As the dust clears
But the low turnout, and the fact that the incoming vote got a fairly low share of the popular vote, indicates the challenge faced by Starmer’s Labour and the deepening of the crisis of British politics. No doubt the sense that the election was a done deal, with Labour dominating the polls so unassailably for so long, depressed turnout outside key marginals and emboldened anti-Labour protest votes. But it is also clearly the case that Starmer did not offer a positive vision for change that could enthuse the country and deliver a meaningful mandate.
The exceptionally wide spread of the Labour majority – winning both marginals and whole swathes of the country seen as previously impregnable Tory territory – described by commentators as “efficiency”, contrasts sharply with Corbyn’s ability to stack up huge numbers in core territories while failing to win over voters outside these. Starmer may not have made Labour more popular than Corbyn did, but he built a strategy that won an electoral mandate in a way that Corbynism never could. But this breadth of spread is also a weakness: Labour support is shallow and vulnerable, and a small swing in another direction can sweep much of it away in 2031, which will encourage Starmer’s instinct for caution and playing to the right.
For me personally (as with many in Labour’s base), Starmer’s tailing of authoritarian populist themes, flag-waving, talking tough on migration and acceptance of the inevitability of austerity left a bitter taste. For those of us who do see the need for a radical transformation of our socio-economic landscape, we will need to buckle down to fight both within and outside (and often against) the party, to hold it to the social democratic commitments it has made and to hold open as much space as possible for a politics of genuine change. Municipal politics, trade union struggles, and social movement activism (including migrant solidarity and climate justice) will become more important than ever.
In the New Labour years, I frequently argued that Labour courts a long-term risk in taking its base (the overlapping categories of (a) educated urban people and (b) Britons from minoritised backgrounds) for granted by playing to the right. It seems that Gaza has started to bring this danger to crisis point, as it is such an emotive issue for both parts of its core electoral coalition. We saw this in George Galloway’s by-election Rochdale breakthrough earlier in the year (thankfully now reversed) and in the sharp decline in the Labour vote in places like London, Birmingham, Bristol and the mill towns of the North. In the Autumn, Labour were at best tepid on the war, allowing their opponents to (falsely) paint them as genocide enablers, and Starmer made a huge moral and strategic error in whipping opposition to a ceasefire call. Although the party took a far better position from the early Spring, it received little media attention and Labour kept its new policy fairly quiet, out of the same caution that curses this leadership, leaving its activists without the weapons they needed to defend the party in its urban heartlands. Meanwhile, a stupid comment about Bangladeshis while posing tough on immigration to a debate hosted by The Sun cost him more votes in these constituencies.
The left
Thus parts of the left are taking satisfaction from the electoral advance of the Green Party, Jeremy Corbyn’s decisive win as an independent, the handful of Gaza-focused anti-Labour candidates, and the fact that Starmer received fewer votes and only slightly higher vote share than Corbyn did in 2019 and a far lower popular vote than Corbyn did in 2017 (as well as getting fewer votes in his own seat than Corbyn did as an independent). But their satisfaction is hubristic.
First, the left-wing surge wasn’t actually very left-wing. While the four Green MPs articulate a progressive vision in comparison to Labour, many of the independents don’t. Ayoub Khan, who won Birmingham Perry Barr, was a lifelong Liberal Democrat (leaving that party after a controversy over arguably antisemitic social media posts), and the three other independents (i.e. apart from Corbyn) focused so sharply on Gaza that it’s hard to see any left-wing positions in their platforms. Those most active in their campaigns include religious conservatives with deeply right-wing views on issues such as gender and sexuality. Few of the independent challengers were credible candidates with a left-wing track record, with the singular exception of Faiza Shaheen, who ultimately only succeeded in getting half of the Labour vote and allowing Ian Ducan Smith to retain his seat.
More importantly, the left’s support is extremely narrow. Just half a million voters voted for independent candidates (including Corbyn, but also all the weird anti-abortion candidates) nationally (2% of those who voted), along with 210,000 voting for Galloway’s left/fascist mix-up the Workers Party of Britain, 12,000 for the more explicitly socialist TUSC and 8000 for People Before Profit in Northern Ireland. Nearly two million voted Green (6.7% of those who voted), which is far more significant, although this figure is dwarfed by the more than four million voting for the hard right Reform UK. Corbyn was the exception not the rule, as his deep local personal base (as an incumbent of over four decades who lives in and is truly present in his constituency) exceeds his political support in Islington North. And unless (G*d forbid) the Gaza war continues, the rage over this issue that fuelled this rebellion will inevitably dissipate.
In other words, beyond the urban areas where Labour triumphed in 2017 and 2019, no left-of-Labour force, even in alliance with religiously conservative Muslim activists, has the foundation of any kind of serious electoral politics, although it does undermine Labour’s electoral coalition. Without re-connecting to post-industrial working class people in former social democratic heartlands, electoralism can never be a viable vehicle for the British left. Or, put another way, without an electoral coalition with more socially conservative parts of the working class, as represented by Starmer’s Labour, the left cannot operate on the national political stage.
The right
Meanwhile, although it translates into a fairly small change in the parliamentary landscape, the surge of the hard right Reform Party should be a serious source of worry for the left. While only winning five seats, Reform got over four million votes: nearly half of what Labour got, more than twice what the Greens got. Crucially, it was only about a third less than the Tory vote. The electoral collapse of the Tories might spell the death of mainstream centre-right conservatism here, echoing the collapse of the Gaullist right in France and the Christian Democrats in Italy. The chances of the revival of the party as a mainstream centre-right party are tiny (moderate potential leaders such as such as Tom Tugendhat are not popular in the party membership). More likely, it will either emerge as a Trumpian populist party under one of its most right-wing figureheads (most of whom are non-white) on an anti-migrant, anti-trans culture war platform – or, following the French and Italian template, be completely eclipsed by an ascendant Reform UK offering a more full-blooded version of authoritarian, xenophobic national conservatism.
The French and Italian precedents show us clearly that (a) when mainstream parties try to wrap themselves in the flag and to compete with the hard right in bashing migrants and sexual minorities it does not steal the thunder of populist parties but in fact emboldens them, and (b) that tepid technocratic management of austerity can feed the rage, discontent and disconnect that fuels authoritarian populism. We can therefore be certain that Reform will continue to grow under Starmer’s government. And we know from the US precedent that when authoritarian populist movements grow within the electoral machine, actually fascist movements grow in their penumbra outside it, emboldened to inflict violence on minority communities. The left therefore needs a strategy to maintain the anti-fascist movement and an anti-fascist culture, rooted in our communities, and this must be one of our most urgent priorities.
The Corbynite left correctly highlights the extent to which Starmer helps strengthen the far right in his attempts to woo Red Wall voters by emphasising social conservative themes, and it correctly points to centrist governments such as Macron helping to incubate the populist backlash. But it should take note of how the French left has started to push back Le Pen’s advance. In France, the radical left has allied with mainstream social democracy in the Popular Front, and the whole left has made a tactical alliance with liberal centrism to hold the line against fascism. The Corbynite left’s insistence that centrism as literally no better than fascism (or that Starmer’s pale attempts at populism actually make him a fascist, as is frequently repeated on social media) is deeply dangerous – and in fact objectively anti-antifascist. While the anti-fascist movement should maintain its autonomy and its project to do more than just protect the status quo, there is no long-term strategy against the far right that does not include at least tactical alliance with liberals and centrists.
So, let’s celebrate the defeat of the Conservatives and Labour’s
landslide victory but know that the next five years will not be easy and will
require us to think imaginatively and in the spirit of coalition not division.
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