Getting rid of the Tories is a relief, no doubt about that. The Labour Party (LP) under Keir Starmer’s leadership has won the election in a landslide winning 411 seats (having a majority of 174 over the other parties) and that sets the stage for a Labour government able to set policy and govern on its own. There are some good things coming out of this election and there are things are worrying that will need to be discussed and attempts to counter-act need to be set in place. Moreover, there are things that are up in the air, but new possibilities (both good and bad) have arisen.
H/T: A lot of this analysis has come from discussions with comrades which has helped me clarify my thoughts and provided direction to the piece. Any mistakes are mine.
The Importance of Tactical Voting
In general, we can note, that the Tories were basically squeezed by three different forces generally. On the one hand, they lost seats to the Labour Party. Secondly, in areas where the Tories primary opposition has been the Liberal Democrats, they lost seats to the Lib Dems. Third, they were squeezed as well by Reform UK. Hell, they even lost 2 seats to the Green Party. So, if this election is taken as a referendum on the Tories, it was evident that voters really wanted them out. The other important thing, is that the British electorate employed tactical voting to ensure that the Tories would not be running the country after the election. That certainly has impacted the Tory vote (as well as the overall results). This election was actually volatile, safe-seats (which both Labour and the Tories have had historically) may be a thing of the past, again depending on tactical voting.
Following the general election, Rishi Sunak has stood down as Tory leader and a Tory leadership election must be conducted. What happens next depends on which Tories MPs have survived the election. In several areas in England, the combined vote of UK Reform Party with the Tory Party actually is higher than the LP which won the seats. Whether the Tories shift even harder to the right and agree an alliance for the next election or not is important. If this actually happens, there are Tory MPs who will never join that alliance, there is a possibility that they vote Lib Dem or even set up a centre-right party. The other question is whether Nigel Farage would want to create an alliance with an even harder-right Tory Party or just let either party wither away. So, whether the Tories continue their lurch to the hard right or pull back towards the centre depends on not only what their surviving MPs say, but also what their members think; remember that the Tory Party (like the Republicans) have faced an influx of hard right voters due to Brexit. So, this remains up in the air. In either case, this could be the end of the Tory Party or not. Current voting may simply be reflecting overall general desire by voters to get the Tories out of power. So, it may not reflect voting intention in the future, but instead reflects tactical voting.
Whatever happens, there is no question that the increased voting for Reform UK means that there is a danger of a rising hard right in the UK that must be addressed. We do not want to have a situation like France as there are no proper left-wing electoral parties to form a left-centre left electoral alliance in Britain; the hard-left is fragmented politically as well. An electoral alliance between the Greens, Lib Dems and Labour could be built to stop them, but that is a centre-centre-left coalition. So while a Tory-Reform coalition could beat the Labour Party on its own, a centre-centre-left coalition given the current election results would not be defeated (see right-wing alliance in the Independent article). We need to begin trying address the rise of the hard right here and to try to avoid the development of a situation like France (and for for that matter, the US).
Lower voter turnout and the impact of first-past the post voting system
The second general point that we can take away from the 2024 general election is the low voter turnout in this election which was around 60% which is the lowest turnout in the past 20 years (since 2001 where turnout was at 59.4%), so in comparison, in 2019, average voter turnout 67.3%. This low voter turnout means that the LP was elected with only 33.7% of the vote.
In terms of vote share, Labour is at 33.7% of the vote share (winning 64% of the seats in Parliament). The Tories are at 24% of the vote share with 19% of the seats winning 121 seats (down from 373 seats): losing 182 seats to Labour, 60 seats to the Lib Dems, 5 to the UK Reform Party and 2 to the Green Party. They did pick up one seat from Labour in Leicester East, simply because two – former LP MPs, Keith Vaz and Claudia Webbe, ran against the current Labour candidate splitting the Labour vote and giving the seat to the Tory). Their votes were squeezed by Labour and the Lib Dems mostly (with a tiny bit from the Greens) as well as UK Reform to the harder right.
Third place in terms of vote share goes to UK Reform with 14.3% (up from 2% if we treat it as the former Brexit Party) of the vote share, but only 5 seats. Fourth place goes to the Lib Dems at 12.2% (up from 11.5%) with 72 seats. The Greens went from having 1 seat in Brighton Pavilion (formerly Caroline Lucas’s seat) to winning 7% of the vote and winning 4 seats (2 taken directly from the Conservatives and 1 seat in Bristol Centre from Labour).
We need to understand that Labour’s landslide is based on a lower overall voter turnout for elections, so this is a victory, but a shallow victory. Voter turnout was down to 60% from 67.3% in 2019. The LP won with 34% of the vote share (only up 1.6% points compared to the 2019 result in terms of vote share); compared with the Tories who received 24% of the vote. Normally, the votes of the Labour Party and the Tories make up a far higher percentage of the vote, leaving less seats for other parties that are running in the election. In this election, the remainder of the vote share was divided up between the Liberal-Democrats, Reform UK, the Greens, Independents, the Scottish National Party (Scotland) and Plaid Cymru (Wales). This was a reasonably volatile election, safe-seats which the larger parties have relied on may not exist
Due to lower voter turnout, and a small increase in the percentage of vote share, what has happened is that Labour has actually won fewer votes in total than in 2019 where they lost the election (winning 9.7 million votes in 2024, as compared to 10.3 million in 2019). What we see in this election is a real disparity between the number of seats won and the percent of the vote share won by the different parties. For example, Labour’s vote share under Corbyn’s leadership in 2017 was 41% winning 262 seats and the 32.9% in 2019 when it won 202 seats. In this election, the LP won fewer votes than in 2017 and 2019. This result comes from the ability of the LP to play the first-past-the-post electoral system where what is needed is that you get the highest number of votes in each seat to win the seat. The seats won do not reflect the overall votes necessarily that each party received in the country, although they reflect the votes won in each constituency.
- The Labour Party won 9,704,655 votes in the general election, that is, they won 33.7% of the vote, and won 63% of the seats (411 seats, the speaker’s seat is not counted)
- Tories won 6,827,311 votes, which is 23.7% of the vote and received 19 % of the seats (121 seats)
- Reform UK won 4,117,221 votes, which is 14% of the vote, but won 5 seats (up from 0)
- Liberal Democrats won 3,519,199, had 12.2% of the vote winning 71 seats
- The Green Party won 1,943,265, so 7% of the vote and won 4 seats
So not only is there an issue of voter enthusiasm (which may be partially due to the fact that Labour was widely expected to win in all polls or the lack of support for the Keir Starmer led LP), the first-past-the post system is beginning to show the obvious signs of not being representative of the vote and there appears to be a democratic deficit. The question of proportional representation is again being raised, not only by the left, but also on the hard-right by Reform UK. Despite the large number of votes they received in England, Reform UK only won 5 seats.
Looking at the different countries (and regions), we find the following results:
In Scotland, the Scottish National Party (exists only in Scotland), got 724,758 votes, won 30%, losing 15% of its vote share and lost 39 seats leaving it with only 9 seats. The Scottish Labour Party won 851,897 votes which was 35% of the vote and was the main beneficiary of the SNP’s losses with wide swings to Scottish Labour. Of the 39 seats that it lost, 36 seats were picked up by the Scottish LP (leaving them with 39 seats), 4 of their seats went to the Lib Dems, but they picked up 1 seat from the Tories in Aberdeenshire and Moray leaving them with 9 seats.
The SNP losses are a combination of two things relating to the leadership of the SNP and a combination of Scottish LP resurgence (which may be due to corruption charges themselves) or that Scots believed they needed a break from the SNP. But it does raise the question of whether Scottish Independence is either on a back-burner or a dead-issue at the moment in Scotland.
The Tories were wiped out in Wales losing 12 seats, 9 of which went to Labour, 2 to Plaid Cymru and 1 to the Lib Dems.
Finally, there is Cornwall, where the Tory Party which held all 6 seats were wiped out completely. Of the 6 constituencies in Cornwall, Labour now holds 4 of the 6 seats in the region; the other 2 seats have been won by the Lib Dems. Labour was essentially absent from the area from the period between 2005 and 2024 general elections. This needs to be noted.
In North Ireland, Sinn Fein keeps it 7 seats and has the largest number of seats, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) lost 3 seats (ugly legal scandals involving their former leader parties a Jeffrey Donaldson), the Social Democratic-Liberal Party got 2 seats, the Alliance Party lost a seat to a former DUP member, Alex Easton, but picked up a seat from the DUP in Lagan Valley (holding 1 seat), another seat in South Antrim went to the Ulster Unionist Party of the DUP seats and the 3rd went to Traditional Unionist Voice in North Antrim.
The Labour Party
We need to examine the Labour Party vote itself. This current version of the LP marks the ascension of the right-wing of the Labour Party. This latest version of the LP (which many of their winning candidates crowed about) articulates a far more centrist position than previously. The way in which their campaign was run from economic policy concentrating on supply side growth (and cooperation with the private sector), emphasising that they were both a party of business and a party of labour, limited spending pledges, “patriotism” and defence policies, and careful concentration on winning back the red-wall that was lost to the Tories in 2019 combined with the attack on left-Labour means that we can expect far less than we would have in a LP that was actually a broader tent. While certainly left-Labour MPs still exist, they are far smaller in number (although they did well in the elections) and there is still a labour left in many Constituency Labour Parties.
The shift to the centre by the Labour Party hinged on an attack on left-wing Labour MPs and well as members. Disproportionally, those that were suspended and expelled by the Labour party around the banner of “fighting antisemitism” were left-wing Jews often members of Jewish Voice for Labour. The LP leadership’s acceptance of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism and their linkage of antisemitism to anti-Zionism meant that Jews critical of Israel were targeted. As such, an antisemitic attack against left-wing Jews was the result; this is antisemitic because Jews themselves have diverse political and religious beliefs (there are different sects of Judaism, there are also secular and Atheist Jews) and this was certainly not taken into account in the IHRA working definition.
There is no question that left-wing Labour MPs and potential MPs were targeted by the leadership of the LP leading to deselections of left-Labour candidates and MPs and their replacement by candidates amenable to the right of the party. Their public failure to eliminate Diane Abbot as the candidate in Hackey North and Stoke Newington due to a combined fightback of local and wider political activists in an anti-racist campaign, media revelations that her case had already been adjudicated months before and the opposition of some trade unions hurt them – it also raised a red flag among Black people concerned that this version of the LP was far less committed to the struggle against institutional and systemic racism in Britain. The outcry may have limited further attacks against left-wing candidates, although it did not stop the deselections of Faiza Shaheen in Chingford and Woodford Green, Sam Tarry in Ilford South, or Lloyd Russell-Moyle in Brighton Kemptown among others by the LP, many at the last minute. 8 late retirements (literally the day before the final cutoff date for selections) enabled the Labour Party to place preferred candidates more in line with their centrist politics. An excellent piece by Richard Price discusses the attack on left-Labour from the perspective of East London, a stronghold of the Labour left.
Honestly, if the LP had better left politics, could have done better; this was argued by the head of the RMT, Mick Lynch, on Sky News on election night. It probably would have helped certainly in areas in the North East where Reform UK came in second behind the Labour Party in the majority of seats which it held (rather than gained).
The fact that left-Labour has not been totally eliminated creates the possibility of struggle-based alliances inside and outside the Labour Party which will be important especially around struggles around the environment, elimination of anti-trade union laws, the NHS and social care, poverty, attacks on civil rights (e.g., the right of protest, freedom of assembly) and international solidarity.
Finally, we need to discuss the LP’s position with respect to the Israeli war on Gaza which alienated many Muslim voters who have traditionally voted for the Labour Party. In the midst of a Labour Party landslide, Labour MPs lost 5 seats, 4 of them to Independents running on Gaza and other left issues, these are:
Jonathon Ashworth (Leicester South), Member of the Shadow Cabinet (Shadow Paymaster General) to Independent Shockat Adam by 979 votes
Kate Hollern (Blackburn) lost to Independent Adnan Hussein
Heather Iqbal (Dewsbury and Bately) lost to Independent Iqbal Mohammed
Having been thrown out of the LP, Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) defeated the Labour Party Candidate, Praful Nargund.
They also lost another 2 seats:
Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol Central), Member of the Shadow Cabinet (Shadow Culture Secretary) lost to Carla Denyer (co-leader of the Green Party).
Rajesh Agrawal (Leicester East), lost seat to Shivani Raja (due to ex-LP MPs Claudia Webbe and Keith Vaz running in the election splitting the Labour vote)
Impact of Gaza
The impact of Gaza was not insignificant, Labour lost 4 seats to Independents running on a left challenge or around the Gaza vote especially in Labour safe seats with large number of British Muslim voters. Several Labour Party MPs, were almost unseated due to Gaza and their majorities were reduced. Even Keir Starmer’s victory in Holborn and St Pancras was reduced by 17.5% with Independent Andrew Feinstein coming in second place and the Greens in third place.
A British-Palestinian Independent candidate, Leanne Muhammed, was within 528 votes of beating Wes Streeting in Ilford North (now the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care who held a 5,000 vote majority after the 2019 election.
What we need to discuss next is the Labour Party luminaries, that were almost unseated due to Gaza and how reduced their majorities were in some of the seats they are won.
Thanks to The Independent we have this wonderful graph (as well as other insights, so read the article):
While 2 of these seats are in East London, 2 are in Birmingham and 1 is in Bradford all of which are areas with large Muslim populations who were concerned about the time that it took for the LP to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Starmer’s statement on October 11th justifying Israel’s right to withhold electricity and water (which are war crimes). Needless to say caused a lot of anger among British Muslims and other people who support international humanitarian law (the protests in solidarity with Palestinians are huge). Labour councillors around the country quit the party and an early-day motion was introduced by some Labour MP. It took 9 days before he attempted to “clarify” his remarks …
So, what now?
Labour won but the fight continues … this is just a short list of what we can continue fighting around to pressurise the Labour government. It is not complete by any means, but are only some obvious points that could allow both local grassroots fightbacks, city-wide fightbacks, and national fightbacks. Taxes can and should be raised on wealth, financial transactions and capital gains taxes to help cover some of the costs for things are that are desperately needed.
Much of what Labour is promising on the economy (including the NHS, housing, social care) requires the support of the private sector. They are both pro-business and pro-Labour … this means that they need the cooperation of business to ensure that their growth plans actually yield growth. So much of what happens will depend on investment by the private sector in pursuit of growth. Britain’s infrastructure is a mess and this applies to water supply (run incompetently by private providers who refuse to invest in upgrading the service, there has been increased pollution and sewage in our drinking water – nationalisation or municipalisation has to be undertaken). The NHS faces increasing privatisation under Wes Streeting who has talked about new doctors (coming from where?) to work in private provision of healthcare. This is a fight that will not disappear under the Labour Party
Environment: Labour cut back on its promised £28 billion/year spending on Green Industrial investment pledges. They are now down to promising £7.8 billion over the next 5 years (so in its first term). We need to hold their feet to the fire. Moreover, public transport is insufficient outside of the larger cities, trains and rails and buses need to be brought back into public ownership (this is being done in Greater Manchester) and we need to be campaigning for free public transport for all.
Housing: Labour has pledged to build 1.5 million new homes over the next Parliament while protecting the green belt. These are desperately needed, but what Britain needs is not affordable homes, but social housing. They are dependent upon private sector contractors to do this building, there is a shortage of construction workers as well. While they need the private sector to build these homes, there is no reason that builders should be in control over what they built; these can be built as social housing to be distributed by local councils (this of course puts a crimp in some Labour Council’s fantasies of building affordable and luxury housing), but it will provide what is needed for the people of Britain. Pressure must be kept on the LP to ensure that social housing is a priority. They also need to address section 21 evictions which allow private landlords to throw tenants out with short notice; even the Tories under May promised to do this (of course it was not done). We need rent control and inspections to ensure that homes are in good repair and this has to be done by local councils. Devolving power would deal with this better provided guidelines are provided. Housing needs to be accessible and for life and green energy sufficient; old properties can be repaired and retrofitted to ensure compliance with environmental conditions and to ensure accessibility for all stages of life and disabled people.
Poverty: Wage incomes (wages and benefits) have been severely undermined, both due to wage freezes in the public sector, privatisation of the public sector where wages were lower than in the public sector where work contracts were undermined and wages were lower due to lower unionisation and zero-hour contracts. The covid pandemic and rampant inflation especially in food prices and energy bills just added to people’s misery and impoverisation. While the Tories did raise minimum wages, it was not sufficient. Public sector worker strikes trying to get better wages and working contracts have protected some and won some wage increases, but there are many non-unionised workers who are still suffering; people in paid employment are using food banks. Universal Credit has undermined the subsistence wage income level in Britain. Between the benefit cap which places limits to how much you can get on benefits (it must be lower than people earn in paid employment) and the two-child maximum benefit policy, poverty (both family and child poverty) has increased precipitously. According to the Resolution Foundation, only £3.1 billion is needed to eliminate both. Rather than say they will eliminate these caps (which they had pledged to do before it was clear they were coming to power), they say this depends on how badly the Tories have left the treasury. This must be prioritised; do we need to wait 5 years to address this?
Labour Law (which honestly looks more like employers’ law these days): Labour has said that they will make zero-hour contracts illegal. They need to be held to this promise as this has vitiated working contracts. Combined with low wages, people in work are not earning enough and food bank usage is wide-spread. The anti-union laws passed under the Tories need to be eliminated.
Dept of works and pensions: The Tory parting gift of cutting national insurance has left less money for future pensions as well as less money for the public sector which has been drained of funding. The pensions brief have gone to Emma Reynolds and been divided up between DWP and Treasury
There is serious concern that those in charge of the Department of Works and Pensions and hence benefits will be sticking to the Benthamite position of the Tories of forcing people into work; this means that the conditions and sanctions regime put in place with Universal Credit will remain in place. Liz Kendall (now the Secretary of State for Works and Pensions) has already informed us that you will not be able to get benefits unless you are in work or looking for work. She has been harping on this theme for quite a while; promising good jobs and tackling unemployment and worklessness. The BBC has done us a nice favour by looking at those who are actually out of work; so this is not only the unemployed but those that are not looking for work (economically inactive).
Those that are economically inactive differ in differ age groups:
Aged 25 and under are students and they do not want to work.
“The main reasons that 3.5 million over-50s were out of the job market were illness and early retirement. Almost nobody who retired early said they wanted to return to work.
Among 25- to 49-year-olds, 1.1 million people did not work because of caring responsibilities (about a million of whom are women).
Nearly one million people in this age group were not working because of illness (more evenly split between men and women).”
So, Labour plans include getting women into work (who are doing care work for their families) promising new money for creches and nurseries but the current ones are mostly privatised and there are insufficient workers available to do the job. The other people they are trying to get into work are disabled people, the problem here is that given how low wages are, hiring disabled employees will require that businesses make reasonable adjustments; essentially that means that disabled people are more expensive to employ than those without impairments. The law ensures that these reasonable adjustments are made, but in this situation, employers won’t do so. Changing this means increasing wages so that it becomes profitable for employers to hire disabled people.
Social support and assistance (aka social care) is in dire shape; local councils have farmed much of this out to private providers. Unionised public sector provision is low, there is insufficient investment there as well. Women have increasingly left work to take care of family members with impairments; this has increased following covid and not only due to long covid, but due to the lack of available quantity and quality support available. Moreover, workers in the sector are underpaid and disabled people have been fighting for independent living rather than “social care.” Unfortunately, disability has been sectioned off under Stephen Timms (Minister for Disability along with Minister for Social Security) and combined with old people, this is not encouraging. Nor is the fact that there only seems to be plans for codifying the already appalling system; the combination of health and social care will undermine both sectors, but social care will remain underfunded.
Quite honestly, it is not the unemployed that are holding back Britain’s economy and its growth, it is the fact that cheap labour does not ensure economic growth, the policies of supply side economics have not led to massive investment despite wages being forced down. Productivity is not advanced by hiring cheap labour which has shortened work contracts. Productivity increases require capital investment and this is not happening because labour is so cheap.
Brexit has not helped the British economy grow as it is closely intertwined with Europe who still the predominant trading partner. Industry has lost out as much production took place across European countries and Britain was easily replaced by other countries; some financial services corporations have relocated to other European countries. Starmer is talking of renegotiating the Brexit agreement as the current one is harming Britain too much in a number of different way. This does not mean re-entry into the EU, just bettering the conditions of the agreement.
Finally, trans people are still under attack, solidarity is essential as there are difficulties accessing medical and mental health services, there are problems within Labour over puberty blockers and accessing medication. We cannot stand aside and let trans people continued to be threatened and oppressed. We need to fight against institutional and systemic racism, misogyny and general queer phobia.
Then there is international solidarity, we must stand with Palestine and demand the right of return for Palestinians, to allow Palestinians to determine their own future, to demand the ability to do Boycott, divestment and sanctions and we must have an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Genocide is continuing and we must stand with Palestinians who are facing increasing attacks not only in Gaza but in the West Bank and Occupied Territories as well as Palestinians living in the 1948 borders. We must stand with Ukraine and support Ukrainians right of self determination and self-defence. We also must resist increasing defence spending as well to be complicit with 2.5% of GDP which has been promised by Starmer.