The Right has a long, long way to go.
To say that the results were a disaster for the Conservative Party is a statement of the obvious, as is the observation that, as self-inflicted wounds go, this (even down to the ridiculous timing: There was no reason not to wait until later on in the year) was right up there.
It’s not much consolation that Labour’s massive haul of parliamentary seats was, as someone I read last night put it, a “loveless landslide” (not that any listener would have known it from hearing a giddy BBC World Service this morning). As I wrote here, the math of First Past the Post is brutal. While there are more nuances to the Reform/Conservative story than a simple split on the right, that’s how, in many cases, it worked.
The result was that Labour won 64 percent of the seats with 34 percent of the national vote, only two percentage points more than it managed when Corbyn led the party to disaster in 2019. Reform won 14 percent of the votes and took 1 percent of the seats (coming third nationally), but the fourth-place center-left Liberal Democrats (12 percent of the vote) took 11 percent of the seats. Another important element in understanding a British election (constituency-based and FPTP) is that where the votes are cast is key. Reform’s support has some areas of regional strength, but, to oversimplify, its support was wide but shallow. That doesn’t bring in parliamentary seats.
The voting system is what it is — it has its strengths and its weaknesses — but Labour has no incentive to change it (other than by extending the franchise to the 16-year-olds), and so it won’t. Under a system of proportional representation, it would be possible to have two parties on the right, the largely Merkelite Tories of the last 14 years, and the more robust Reform. That option is not open, and so, at first sight, the best way for the Conservatives to go would be to merge with Reform. That’s not necessarily wrong, but things might get a little rough at the altar.
The Tories’ problems were exacerbated by the number of their votes that went in their traditional heartlands to the Liberal Democrats. In other words, they have a problem to their left as well as to their right. The reasons for that are complicated. But, to start with, the political leanings of important sections of the British bourgeoisie (to use an old-fashioned and inadequate word) have been drifting leftward for years, a process that was accelerated by the grotesque decisions of Johnson and May, the two miserable failures who — much more than Sunak and in so many ways — are responsible for yesterday’s debacle, to go for a “hard” Brexit.
Staying in the single market (not the customs union) was an option (albeit one that would have taken some wrangling). It would, as was pointed out (ahem) by some of us at the time, have buried most of the Brexit divide very quickly, and the Remainer Tories would have been reconciled with their party within a short time. That was not to be, and nor will it be for a long while, if ever. While a way back into the single market via the European Free Trade Association (Norway 2.0!) remains desirable, that would be a very long trek indeed, and there is no guarantee that Britain would get there in the end. Rubbing salt into the Tories’ wounds, the political issue that hurt them the most on the right — the surge in immigration, most notably illegal immigration — was attributable in no small part to the ending of the free movement that went with participation in the single market.
And one legacy of past and present mass immigration that has been lurking in the shadows for some time has now emerged snarling into the light.
Labour has lost five seats with large Muslim populations — four to independents and one to the Conservatives. In Leicester South, Shockat Adam declared “this is for Gaza” as he won the seat by 979 votes.
The constituency, where around 30% of the electorate are Muslim, has been held by Mr Ashworth for 13 years. In nearby Leicester East, the Conservatives benefitted from independent candidates picking up several thousand votes, particularly the area’s former Labour MP Claudia Webbe.
Ms Webbe, who was expelled from the party after she was charged and later convicted of harassment, has been a vocal pro-Palestinian campaigner. The Tories won her former seat by 4,426 votes, less than the number secured by Ms Webbe…
Other senior Labour figures in areas with large Muslim populations only narrowly held their seats after seeing their majorities eaten away.
The newly elected Labour MP for Coventry South, Zarah Sultana, said her party’s position on Gaza was a “stain on its record” and, while the party had “moved in the right direction”, it “took a long time to get there”.
David Lammy — who could be set to become Labour’s foreign secretary — told the BBC that his party would “work with partners to seek Palestinian recognition” in power.
At his own count, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer faced heckles of “Free Palestine” and saw his majority cut, with pro-Gaza independent Andrew Feinsten coming second with 7,312 votes.
Note that last sentence. Keir Starmer, Britain’s new prime minister, the man who led his party to an enormous parliamentary majority, saw his majority cut.
Oh yes:
In Islington North, his predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, retained his seat as an independent, after being suspended from the party over his response to a report on antisemitism in Labour.
Mr Corbyn beat the Labour candidate by more than 7,000 votes.
Corbyn’s win owes more, I think, to local loyalties than anything else. He has been an assiduous MP for a long, long time (indeed, he was my MP in the early 1980s), but still . . .
The failures of the Conservative Party over the last 14 years are too numerous to summarize in one not so brief post. But, beyond immigration, a botched Brexit, the lockdown fiasco, progressive authoritarianism, and net zero (the greatest and most destructive part of their economic interventionism), they failed, through a mixture of laziness, cowardice and, in many cases, their own lightly concealed sympathies, to make a significant dent in the cultural (and extra-parliamentary political) hegemony of the Left, a hegemony that will extend and deepen and, incidentally, be managed in a way that, if at all possible, absorb and benefit from the country’s new sectarian politics.
Add the percentage scores of the Conservatives (24) and Reform together (14), and that gets to a total of 38, four ahead of Labour, but way behind a combined Left. That, and the internal divisions within the Conservatives, losing votes to both right and left, and the fault lines within Reform (broadly Thatcherite at the top, but far from that in the rank and file) means that the Right has a long, long way to go.