Labour has won the general election and will hold a significant majority of around 170 seats.
Its leader (and next prime minister) Sir Keir Starmer says he has “earnt the mandate” because the electorate saw “that we can serve their interest.”
This is total nonsense.
No matter how many times Starmer repeats the lie that this election “could only be won by a changed Labour Party”—it will still be a lie.
Labour actually won because voters have come to loathe the Conservative Party so much that they decided either to stay at home (just 59.6% of the electorate voted—the second lowest level since 1885—and in 59 seats, less than half the electorate turned out) or to vote Reform.
Indeed, the millions of votes for Reform across the country might have only secured Nigel Farage’s party four seats (still an impressive number for such a young party under the first-past-the-post electoral system, and one from which it hopes to build upon at the next election), but they stopped the Conservatives from winning dozens and dozens of their own, handing them instead to Labour.
Starmer was also helped massively by the near-total collapse of the SNP in Scotland.
Polling expert Sir John Curtice’s assessment is absolutely damning for Labour:
But for the rise of the Labour Party in Scotland … we would be reporting that basically, Labour’s vote has not changed from what it was in 2019 [under Jeremy Corbyn]. In Wales, it’s actually down. In England it [has] barely changed.
Just to put it into context, Starmer’s Labour has landed two thirds of the seats with just one third of the vote.
There has obviously been no groundswell of support for Labour. You’d struggle to find a voter who is genuinely excited about what it has to offer—who could say much more than “the Tories are toast, so it’s time to give this lot a chance instead.” (It’s worth noting that this is effectively all The Sun said in its flaccid endorsement of Labour yesterday.)
Just look at Starmer’s own seat. He won on a low turnout and with a significantly lower vote share than he secured at the last election [again, under Jeremy Corbyn]—and, it should be noted, with almost 3,000 fewer votes than Farage picked up in Clacton. And yet Starmer talks about people waking up today under “the sunlight of hope.”
Labour also lost some of its frontbenchers, including to an independent candidate. And yet Starmer talks about this election having been “hard won” by Labour.
Or, as he puts it, by “Changed Labour.” Sorry to spoil the fun, but this just doesn’t fit. Starmer won fewer votes (9,650,254) for “Changed Labour” at this 2024 general election than former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn did at both the 2017 (12,877,918) and 2019 (10,269,051) elections.
Historian and broadcaster Rafe Heydel-Mankoo is quite right: “Labour may claim a mandate for a radical agenda and may use their majority as justification for lurching Britain to the progressive Left, but the facts simply don’t support that.”
The party appears even less popular now than during the Corbyn era which Starmer has been working hard to wriggle away from—just, lucky for them, less less popular than the Conservatives!
There’s no doubt about it: this election wasn’t really ‘won’ by Labour. It was lost by the Conservatives, with a great deal of help from Reform, which is where the real momentum lies.
