As I write, there are 5 seats left to declare. Labour have won 411 and are expected to win a few more, the Conservatives have been reduced to a rump of 119 meaning they’ve performed even worse than the Exit poll projected though slightly better than some of the polls were suggesting they might. The SNP are also seriously reduced to just 9 seats in Scotland, the Greens up to 4 and it looks like Reform UK will be on 4 seats. The Liberal Democrats are perhaps the biggest winners of the night apart from Labour moving from a handful of MPs to 71.
Labour have not got the feared one party super majority monopoly of over 200 seats but will still have a Tony Blair scale majority of over 170 seats. They’ve done this despite having a vote share much lower than 1997 and 2001. They have won a landslide on a lower vote share than Jeremy Corbyn got in 2017 and only a few percent more than he got in 2019. David Cameron got a greater vote share when he was leading the Conservatives as did Borsi Johnson and of course even Theresa May.. In fact the number of votes cast to Starmer’s landslide victory were closer to the number cast for John Major’s Conservatives in 1997. Let that sink in.
The projected vote share is as follows:
Labour 35%
Conservative 24%
Reform UK 15%
Lib Dem 13%
Green 7 %
Now, this means Labour’s majority is in massive disproportion to their vote share. First Past the Post exaggerates the strength of winners and the weakness of losers. Some people are again arguing that this reinforces the case for proportional representation.
Personally, I’m not convinced by the PR argument. Arguably our system as it now is hasn’t worked this time. FPTP is a system set up on the assumption that you have two main parties fighting it out. So, given that we now have a multi-party democracy this might suggest that it is out of date.
So why am I still not convinced. Well, the answer is that there is a case for saying that the problem is the multiple parties. We live in an age where everyone wants their little kingdom. Nigel Farage might have been a troublesome backbench Tory MP if he’d not got involved in UKIP. Leading his own party gives him a platform and prominence. But essentially, the two party system assumed that coalitions were built before an election and then the parties had to build a platform that could gain as many votes as possible, It meant that the extremes of politics at both ends were moderated and absorbed. When you have lots of small parties, it enables them to dictate the noise of a campaign much more and that can make for uglier politics. In a PR system, this also places them in a powerful position to negotiate for their policies and people after the election meaning that the Government’s mandate comes from a coalition negotiation, not their election manifesto.
That Labour’s majority has come on a such a small vote share does give Keir Starmer some challenges ahead. First it means that he will have a lot of MPs who perhaps never expected to be there. Party management may prove challenging. There’s a lot of ambitious people to keep happy. He must also square the circle that it will be easy for him to get radical policies through parliament but there will be questions about whether or not he has the mandate to do so. The risk is that things may change just as quickly between 2024 and 2029 as they did after 2019.
So, Labour need to know as much about how they got here and learn lessons quickly as the Tories do. Primarily the Tories lost power and almost wiped themselves out. Starmer will want to pay attention to that. There have already been signs about this including a concern to deal with the Channel boats whilst moving away from the horrific Rwanda policy. His concern for economic stability reflects a recognition that you can’t blow your economic credibility and recover.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives also lost heavily in the areas where they had broken through the so called “Red Wall” back in 2019. I suspect that a big part of disillusionment is with the sense that those people who lent their votes without converting to Conservatism felt that they’d been sold a dud with levelling up. They are still the left behind and forgotten. Labour won as much because Conservative voters switched to Reform. In fact, the Conservatives and Reform together polled 39%, 4% more than Labour. That doesn’t mean there is a right-wing majority over the progressive/left side of politics.
If Sir Keir is canny, he will not push into radical territory. There’s no mandate to play with suffrage and change the voting age to 16. He will want to do things to quickly improve the situation with the NHS and waiting lists.
So, given it is the Conservatives who through the game away. It’s important to look closely at how they managed to do so badly. Rishi Sunak was given a terrible hand to start with. As alluded to above, the Conservatives threw away any last remnants of reputation for competency with Liz Truss’ disastrous short time at Downing Street. She threw away the shreds of economic competency but actually the Tories had long ago sacrificed its overall reputation for competency and probity. In fact, they willingly did that by voting in Boris Johnson. Nobody could complain about that, they knew what they were getting. Incidentally, I struggle with the anger of some about his time in office and their crowing now. Where were they in 2019 when people like me were saying that Johnson was unfit for public office. At that time, many of us were denied an alternative choice as the left chose the luxury of an equally unsuitable man.
As I suggested eariier in the campaign, the Tories had been reduced to their core vote in 1997. They never really managed to grow new voters and after Brexit, their core vote was eroded further. Today we are seeing how small their core vote is. 2019 was about borrowed votes, non natural Tories, a fragile alliance that is now gone and I suspect will not come back. I don’t think those red wall voters will be tempted back again. This means that the Conservatives are going to have to get serious about building a new vote base if they want to survive into the future. That means beginning to win the case for conservatism with young voters.
This is important because the push will no doubt be from loud voices, I’m thinking of people like Suella Braverman who will want to push harder on the Rwanda policy. The Conservatives need to build a case for how lower taxation, controlled inflation and free markets is what the country needs and how that can be compassionate so that people can see their own needs met and those of the vulnerable. You will appreciate from this that I believe such an offer is possible.
Rishi Sunak will be tempted to resign immediately. I think this will be unwise both for the Conservatives and if a credible alternative matters, for the country too. The Conservatives need time to think carefully. They will need to look at who is still there. If not Rishi, then a Michael Howard caretaker leader to help bring a long term successor through may be wise.
In the end, Sunak came into the campaign with a weak hand and through even that away. The resonate images of the campaign were his peculiar decision to announce the election in a downpour. The timing of the vote before he could get his key policies in place and before people could feel the effect of lower inflation and improved growth figures was bizarre. He then decided to poke Reform with the unforgivable early return from D-Day. Sunak lost the campaign. Just a few more % of voters coming back to the Tories from Reform could have substantially changed things. By the time the Tories decided to face rather than try and ignore the Reform it was too late for them. They were further compromised too by the betting scandal. This reinforced an image not just of sleaze but of people who didn’t care, for whom it was all a game. Remember too that Rishi himself had on live TV made a bet once, remember too that the whole election felt like a questionable gamble. That the gamblers were not on the fringes but key figures close to the Prime Minister confirmed suspicions that Rishi’s judgement was poor.
Sunak was a terrible campaigner but remember this was a known problem already. He lost to Liz Truss in the leadership election after all. I understand some Conservatives are suggesting the rules should be changed to have the leader elected by MPs again. Remember that it was the MPs who offered party members a choice between Sunak and Truss and then replaced Truss with Sunak uncontested. So, there it seems is another unwise suggestion.
So much for how the politicians got there and what next for them. What about us as Christian voters? Here’s a question that was on my mind yesterday. Quite a few Christian friends were posting Think of the most vulnerable person you know and vote for them?”. Yet what did that phrase mean? I guess if I was voting FOR the most vulnerable person I should have voted for the candidate likely to win the least votes? If it was a covert way if signalling political alignments let’s be clear because the challenge is that at their best all parties care about the vulnerable and at their worst do things that harm them. I guess that it could have encouraged me to think of babies in the womb, especially those with possible Downs Syndrome? Sadly, there was little prominence on this issue in the election. I wonder if we know our new MPs position on this and I’d encourage friends to write urgently to them encouraging them to make this a priority.
Faithroots 