It’s too early to draw clear conclusions about the meaning of Thursday’s dramatic national election in the U.K., and still less about what lessons it might offer to America’s feeble attempt to preserve democracy. But one thing is clear enough: Headlines around the world announcing that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has won a huge victory are factually accurate yet fail to convey the underlying complexity of the situation — especially the extent to which British politics has been thrown into complete disorder.
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Based on near-final vote counts, Labour has won 412 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons — one of the largest majorities in British political history, and the party’s biggest win since Tony Blair’s neoliberal-flavored “New Labour” surged to victory in 1997.
But the actual voting patterns in this week’s election appear not just counterintuitive but counterfactual, compared to those results.
Labour’s overall percentage of the total vote was up less than two points from its near-catastrophic 2019 loss — in fact, it appears that Labour received 500,000 fewer votes nationwide than it did under the supposedly toxic Corbyn regime. And if we compare this week’s election with Corbyn’s narrow loss to Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May in 2017, the picture is even more upside-down: In that election, Labour got 40% of the vote and about 12.9 million votes overall; this time around, in what will go down as a historic victory, Labour garnered less than 34% of the vote, about 9.7 million in all.
Starmer’s supporters will no doubt shrug that off, and maybe they’re right: What matters in the British system, as in ours, is winning enough seats to control the reins of government, and Labour has certainly done that. But it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that below the surface Britain has just experienced an implosion of mainstream electoral politics, along the lines of what has already happened in major European nations like France, Germany and Italy. The full consequences of that meltdown are effectively concealed, however, by the U.K.’s “first past the post” electoral system, in which the candidate with the most votes in a given district wins the seat, even when that person often (or, indeed, most of the time) falls well short of a majority.
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This leads to the most salient single fact of the 2024 British election: Labour’s huge parliamentary majority is built on just 9.7 million votes; Reform and the Tories, put together, got nearly 11 million — and as a hypothetical united force, would probably have won. On paper and in the House of Commons, Keir Starmer looks like this year’s big winner, but the pendulum that just swung so hard in his direction can just as easily swing back. He needs to learn the lesson that American liberals and progressives are absorbing, in painful fashion, right now: Don’t assume that the disgruntled far right has been beaten just because it lost an election.
Labour, LibDem, Green together also would have a majority, and hopefully people would vote tactically for Labour if all the right wing votes would go to one party as well, though you never know. So I’m not sure I agree with that part of the analysis.
Otherwise: yeah, it’s at least as, probably more, accurate to say Tories lost, as it is to say Labour won.
By the way the votes fell, 38% seem to have voted Tory or Reform. Ignoring how people would vote differently if the system were to change, that to me implies proportional voting would still see the right wing lose. Not nearly as much as they did now, but perhaps more securely.
I just hope Labour will think of this similarly and actually do something to make sure we get a system where that 38% doesn’t overcome the rest and leads to a Tory or even Reform government.
Exactly. No UKIP or Reform in 2019, and 43.6% for Tory. A lot of vote was anti Corybn. A lot of the vote was hope for Boris’s leveling up.
In 2024, I think most of the crazy right was already reform. The remaining Tory vote were voting for Tory of old, mostly centre right.
If by the next election, they have been through complete Faragification, I think they will get less again. Partly their base dying off and not being replaced and partly them driving away anyone near the centre. I think they do this for an election or two before a new Cameron comes to detoxify the party again.
The thing I’m currently most worried about for the next election is a Conservative-Reform coalition that just squeaks past the post and puts Farage in the Deputy PM spot. There are a lot of ifs-and-buts to that (IE the Tories and reform would have to bury the hatchet, Labour would have to pretty massively fuck up to get people interested in the Tories again after just five years etc.) but stranger things have happened.
So Corbyn actually got more votes than Starmer. What this suggests to me is that under FPTP the Starmer campaign was more astute in choosing which constituencies to target. Also, to me at least, the whole campaign felt more ‘marketable’.
Gosh, I wonder why Starmer was able to campaign more effectively than Corbyn…
Believing that their favoured MPs were about to lose their jobs, HQ staff launched an unprecedented covert operation to divert funds from pro-Corbyn candidates in winnable Tory seats to defending the seats of anti-Corbyn MPs. A code used to record spending on “generic campaign materials” was used to spend extra money on “key seats” decided by a group in Ergon House – an overspill office for HQ staff. The report finds that these seats were chosen on a factional basis: anti-Corbyn MPs were helped out.
https://novaramedia.com/2022/07/20/six-key-takeaways-from-the-forde-report-into-labours-civil-war/
Man, what a can of worms that report is. Very depressing as well.
Think how differently things could have turned out if Corbyn’s leadership wasn’t getting sabotaged by those people. How much more damage has been allowed to be caused by the Tories since 2017? I’m sure they feel smug now that their own boy just won an election but for what?
We urgently need proportional representation.