The airwaves have crackled since 5 July with commentaries of various people trying to make sense of the UK General Election – whether political commentators such as Andrew Rawnsley (here and here), Polly Toynbee or my fellow blogger Boffy. All have drawn attention to the low turnout of the electorate and the role this played in the Labour vote being much less than anticipated. These days we are increasingly aware of the dangers of confirmation bias ie looking for views and information which simply confirm our existing opinions
But the best analysis of the results was probably Change Pending – the path to the 2024 General Election and beyond (More in Common 2024)
More in Common and the UCL Policy Lab conducted polling of more than 10,000 people in the week after polls closed and held focus groups in constituencies that reflected some of the most striking electoral trends. This builds on focus group conversations of more than 500 people and polling of tens of thousands of people during the campaign. The findings illustrate a more complex picture than last week’s headline results would suggest and offer clear pointers about how to meet the public’s expectations for the next five years.a government that embodies service and respect. Making those words in that first speech a reality is, undoubtedly, the central task of this Parliament
But the fact Labour took just a third of the vote, against a Government which by any measure had lost public confidence, suggests voters remained unsure about the alternative.
Ultimately, the electorate granted Labour the majority they needed to get things done, but with many individual MPs now sitting on majorities small enough that they could be voted out with the slightest change in the public mood.
The challenge then for Labour - and indeed for the Conservative Party as it thinks about how to rebuild - is to define what change the country is looking for, what public opinion can coalesce behind, and how that change can be delivered. Keir Starmer seems keenly alive to this challenge - having pledged in his speech on the steps of Downing Street to focus on the two thirds of the country who did not vote Labour, and to do so through understand this challenge.
Despite what this quote says, I don't see any sign that Starmer and Co. are looking at that 2/3 that didn't vote for them. From the off they have dismissed the fact that not only did they only get a third of the vote (25% of the electorate), but also the fact that Labour's vote in absolute terms fell compared to 2019, and fell by a third from 2017, with its vote share falling in 2024 to 34%, from 40% in 2017. They have instead, lyingly claimed that this was all a cunning plan to not rack up excess votes in seats where they were sure to win, and concentrate on increasing votes in the seats they needed to win.
ReplyDeleteThat line was put by Harriet Harman et al, but also by the likes of Paul Mason, and by Labour's supposedly Left apologists, like Eric Lee, who wrote, comparing those that noted the actual facts about Labour's poor performance with those that are climate deniers, moon landing conspiracists and so on. In so doing, he doesn't seem to realise that given that what is said about Labour's showing is verifiably true, he undermines the case against the climate deniers and so on!
The truth is that had it really all been a cunning plan to focus attention on target seats, resulting in Labour winning in them by raising its vote, it would have failed, because in nearly all those seats, it failed to raise its vote by any meaningful amount, just as its vote in total fell rather than rose! I showed that in relation to Newcastle under Lyme, but it was true across the neighbouring Stoke seats too.
The reality is that Labour won by default, because Reform split the reactionary, petty-bourgeois Tory vote in half. Everywhere, add the reform and Tory vote together, and labour would have lost, and also have lost the election. Where the Tories did not lose votes to Reform, mostly in the professional middle-class, Blue Wall seats, they lost them not to Labour, but to the Liberals, because the Liberals, like the Greens, appear as a more progressive alternative to the reactionary nationalist politics of Starmer and Blue Labour.
Unless Blue Labour, and its apologists face that reality in the face, they will see their success being very short lived. In a huge number of seats, now, they have Green and Liberal parties sitting in second place, often with not much ground to make up. Braverman looks set to join with Reform, taking a chunk of other Tories with her. That clears the decks for the Conservative party, shorn of those Tories to link up with the Liberals. The contradictions of Brexit, and need to re-join the EU, will continually impose themselves, and will be emphasised as Starmer's attempts to get a closer relation with the EU fall flat without such commitment. That leaves the door open to an EU facing Liberal-Conservative party to make hay.
Yet, Starmer continues to orient to that same constituency of bigots and petty-bourgeois nationalists, whose votes he did not win in the election, but which they keep deluding themselves into thinking are natural Labour voters that came back to them! They aren't, and they didn't. So, Blue labour continues to steam in the opposite direction to solid ground, and on to the rocks of its own self-destruction.