For quite a long time, I was told that Labour would win the next General Election by an absolute landslide. The people who told me this (especially if they were people whose political opinions were fairly leftist, progressive and similar to mine) assured me that this would not be because they were actually doing especially well, but just because the Conservatives were doing particularly badly. I always responded by saying that Labour's super-majority was not guaranteed, and that just because another party was doing badly did not automatically mean that Labour would do well. I have said as much on this blog, many times.
My main reasoning for coming to this conclusion was that I felt that you could have said exactly the same thing in 2015. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of the early 2010s was supremely unpopular, and the huge wipeout the Liberal Democrats suffered at that election was demonstrative of that. That should have been an extraordinarily easy election for Labour's then-leader Ed Miliband to win - but unfortunately, his iteration of Labour was so abjectly unappealing that the anti-Tory vote was widely split, and the result was that David Cameron's Conservatives managed a full majority by themselves. It wasn't until Jeremy Corbyn took over the party's leadership that it became more of a two-party fight again. Whether you supported Corbyn's policies or whether you didn't, it is inarguable that he galvanised a lot of the people who had strong anti-Tory sentiments, and the 2017 and 2019 elections very clearly became Labour versus the Conservatives again, in a way that 2015 just had not been. Since Keir Starmer has taken over the reins of the Labour Party, I have felt that a lot of the problems that prevented Labour's win in 2015 have re-emerged, in particular the party in opposition failing to take especially strong stances against much of the Conservative Government's ideology. In fact, I think these problems have been worse under Keir Starmer than they were in 2015 under Ed Miliband, and I didn't see why taking such a similar approach to one that had clearly failed in the past was likely to have a different outcome this time.
Of course, we've now seen that Labour did get a huge majority of seats at the 2024 election, just as they were predicted to. However, this does not mean I'm going to sit and eat humble pie, because I still don't believe I was wrong. I never claimed to be certain they wouldn't get a super-majority, just that I didn't think it was inevitable. I still don't think it was inevitable. From interacting with people, both across the country via social media and on doorsteps whilst campaigning for my partner (who was standing as an independent in Monmouthshire) I sensed great dissatisfaction from many people not just with the Conservatives, but with the Labour Party as well.
I do not feel that Labour did as well in this election as the amount of seats they won would suggest. They received around 600,000 votes less than they did in 2019, which is generally considered to be Labour's worst result since the Second World War, some of their most prominent MPs such as Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debbonaire lost their seats, and many got in on a much reduced vote count in their constituencies (Keir Starmer's majority was reduced by half, which is absolutely unheard of for an incoming Prime Minister, whilst Health Secretary Wes Streeting came within around 500 votes of losing his seat as well). More significant than this is that in both cases an independent candidate came second, which is pretty unusual under our archaic First Past The Post system. The Green Party quadrupled their seat count, and some independents did get in, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
So why, if we're to agree with my basic standpoint that Labour isn't especially popular and that the Tories imploding wouldn't by itself be enough for them to win, did they get such a large seat count compared to elections like 2015? There are many reasons for that, but I've narrowed it down to three key ones: the 2020 pandemic, the rise of Reform UK and the collapse of the SNP in Scotland.
The 2020 pandemic
I don't see this matter discussed very much in the media anymore, and certainly not in reference to the election, but I believe it's vitally important in terms of exactly how much the Tories fell from grace.
Personally, I had quite a nice time during the COVID-19 pandemic, although I know a lot of people didn't. But whether we were happy or whether we weren't, I feel that that pandemic changed us as human beings, and that the impacts of this have not been acknowledged by the establishment class. For the first time since the World War II, we were all in a situation where we felt we had to collectively inconvenience ourselves for the greater good. Some of us were trapped with toxic partners. Some of us missed loved ones' funerals. Some of us were far shorter of money than normal. Some of us (me included) were lucky enough to be generally okay, but if we were we felt obliged to check in from time to time with people who might not be. But that was okay - because we were doing the right thing, and all in it together.
I remember the day the glue snapped - when Dominic Cummings decided to drive to Barnard Castle ostensibly to check his eyesight, and Government ministers tripped over themselves to defend his behaviour. At this point, that community spirit died. People thought, quite rightly, that they'd been taken for absolute mugs - that they'd put themselves to great inconvenience for the safety of everyone, and the people who made these rules couldn't even be bothered to follow them themselves. At that point, we all decided we couldn't be bothered anymore to follow the rules, even in the interests of keeping people safe, and when scandals like Partygate came out we didn't lose any respect for the Government because there was already none left.
The irony is that from the Conservative Government's perspective, this probably didn't feel especially significant because they've always had contempt for the common people and consider themselves to be exempt from the rules. They're so removed from people's daily lives that they probably saw nothing wrong with what they did. And for ordinary people, the Government playing to a different set of rules is what we've come to expect, and in most cases we just shrug and say, 'So what? It's always like that.' But this was different. This was such an extreme situation, where everyone felt that they had to care for each other, that this felt like a gross betrayal in a way that this kind of thing normally does not.
Another feature of the 2020 pandemic is that it gave a lot of people a bit of time to think. Many found new hobbies, or discovered they had talents that they didn't know about themselves. It gave us the time to think about what we wanted to do with our lives, what values we held and what we wanted to do with them, in ways that normally we don't quite have time for. These feelings have stayed with us since, and there are many people now in creative work that they picked up during lockdown. This time taken has, I think, made it more possible to recognise when our elected officials are taking advantage of us.
Of course, this one itself would only result in the Tories doing badly, not necessarily in Labour gaining seats - but I think it does explain a big part of why they were so much more unpopular than normal.
The rise of Reform UK
Reform UK is the new name for the Brexit Party, which advocated for a no-deal Brexit in the late 2010s. Although they are not the same party, it bears a striking resemblance to the UK Independence Party (UKIP), mainly due to the ongoing association both parties have had with the politician Nigel Farage, who is Reform's current leader and serves as the MP for Clacton.
It wouldn't be accurate or fair for me to say that Reform doesn't have any coherent policies, because it clearly does if you take the time to read them, and my local Reform candidate Max Windsor-Peplow gave some quite thought-out and complex answers to questions during the one single hustings he attended, even if I didn't agree with what he said. However, what I can say is that when canvassing on doorsteps and meeting Reform voters, it was quite rare for them to be able to coherently explain what their policies actually were, besides vague comments like, 'It's all the immigrants, isn't it?' Reform may have some policies, but they have not taken the time during their campaign to make clear what these policies actually are, or what the causes are of our societal problems.
What UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform all have in common, and what Nigel Farage in particular is exceptionally good at, is that they purport to be the main anti-establishment option for voters. This is demonstrated by the fact that they received the third highest vote share nationwide. People were sick of both the Tories and Labour, Reform UK recognised this and presented themselves as being a credible alternative. Just as a personal anecdote, I found that potential Reform voters were some of the most easy to talk to about my partner Owen's campaign, even though his actual politics are radically different from theirs and Nigel Farage's. This is because a lot of the time, this wasn't actually about anyone's policies; it was about wanting to send a message that people want to be listened to a bit more, and voting for a really good independent does that just as much as voting for a party like Reform.
In reality, Reform UK is not anti-establishment - its organisers have just learned how to appear to be, when in reality they care very little about ordinary folk and are connected to exactly the same kind of powerful individuals as the Conservatives are. This can be seen by how much they are featured in the mainstream media - Nigel Farage is one of the most frequently-featured faces on Question Time in spite of the fact that until last Thursday he'd never been an MP, whereas someone like Caroline Lucas of the Green Party has appeared far less often despite having been in Westminster for fourteen years. With the complete lack of impartiality from the UK's media, a truly anti-establishment politician could never hope to receive this amount of prominent coverage. The aim is to purport to be anti-establishment whilst driving the UK's domestic and foreign policies increasingly to the extreme right.
However, there are some major differences between UKIP and Reform UK. The most important one for this election is the fact that UKIP's aim was not really to gain seats - it was more to spook the Conservative Party into adopting more of their policies, in particular to pressure David Cameron into ordering a referendum into the UK's continued membership of the European Union. Reform UK isn't so interested in this, perhaps because it could see that at this point the Conservative Party was dead in the water. Its aim is more ambitious than this - it's to take advantage of the complete drop in support for establishment politics generally, and for this they do need seats.
In my constituency of Monmouthshire, the newly elected Labour MP Catherine Fookes unseated incumbent Tory David TC Davies, who had held the seat since 2005. Her majority is roughly the same amount of votes that Reform got. I will not say that this is fundamentally the reason why Labour won that seat, as I don't believe Reform's voters would necessarily have otherwise voted Conservative (I actually think my partner Owen could have got more votes as an anti-establishment candidate in the absence of Reform). Nevertheless, the fact that Reform was more interested in taking votes from the Conservatives than UKIP were has overall benefitted Labour.
Although I'm concerned by the rise in Reform, I do really hope that by sitting as an MP it will become apparent to the populace how devoid of practical measures to improve our lives Nigel Farage actually is. In the meantime, I'm confident in the left's role in presenting decent principles as an alternative. But these will not come from the Labour Party, they'll come from people who are truly anti-establishment and not just purporting to be.
The collapse of the SNP
I believe that the performance of the SNP is the most crucial reason why Labour did so much better in this election than they did in 2015.
In 2015, pretty much all the other parties were wiped out across Scotland as the SNP dominated, winning 56 out of a total 59 Scottish seats. This was embarrassing for all the other parties, but particularly for Labour, as Labour has traditionally dominated Scottish politics. The reason for the SNP's success is not because Scottish voters have fundamentally different values to voters across the rest of the UK; it's merely that they happened to be presented with a valid alternative to neoliberalism when the rest of the UK was not.
Fast forward to 2024, and the SNP has lost huge numbers of seats. There is no one single main reason for this, and I don't know enough about Scottish politics to feel comfortable speculating. I feel that there were just too many small things that made the SNP far less appealing than they were ten years ago, including having constant changes of leader since the departure of Nicola Sturgeon. It is this, to me, that has caused the Labour Party to get so much more success at this election, as Scotland is the nation where the Labour vote has increased the most (in England it remained fairly static, and in Wales where I live it actually fell). Again, I don't believe that this was because of radical differences of value between Scottish voters and the rest of the UK; merely that the Scots had become accustomed to having a decent alternative to the main parties, and without one fell back towards supporting Labour as they traditionally would have.
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For me, I'm very optimistic about the new Westminster make-up, in spite of the fact that I really did not think Labour deserved to win an election. The fact that they won such a landslide in terms of seat numbers but dropped so much in terms of actual votes is something bizarre that has never happened before. The Government knows that seats they thought were safe are now perhaps not so safe, and for this reason I feel the time is ripe to put pressure on them to really stand up for the things that matter to us.
But we must not be complacent. If we are, our NHS will be privatised, our civil rights to protest will be stripped from us, and our general quality of life will be radically reduced before we can say, 'We shall not be moved'.
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