I have published this video this morning. In it I argue that Labour might have won a massive majority but did Keir Starmer really win? His constituency data presents a very different view – as does a comparison with Jeremy Corbyn. He has delivered an unloved landslide majority to govern the country.
There is no audio version, as yet.
The transcript is:
Did Keir Starmer really win this election? I just want to offer you some figures that suggest he shouldn't be quite as confident as he will appear to be on so many newspaper front pages on Saturday morning.
Why? He didn't do so well in his own seat. He actually only got 18,884 votes for himself. In 2019, he got 36,641. His personal vote halved in this general election.
The turnout in his constituency collapsed. It was 56,000 in 2019. It was 38,000 this time.
That isn't the sign of a man who's really winning the confidence of the people who elected him.
And let's compare him with his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn got 24,120 votes in this election. Stamer, just 18, 884. Who's the more popular? Well, on a poll, it would seem that Corbyn is.
So, is Starmer really the winner of this election, or is he, as Gary Gibbon on Channel 4 said, the leader of an unloved landslide party?
I fear he's the leader of the unloved, and that's going to show very quickly.
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Nope. He did not. It would be good for an analysis of how Reform facilitated LINO’s win.
On a related note: “Keir Starmer promises a ‘government of service’ “…..hmm service to what/whom? Who benefits? not those that voted LINO I’ll be bound.
Reform clearly did a lot of damage to the Tories, whereas a lot of Labour voters from last time simply didn’t turn out, in safe Labour seats, for various reasons (certainly Gaza/Palestine, in some places); Viz Starmer’s low personal vote.
In Penistone and Stocksbridge, the New Conservative, Miriam Cates, got 10,000 votes, Reform 9,000; and Labour’s Dr Marie Tidball won with 19,000. So, absent Reform, quite a lot of those 9,000 might well have stayed with the Tories. (Of course, some might have gone back to Labour to “get the Tories out” as the least-worst option, even if not anti-establishment as they’d like. Hypotheticals are always tricky…)
By the way… Marie Tidball seems a good candidate and MP: the visuals of her maiden speech will be worth watching, if you care about disability rights and empowerment.
Anyone who says that social democratic Labour was/is “unpopular” needs to give their heid a wobble.
In 2019 JC’s Labour had almost 500,000 votes more than SKS centre right Labour in 2024.
The main difference is that the Tories dropped 7m votes, and the LDs managed 55+ seats.
Under FPTP, regardless of the aggregate right wing vote, the 3rd party needs to take 50-60 seats in England, and over 3,5m votes, to allow Labour a WM majority – that is just a quirk of FPTP in England, (Blair would have lost in 2005 otherwise),
This does not mean that voters do not respond positively to democratic socialist policies – a myth put about by the Blair-right.
It would all suggest that it was Tory failure not desire for Starmer’s Tory-Lite policies that drove the election result.
If you care to add Reform and Tory votes together………the possibility arises that LINO at best would need the LibDems in a coalition. In my own constituency, the right wing LINO candidate gained 17k, the Tory 15k, Reform ( a particularly odious little racist) 9k. STV would’ve seen the Tory win BTW!
PS
The real winner is Farage. He is funded in a long term campaign to win in 2029. His presence on social media, especially TikTok, is explicitly aimed at conditioning the new voters in the 16-25 age group. He has already influenced even younger ‘voters’ – in a mock school election by the U16s here Labour and Reform were on 35% each yesterday. Some of my 6th formers already spout Reform tropes.
Labour has not so much won power as had power thrust upon it. It has won a record number of seats, but, the voting statistics for the last four elections suggest that had Corbyn still been leader, Labour would have won even more seats, and I am not just thinking of the four that went to independents. Of course there is no way of knowing this one way or the other, but, on the other hand, there is very little reason to think that Starmer’s purge of the left, his U-turns on popular policies, and his cosying up to financial organizations have done anything to enhance his win, although he will no doubt spin these as precisely the reasons he won.
I think these are all incredibly good points
Reform were the winners coming from nowhere to take 14% of the vote even more than the Lib Dems. They have the same number of seats as the Greens but nearly 3x as many votes. They would have 100 seats under PR. If they get financial backing as I think they will they will become a real political force. Do you still believe in PR?
See a video out tomorrow
Except we have no way of knowing how many piled in to Reform because a lack of PR meant there were few ways they could register a vote that counted.
If we already had PR it’s quite possible that those who currently feel politically homeless would have felt their vote counted if they voted for other non mainstream parties.
It’s a Donald Rumsfeld, as it stands.
True
Whilst I abhor most of their policies, I support PR because all voters (including Reform supporters) deserve fair representation. The real problem is that decision-making is far too centralised and putting a cross against one candidate every 5 years is not my idea of democracy!
To quote an “Australianism” A blind drovers dog could have won this election. The Tories were so foul, corrupt, self seeking, arrogant, incompetent and ordinary folk were just plain sick of them and could not stomach any more of them. It was definitely more of a case that Tories really did lose through their own depredations and corruption, hopefully never to slither out of their slime pit for a long time if ever.
Starmer having rolled Corbyn, was just well placed to reap the benefit of being the most obvious and insulting vehicle to throw the tories out with. High points of the affair were Corbyn winning his seat as an independent and that so many high and mighty Tory brexiteers jumped ship or were trounced.
I have faith that goodness and equitable dealing will eventually win out in the whole squalid money, privilege, corruption and power pit of U.K. politics and a balance will return, well eventually anyway. Tories gone is a start.
From Prospect Magazine
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/elections/general-election-2024/67168/the-anti-tory-vote-won
“Just 35 per cent voted Labour. That is the smallest share of the Britain-wide vote ever obtained by any party winning an outright majority, however small. It must be one of the weirdest landslides that any mature democracy has ever served up … its 35 per cent share yesterday was nine points lower than Blair’s 44 per cent—and six points lower than [41 per cent] under Corbyn in 2017.”
From Al Jazeera [with slight difference on some of the stats]:
Labour’s overall share of the vote rose by less than 2 percentage points. Despite taking 64 percent of the seats, the party only won 34 percent of the actual vote. In 2019, when the party was led by Jeremy Corbyn, whose low popularity was blamed for Labour’s losses, vote share was only slightly lower – at 32 percent.
This is the second-lowest voter turnout, which usually exceeds 65 percent, for a general election since 1885. “In many ways, this looks more like an election the Conservatives have lost than one Labour has won,” wrote John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, for the BBC.
From the Financial Times:
https://www.ft.com/content/74108618-1638-421a-9a08-dc3073c277fa
“Four and a half years ago, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party received just over 10m votes in the UK’s 2019 general election — a third of all that were cast. This performance resulted in Labour winning 202 seats in the House of Commons, its lowest tally since the 1930s.
Wind forward to yesterday and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party received half a million fewer votes than in 2019, again a third of the popular vote. This performance has been rewarded under our first-past-the-post electoral system with a huge majority and 412 seats so far, the second-highest tally in the party’s history.”
No, Kier Starmer did not win.
It is all utterly bizarre
And we get stuck with this lot
The ERS have done a projection of what the result might look like under a PR system. They acknowledge it’s highly conjectural and is simply and indicator of the possible number of seats a party might get if the results were more proportional to their vote.
It would of course be a coalition, if the more leftish parties could hold their noses and work with the fairly rightish LINO, and if the latter would drop their dogma of Labourism (LINO-ISM?).
Some might object that PR would give a lot of seats to Reform, but to my mind that’s a risk worth taking if we are to move a little towards democracy. Besides, people may be more confident in voting for parties like the greens if they know their vote will actually be counted and be effective.
IMHO the way to neuter Reform is for the government to spend money and tax wealth a la TWR 2024 and start fixing some of the things that the Tories in particular have run into the ground. (High on the list of concerns is the NHS, poverty, stagnating incomes and many more – British Social Attitudes Report)
Another absurdity of FPTP that the ERS highlight is how very small swings in the vote could have dramatic effects on the result. For example, in 2017, just 533 votes in certain seats would have given May an absolute majority! Madness.
PR has to be the first thing to change if we hope to get better government. But how? Starmer isn’t interested. I suspect, like reversing Brexit it isn’t something he expects to see in his lifetime.
https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how-the-2024-election-could-have-looked-with-proportional-representation/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ers-email&utm_campaign=electoral-reform&utm_content=GE2024+AMS+projection+and+petition
https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/it-should-be-a-scandal-that-small-changes-in-the-vote-result-in-outsize-changes-in-parliament/
I will state it here in the morning
I am a member
Fraser Nelson in the Spectator too:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labours-potemkin-landslide/
“I expected Starmer to win a big majority, but neither I nor anyone else expected how low the Labour support would be. This time yesterday, I thought the Labour would be in for ten years. Today, seeing the shallowness of Starmer’s support, I think there is all to play for next time around. The voters have turned away from the Tories but did not turn towards Labour. Never has a postwar prime minister had less popular support. Never in a century of elections have the two main parties had a lower combined vote share. All told, the next five years in British politics will be thrillingly unpredictable.”
I don’t think I would call the unpredictability of the next five years thrilling. Apart from that Fraser Nelson is right.
Be careful what you wish for.
Some people argue that PR could be the answer, but it comes in many stripes. In some versions it can result in an extreme minority holding the balance of power in a coalition government – look at Israel currently!
So we need broadly based constituencies with multiple members
More stats:
UK 2024
Total electorate – 48,214,128
Did not vote – 19,285,651 – 40%
Voted Tory or REFUK – 10,848,619 – 22.5%
Voted Labour – 9,650,254 – 20%
A landslide victory with the votes of ONE IN FIVE of the electorate.
Broken.
From owen Jones in this mornings guardian……
YouGov reported that nearly half of Labour’s voters gave “get the Tories out” as the main reason for their choice, with “agree with their policies” chalking up just 5% and Starmer’s leadership securing 1%. Enthusiasm for Starmerism this was not.
Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory, standing as an independent in Islington North, was also a much bigger success than has been understood. Since the second world war, vanishingly few independent candidates have won in a competitive contest at a general election.
He is right