Editorial: For the Tories a historic defeat, for Labour a wide but shallow victory
The Conservative Party this weekend is nursing the biggest political hangover in its entire history. It is hard to over-estimate the scale of their historic defeat last Thursday. Since the foundation of the party in 1834, it has never suffered a more crushing electoral setback. It is a defeat that may present an existential threat to the party. “Good riddance”, most workers would add, if it does find its way into the dustbin of history.
But despite winning a landslide in terms of seats, Labour’s share of the vote has risen only slightly. It actually only received 33.8 %, between 5 and 6 % below opinion polls and only 1.7% above 2019. Compared to the last election, Labour has actually lost half a million votes! It is only the vagaries of the First Past The Post (FPTP) election system that has gifted Keir Starmer such a big majority, which might be very wide, but is at the same time extremely shallow.
One of the main reasons for the collapse of the Tory vote was the rise of the far-right Reform UK party of Nigel Farage. Its predecessor, the Brexit Party, effectively had an electorial pact with the Tories in 2019, not standing against sitting Tory MPs. This time around it stood in almost every seat, and won a big vote, largely, but not exclusively, at the expense of the Tories. Reform came second in 98 seats, many of them in Labour’s traditional heartlands and this is a stark warning for the future.
Up to now the Conservative Party has been the most successful right-wing party in European history, the political representatives par excellence of the British capitalist class, including its varied elements in industry, manufacturing, finance and the landed aristocracy.
The focus of the party has shifted in recent years away from manufacturing and industry and towards finance, and it was for that reason that it engineered a Brexit which was the biggest-ever self-inflicted blow to the British economy, helping to push the British economy into an even more precarious state than it was already in.
Lowest Conservative vote in nearly two hundred years
Although the voting franchise has considerably widened over the last two hundred years, it is notable that the average Conservative vote in every election since the party’s formation, nearly two hundred years ago, was over 42 per cent. Even in the post-war period prior to Thursday, it averaged just over 40 per cent. Its support has now collapsed to 23.7 per cent, its smallest share ever. It may mean the end of the Tory Party as we have known it, and the beginning of new convulsions on the right of British politics, with, more than likely, the rise of new political formations, including more dangerous ones on the far right.
The Labour Party under Keir Starmer has been elected with a big majority of seats, surpassing that achieved by Attlee in 1945 and around the same as Blair in 1997. As was evidenced in the polls, the over-riding factor in the minds of many of those who did vote in this election was a widespread revulsion at the most corrupt and incompetent government in living memory. This gut feeling was confirmed, on virtually the eve of the poll, when YouGov published the results of a survey showing the motivations of those who said they were going to vote Labour.
As the figures showed, in complete contradiction to the claims of Labour’s right wing, Starmer inspired no-one, except his closest circle of acolytes. YouGov found that only 1% of its sample were motivated to support Labour as a result of “Starmer’s leadership”. Fully 48% voted Labour “to get the Tories out”, way above the next group, 13%, who thought “the country needed a change”. This was a complete reversal of 2017 under Corbyn, for example, when 28% said they were voting Labour because they agreed with its policies,13% who supported Corbyn, 12% because it provided hope and fairness, and 15% who just wanted the Tories out.
In 2017 Corbyn’s Labour got three million more votes
Labour’s right wing and the media will focus entirely on the number of seats won, even though it is significantly skewed by the FPTP system. Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in 2019 was described as the “worst in Britain since 1935” but in terms of the percentage vote won, it was better than Ed Miliband’s in 2015 and Gordon Brown’s in 2010.
Corbyn’s result in the forgotten election of 2017, before Keir Starmer had sabotaged Labour’s Brexit policy, was nearly 6% higher than Labour achieved last Thursday, and Corbyn’s Labour got three million more votes that year! Even in the 2019 defeat, Corbyn got well over half a million more votes than Starmer got last week, albeit on a higher turnout. Labour’s huge parliamentary landslide, masks what is the smallest share of votes achieved by a majority party in UK history, much less one with a landslide.
There are clearly deeply-held suspicions of Keir Starmer and what he will do as Prime Minister. The distrust of the Labour leadership was clearly reflected in several elements of the election result. In the turnout, as the other graphic shows, there has been a trend in modern elections towards a decline, as voters are increasingly disenchanted with mainstream politicians. To Labour’s great shame, the notion that “they’re all the same” is a commonly-held view and it was seen in the turn out, which, at just under 60 per cent, is the second lowest since 1885.
The Tories introduced voter-ID as a blatant vote-suppression mechanism, the cynical calculation being that those unable to provide the officially ‘acceptable’ ID would be the less well-off and younger voters, who are more inclined to vote Labour. This was the first general election in which the new rules applied.
Labour voters not motivated to turn out to vote
It is possible that this ID requirement may have accounted for a small part of the decline in turnout, but without research and evidence, it is impossible to say. What was a much more important factor was the failure of the Starmer leadership to inspire voters to turn out in larger numbers to support him.
The distrust of the two main parties is not only evident in their vote and the turnout, but also in the large swing towards Reform UK, a xenophobic party that puts immigration and racism as the heart of its policies. Reform UK presented a thin veneer of radicalism, with a few slick slogans on low pay, the NHS, the lack of affordable housing, aimed to appeal to workers. But they then draw conclusions that links everything to race and immigration. “Save Britain” was their central slogan.
Some Reform UK candidates were open misogynists, homophobes and racists, the kind of people who would sit comfortably in the British National Party or the English Defence League. Their rise in this election, with five seats in Parliament and over 14 per cent of the vote – four million voters – is a serious warning for the future.
Like Marine Le Pen’s party in France, Meloni’s in Italy and the AfD in Germany, Reform UK points in the direction of a far right and ultimately fascist formations in UK politics. As what remains of the Tory party begin to fight like rats in a sack, a part of the Tory right will sit very easily with the racists of Reform UK and they will seek accommodation with Farage.
If the Labour government fails to make a meaningful difference to living standards, it will spur a further swing to Reform. Those who vote for Reform – including many disenchanted working-class Tories and older manual workers whose traditional jobs have disappeared under “globalization” – see their lives blighted by uncertainty. More than most, they are affected by low pay, lengthening hospital waiting lists, the lack of doctors and dentists, and the absence of decent affordable housing, as well as many other social ills.
Reform UK present a thin veneer of ‘radicalism’ to make racist conclusions
It was not accidental that many of those areas that voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum had a significant vote for Reform UK and returned their MPs. It is the same party, using the same xenophobic memes that play on what are genuine fears and insecurities of a part of the electorate.
Not all Reform voters are racists, but they feel that the challenges to their daily lives are increasing and they have little confidence in the future. The services on which they depend – local authorities, the NHS, schools – are falling into decay.
They can be easily convinced – because it is true – that important decisions that destabilise their lives are being taken above their heads, usually by men with sharp suits and high salaries. That is the starting point for Reform UK, using genuine anxieties and hardships and turning them towards scapegoating migrants and asylum seekers. They spice it all with an appeal to a mythical past, before so-called “woke” ideas became popular.
What Left Horizons underestimated, and we hold our hands up to it, was the degree of suspicion and outright hostility towards a Labour Party that has shifted to the right under Keir Starmer. Starmer himself won less than half of the votes in what was a rock-solid Labour seat in Holborn and St Pancras. His vote fell by over 17 per cent, and an independent challenging him on the issue of Gaza, Andrew Feinstein from the old South African ANC, gained over 7,000 votes (19 percent!).
There was a fall in votes for other key Labour right-wingers, like Wes Streeting, whose formerly safe seat was won by just 500 votes, as well as Jess Phillips and Liam Byrne in Birmingham, and Naz Shah in Bradford, all of whom only just scraped home.
Backpedalling on the Green New Deal
It was as a result of Starmer’s disgraceful support for Israel – together with his abandonment of more radical policies, such as those on poverty and welfare and his backpedaling on the Green New Deal – that Labour lost several other seats. The Green Party stood on a much more radical policy platform than Labour and its vote increased, giving them four MPs. Many former Labour voters and even Labour members turned to them, as a form of protest. In swathes of safe Labour seats in metropolitan areas, Labour lost votes to Green Party candidates, who now lie second in 40, mostly big city seats, where there are many younger voters.
In four seats, incredibly, Labour also lost to Muslim community independents, including Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester, a Shadow Cabinet member. This is a direct result of Starmer’s apparent indifference to the genocide in Gaza. In many other formerly ‘safe’ Labour areas, the large number of seats won by Labour masked significant votes for opposition pro-Gaza and/or left candidates, some receiving 10 or 20 percent or even more.
Starmer’s disgraceful decision to ditch Jeremy Corbyn as a Labour candidate backfired badly on him, as he won with a clear majority over the stooge ‘official’ Labour candidate in Islington North. In Chingford and Woodford Green, the stupid and spiteful decision to dump Faiza Shaheen resulted in a more or less even split between her and the official Labour candidate, leaving Ian Duncan Smith, the architect of so much household poverty through Universal Credit, as winner by default.
Overall, as a Financial Times journalist put it, Labour’s win was “extensive but shallow”. Its vote stayed the same in the North, was down 4% in Wales (yet won many seats), and the only place they made a notable breakthrough was in Scotland where the vote was up 17%. In Tory/Labour marginals there was a modest swing to Labour, as voters tried to get the Tory MP out. But overall, in so far as there was a Labour ‘surge’ it was largely due to Tory voters going to Reform UK rather than Labour voters being motivated to turn out.
This Labour victory has been compared to the Blair landslide of 1997, but it is not at all the same. Tony Blair won in 1997, with 43 percent of the popular vote on a turnout of over 71%. He got three and a half million more votes than Starmer. After Blair’s victory his personal standings in polls was very high and it remained so for some time.
Weariness and wariness
It is the opposite with Starmer. The working class is exhausted after fourteen years of Tory cuts and austerity, and they desperately wanted ‘change’. They have elected Starmer but with a high degree wariness and scepticism. There will be an expectation on the part of working people that Starmer’s fine speechifying in Downing Street will turn into real and meaningful improvement in the lives of ordinary households.
How much those expectations are realised and how many hopes will be dashed will become clear in the coming months and years. There is no expectation whatsoever on our part that the Labour administration will go anywhere near real socialist ideas like public ownership and planning.
On the contrary, the outlook of the Starmer Cabinet, not least the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is to ‘manage’ capitalism better than the Tories did. But a ‘market’ cannot be managed and in so far as it works at all, it will run for profit and only for profit. Moreover, compared to 1997, British capitalism is in a far more precarious position compared to all its capitalist ‘rivals’ in the world market.
If, as Reeves has suggested, the economy needs the private sector to invest, such investment will only be forthcoming if there are profits to be made and they can only come at the expense of workers in the public and private sectors. If there is any uptick in investment in the NHS and public services – and it is badly needed, not least to pay public sector workers decent wages – then that government spending has to come from somewhere. That means higher taxes or cuts elsewhere.
Even when it comes to building more houses, it is not ‘planning’ that is the barrier to more social housing, it is the market, dominated by developers and building companies whose commercial strategy relies on a housing shortage.
Pressing issues to face immediately
In other words, it will not be the government that dictates to business; it will ultimately be capitalism that dictates to the government. Keir Starmer’s honeymoon period in office will be very short-lived, assuming there is one at all. He will be faced immediately with pressing issues that demand resolution – like the approaching collapse of Thames Water, the doctors’ pay dispute and the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Soon, public sector workers will be looking at their annual pay award. All of these are big issues.
Some quasi-reforms will be offered to the trade unions – measures that cost little or nothing, like the New Deal for Workers (assuming even that is enacted) but within months, certainly by the time of Reeves’ first budget as Chancellor in September, the economic realities of British capitalism will begin to bite. That will spell more austerity – this time ‘Labour’ austerity, dressed up as “hard choices” – and the beginning of a change from ‘wariness’ and ‘scepticism’ to anger.
The election has shown some channels through which opposition to Labour could flow, notably through the Green Party, a handful of better-known ‘independents’ and Reform UK. Failing to provide the real ‘change’ it promised would see Labour quickly losing ground in the polls to Reform UK, to the Greens and back to the SNP in Scotland.
But there is another important channel of opposition that was invisible in this election – the trades unions. Despite the leaders of most of the unions, who have supported Starmer to the hilt up to now, their members will be forced to move into action to defend their living standards.
The election of this government ushers in a new phase in UK politics, one characterised by sharp changes and sudden turns in the class struggle as workers refuse to accept more austerity. In politics today, volatility and unpredictability is the name of the game, as voter sentiment swings rapidly between right and left.
It will be a period of sharp debate and discussion among activists, both outside and inside the organised labour movement, as the crisis of British capitalism grinds on and political leaders fail to address it. There will be an atmosphere in the trade unions, reflected later in the Labour Party, in which real socialist ideas will get an echo. It will be a period also of factional crises, deep divisions and possible splits.
As Starmer ushers in the most right-wing Labour government, there are still grounds for optimism for socialists. Capitalism has nothing to offer workers except blood, toil, tears and sweat. Those who want to transform capitalism into a more ‘benign’ version of itself will fail. As events and experience will demonstrate, only socialist ideas, the most modern and relevant ideas in politics, will provide answers in the coming years.
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