The Tories have lost this election. By default, that means Labour are now in government. This election, lost before the election was even called, was a foregone conclusion. The results of the election though shows so much more than the simple ‘Labour win’ headline and there is now so much we can predict now, but that will be for an article later.
The results are (Seats, Seat Change, Percentage of Vote, Percentage of Vote Change)
Labour - 412 (+211) - 33.7% vote (+1.6%)
Tories - 121 (-250) - 23.7% vote (-19.9%)
Lib Dems - 71 (+63) - 12.2% vote (+0.6%)
SNP - 9 (-38) - 2.5% vote (-1.3%)
Reform - 5 (+4) - 14% vote (+12.3%)
Green - 4 (+3) - 6.8% vote (+4.1%)
Plaid Cymru - 4 (+2) - 0.7% vote (+0.2%)
Other - 33 (-1)
Turnout: 60%
Rishi Sunak resigned as Prime Minister and predictably as leader. Keir Starmer will now form a government.
Labour have the most seats and will form a government, but the stats show that this is anything but a desire to a Labour government. The Tories have lost this election. That is the story. They were always going to lose, and this is anything but a resounding success which will spook an incoming Labour government.
The election was bad, but not a disaster for the Tories that was being expected by some people. There was a real fear that the Tories would get less than 100 seats and Labour would achieve north of 40% of the vote. Neither happened. The Tories for all their issues were only around 10% behind Labour in terms of the popular vote. 80% of the public did not vote for Labour if you add non-voters too. Starmer has overseen not an election of Labour constituencies winning by thousands of votes; there are hundreds of marginals. 2 shadow ministers in the Labour Party lost the vote in their constituencies. Keir Starmer’s first speech as the Prime Minister to-be was actually very restrained. This is not a victory, it’s watching the opponent lose.
Labour’s ‘landslide’ is not a landslide of support. It is a landslide of the electoral system and nothing more. The Labour share of the vote was up by 3% from the 2019 eelection where they were decimated. Their seat victory is less than that of the 1997 general election. Their vote share went down in Wales. In England aside from London their vote share stagnated. Only in Scotland did they see their vote share go up. This is because a Labour vote was in itself a protest against the Tories and the SNP; the incumbents failures gave Labour their victory. Voter turnout was the lowest since 2001. Starmer’s approval rating is +5 (Tony Blair was +20 in 1997). This is a victory of numbers, yes. Labour managed to get its voters to go out and vote and that is a major success of Keir Starmer, but it was very much an in-house victory; few voters went from another party to Labour.
Scotland saved Keir Starmer from blushes. Labour were up 41-3% for so long in the polls but slumped down almost 10% during the general election and had the SNP not completely imploded as a party in Westminster Labour would have a majority similar to Boris Johnson’s in 2019 and the narrative would be incredibly different. The SNP lost 38 seats, becoming an electoral footnote now with Labour as the main beneficiaries, a total rejection of the incumbents in Scotland that wasn’t really foreseen. In all honesty, Labour needs Scotland in order to carry the day, as the numbers really help. But in so many ways Labour was just not the SNP, though they have a popular leader in Scotland in Sarwar, much like they just weren’t the Tories. Labour really benefited from the failures of governments since 2010.
The main winners, in seat numbers, has to be the Liberal Democrats. Though their vote share didn’t even go up by 1% they were far more tactical. They gave up on the national issues as their leader spent the entire campaign doing stunts that had nothing to do with national politics, or politics in general. They instead capitalised on the local Tory disenfranchisement and used their sniper rifle to take out Tories in the shires, including one Jacob Rees-Mogg (though in his defence the boundary changes thinned out Tory votes letting Labour in following Tories not voting or voting Lib Dem). The success is historic in terms of seat numbers and it will be very interesting to see the Tories react to this, but more on this in another article. The Lib Dems have done nothing with national arguments and have pitched themselves as local champions which has done really well. It will be interesting to see how they pivot back to national politics but they will be happy even though they have benefited largely from the Tories just not turning up.
Reform have had the best night in terms of increasing of a vote share. In fairness, the Brexit Party did stand in 2019 so it is not necessarily going from 0-14%, but more from 1-14%. They had the best campaign of the election in terms of turning heads and shifting views. The relentless media campaign against them seems to have succeeded in preventing them from getting over the lines in places like South Wales and the midlands by a handful of votes. They will be a bit dissapointed that they will have only won 5 seats after the exit poll predicted 13. They relied on potential non-voters coming out but this is one of the hardest demographics to actually get out to vote. But let’s be serious. This party had no structure, no coordination, no sophistication, no money and it managed to garner 17% of the national vote (taking out non-voters). It was predicted 0-1 seat at the beginning. Nigel Farage, their leader, gathered a whacking great swing to Reform of around 40% of the vote and will be joined by four others. Reform won 98 second place finishes, mostly in the Labour-held areas. In Brexit-supporting areas they won most ex-Tory votes by 30-40%, and in non-Brexit supporting areas by 10-20%. Reform changed the most minds and in so many ways the shows a big success. They will be a thorn in the Labour Party side but again more on that in another article.
Some worrying developments. Dan Ashworth, a senior Labour Party politician, lost in Leicester south to an independent candidate campaigning on a pro-Gaza ticket. In fact 4 independent MPs beat Labour candidates because they ran on a pro-Gaza ticket. George Galloway lost his seat which shows a bit of a push back against sectarianism but there are the seeds of a fracturing of Labour’s domination of ethnic minority voters. Also with a turnout of 60% this will heavily undermine politics in general as more people didn’t vote than voted for the winning party. It’s not a good look.
Labour won 2/3 of the seats with 1/3 of the vote. Reform won more votes than the Lib Dems yet the latter won 71 and the former won 4. Labour’s vote share did not change on the whole in so many areas and in one nation in Britain it went down, and yet the ‘landslide’ was great. It all looks, feels and sounds yucky from a democratic point of view. Labour will govern based on their view of all of this and will be far more constrained than we think, but still we will see what happens as they have the numbers to do whatever they want. But this is not a victory for Labour; this is a defeat of the Tories, a win for the disenfranchised and Labour being opportunistic as the only boxer in the room has just sat around as the referee has waited 6 weeks to announce the winner as the opponent has laid flat out cold for the last year.
Labour are now in government, but they are very much not there because of the people, but by the electoral system that has made sure that only Labour could benefit from the implosion of the Tories. Maybe one day that will change but for now witness the results of not a democracy, but of a system that sacrifices democracy for stability. Over the next 5 years we will find out if that sacrifice is too great a burden to bear any more.
The next government will be formed soon but we will publish this article before the announcements. We will look into this at a later date.
Here at the TDL Times we will predict what will happen in this parliament in a later article based on these electoral result. Look forward to that.
This article first appeared on the TDL Times. For more information, articles and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.
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