded by the media and lazy online commentators as crazy 'Marxist' ideas get implemented by a nominally centre right government a few years later (I'm thinking of the energy price cap as I write this). But I imagine that many people in the Labour party want to be a party of government, so they'll want to change tack. Since their left wing policies did abysmally in the 1983 election, it took 14 years for them to shift slowly to the centre and finally win an election...
For the Lib Dems, the strategy was also disastrous. They only ever became a big party by snapping up seats in the south west which broadly voted leave. Gambling on such a strong revocation platform to try and overturn huge majorities in very remain-leaning seats (nearly worked in some places, e.g. Cambridgeshire South, Esher & Walton, Finchley & Golders Green, actually did work in St Albans) was pretty much outright sacrificing their existing more leave leaning seats (of which they lost three out of four) and giving up on recovering their SW seats. Of course, their actual campaign also went pretty badly so they didn't even win those former lib dem constituencies that were very remain leaning, e.g. Cheltenham or Wells.
Until/unless we get electoral reform, getting into government requires mass appeal, and the only party who played to that in this election was the Conservative party - sure, their 'get Brexit done' message divided people pretty hard along the leave/remain axis, but they otherwise campaigned from a fairly centre-right platform, so there wasn't much to put most voters off...
There's a lot of talk about the break up of the union, on which I have a couple of thoughts.
Firstly, for Scotland, a vote for the SNP in a general election is not a vote for independence - but a pro independence voter is pretty unlikely to vote for one of the UK-wide parties. The SNP ran on a very strong anti-Brexit platform plus the usual idea that a stronger SNP group in Westminster is a stronger voice for Scottish priorities. In spite of this the total vote for the SNP and the Scottish Greens (also pro-independence) was 46%. I'm not suggesting this is totally indicative of what would happen in another independence referendum, e.g. because the franchise would be different, turnout would probably be higher, etc. But it doesn't paint that promising a picture for independence... Also, it seems to me that many of the priorities that might lead a voter to be anti-Brexit might also lead a voter to be anti-independence. For example, many were swayed by economic arguments in favour of the status quo in both cases. A remainer might like the idea that, in the case of a 'hard' Brexit, independence would allow Scotland to be in close economic alignment with the EU by rejoining it. On the other hand, in that case, economic alignment with the EU means being not aligned with the rest of the UK, with which Scotland does most of its trade. Conversely, if the Brexit is 'soft' the advantages of rejoining the EU would be relatively slim and so the economic case is in an entirely similar position to 2014 when it put a lot of people off voting for independence.
On NI, the unionists might not like the arrangements in the withdrawal agreement, but that's hardly going to switch them en masse to nationalists. Similarly, there may be slightly more nationalist MPs than unionist ones, but I'm not convinced how strong that really makes the possibility of an imminent border poll, since it's not reflected in the Stormont assembly, and there's a lot of pressure now to restore the government there due to the dismal performance of both the 'main' parties in the general election.
