This final article of the general election will analyse the last lessons both short and long term learned in this 2024 election. What will this election be remembered for in history? What will present or future politics or history students learn from this? This is the article that will help to understand the legacy of the 2024 general election and what could happen in the future. Are there aspects we will see the last of? Are things about to happen that haven’t happened before? The short answer is yes.
We have published 45 articles during this general election analysing twists and turns, key arguments and flashpoints of the election. We have published an article a day and this we hope has been helpful to understand what it is that’s been going on with a narrative going through the last 6 weeks of a desire for intellectual arguments. We were starved of it in the general election and so we attempted to extract it ourselves. We hope you have enjoyed the adventure with us and whilst we might loosen ourselves from the general election and articles might not be so forthcoming we hope you stick with us as we go into the next phase of the TDL Times. If you don’t hear from us fora day or two know that we will be casting our net wide to catch as much information as possible to bring it to you as best as possible, maintaining our narrative of providing intellectual content from unintellectual stuff in the media. Wish us luck with the milking of water from a stone.
This general election has taught us so many things that will probably see things change and reflect so many shortcomings. The headline is that this is the least democratic election in the history of the UK. Labour achieved 1.8% seats for 1% of the votes, the highest it’s ever been (in 1997 the second highest was 1.5%). No party has ever won with such a low percentage of the popular vote. It is clear to the max that Labour did not win. The left coordinated, the right didn’t. The left played the game of the system whilst the right argued on a political level (which is really what it SHOULD have been), though in so many ways the Tories simply argued amongst themselves. The smiles of the Labour Party are same smiles of authoritarian regimes as their latest plebiscite returns a result they wanted in an election anything but fair. The Labour Party are democratically insufficient. Will Keir Starmer, such an advocate of re-doing the Brexit referendum because it was ‘unfair’, say that actually we should vote again? No. In politics if the result suits you you double down. If it doesn’t you fight to get people to vote again. Starmer doesn’t really have much to go on with 33% of the vote. This election will be interesting to see what an unpopular party with the political landslide numbers do with it. Could this be the biggest parliamentary majority with the least political wiggle room to do anything? Yes.
The next point from this is the legacy of the Reform and Green vote. The Greens got 4% of the vote but 1% of the seats but reform getting 14% of the vote but 1% of the seats is immensely undemocratic, especially when the Lib Dems got half a million fewer votes than Reform and were awarded 71 seats. A lot is awarded to parties who achieve more seats (in something called Short Money; taxpayers money given to parties to help pay for their parliamentary staffers and research - numbering in the millions). The Lib Dems benefited from a deal with Labour with tactical voting with Labour (which went both ways) in many different constituencies. Millions of people feel disenfranchised because millions voted for parties who have basically no representation save a few MPs, meaning parliamentary business is essentially neutered, when around 9 MPs represent something close to 10 million voters. This wouldn’t be nearly as big a story if Labour had seen their vote share go up at the same time with a considerable margin but there was no such rise (0.6% rise for Labour nation-wide). The legacy of this election is that democracy lost up and down the country.
The legacy of the right and left in politics is probably changed forever. On the left the Labour Party have failed to galvanise the left. Jeremy Corbyn, the ex-leader of Labour thrown out due to allowing anti-Semitism to run rampant in the party, was re-elected as an independent, defeating the Labour candidate. Labour lost two senior shadow cabinet members to pro-Gaza independent candidates with sympathies to Islamism. Labour in government has in history only exacerbates left-wing militancy and it has brought down Labour governments before, and it will probably happen again. The left is disunited as Starmer’s coalition really revolves around Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Ed Miliband and perhaps a quiet socialist wing behind Angela Rayner. Add in the civil service and certain areas of mainstream media and that’s it for Starmer and the left. Aside from that there is rampant disunity. Starmer doesn’t even have a coalition of anti-Tory voters as Reform came second in so many constituencies. There will be by-elections and Labour will lose many and quicker than usual because they have not got a solid coalition and fractures will occur due to the unease with the over-reliance on the Blairite forces within the party in the shadows.
For the right the Tories really underestimated the amount of anti-Tory sentiment, BUT they will see that their base was higher than people thought. Rishi Sunak relied on anti-Labour and having a realistic chance of winning in constituencies, especially pro-remain constituencies they had MPs in. They lost out heavily in pro-Brexit constituencies by a swing of between 30-40%. The Tory coalition that kept them in power, symbolised by Boris Johnson, is gone. They needed the Brexit voters to have a majority, they needed the credibility to run the country to get to a hung parliament, and they needed the anti-Labour vote to remain relevant. They only got the latter, and in that they shared with Reform. They will look to the Lib Dem seats and Labour seats in the city and consider that as their next strategy, but their legacy is that they will change as a party for good. The Tory legacy is that their Brexit voters have finally betrayed them and they have pushed Reform so far away with their comments on them that a merger or rapproachment with Nigel Farage seems impossible. They will finally give up on the populist right and will not allow a right-ist to lead the party. Rishi Sunak was very much supported by the fact he wasn’t stabbed in the back by nearly enough people to force anything. The damage to them over the last general election and the existential nature of it will mean that they will be electorally irrelevant for around 3 years, and will not feature much in opposition, which is a big worry (healthy democracies NEED a strong opposition almost as much as a good electoral system). Reform will win seats from Labour and the Tories will most likely not feature much there in a bid to fight their own battle against the urban middle class graduates again because there is no other party realistically going for that save perhaps the Lib Dems.
The right was fractured in the last election. There will be some perhaps in the Tories or in Reform who will have to think long and hard about whether a similar amount of negotiation will have to happen on the right as it did so soccessfully on the left. If the Tories dig their heels in thinking they ARE the right (when they are more centre-left than anything in the majority) and Reform continue to be irrelevant to them then Labour will have an easier time, save the flank exposed to Reform as they pursue policies associated with the woke radical left. Could Reform break the Tories and see defections? The legacy of the 2024 election is that this could be possible. If the Tories do not learn that they need to actually be a right-of-centre party to provide an alternative as their voters largely stayed at home then the legacy of this election is that it fundementally destroyed the Tory coalition, ending its chances of forming a majority government ever again. Reform won’t go away. They won with no election engine, no money and no structure. They will professionalise and if they get this right then a majority of 2019 Tory voters in the Red Wall will become core Reform voters from now on. If that’s the case the Tories will never be alone in government ever again.
The last big legacy here is turnout. At 59.9%, the election was a failure to galvanise support. The media are largely to blame as well as the Tories. A foregone conclusion declared form the off, Labour voters didn’t go out thinking the battle was won anyway, and Tory voters didn’t go out to vote thinking the cause was lost anyway. Democracy in this country is at an all-time low in terms of uniparty issues (6 of the 7 major parties in the UK and its nations are Social Democrat parties), the electoral system issues and media scandal issues. Turnout was affected because so many people didn’t want to get involved with what became a dirty election in terms of name-saying, inneffective leaders and what seemed to be a dishonest argument being shown on TV. It was sanitised, elitist and the insistence by the political parties and media on closing the Overton Window when on the street the masses are angrily trying to open it wider and wider created a disconnect that was symbolised by people just not bothering to go out and vote. UK politics is fast becoming another world, another reality to what is going on on the streets. Labour didn’t talk at all about immigration. The Tories didn’t talk about cultural conservatism at all (and in the case of Sunak and D-Day actively acting against cultural conservatism). The Lib Dems just spent the election showing their leader having fun in not doing politics. Westminster and the public are miles apart. And when a party like Reform actually tries to rise out of the general public the response is to call them racists, sexists and the scrutiny becomes all-too-much. People fear about getting involved too much in politics lest they be set on by the witch-finder generals. It is safer not to get involved and he tip of the iceberg is turnout. If politicians don’t speak to you then don’t go out to vote. That is the saddest part of the legacy of this general election; people didn’t want to get involved.
The legacy of this general election is generally negative and thus the response will be seismic. This election will be pointed to when the next argument for electoral inevitably comes around. This election will be pointed to when the Labour Party falls very quickly from its landslide. This election will be pointed to when the Tories become even more of a regional party as their decision to stick to the centre comes back to bite them on the butt. This election will be pointed to when the Reform Party succeed in making the argument that politics needs to return back to the people and populism, so popular in Europe, returns to the UK after its slumber in 2019. Brexit was just the beginning. This election will be the flashpoint which tells the established parties and media that the norm cannot go on for any longer. Change will only happen when Labour begins haemorrhaging support in the Commons and the wider general public in a year or two following the initial desire for stability with our new government.
We hope that the legacy of today makes a better tomorrow, whatever that will look like. Let us hope that we ACTUALLY learn from what has happened. Otherwise people will get more angry and things won’t change, and the thing that tips the balance becomes ugly as time goes by.
The legacy of the general election is that things need to change, but Labour is not that change because they support no real change when it comes to a general election.
This article first appeared on the TDL Times. For more information, articles and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.
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