The Conservatives are going down to one of their worst defeats ever. The opposition has come from nowhere to absolutely destroy them. It ought to be one of those rare moments in British history when the centre-left can celebrate crushing a Tory party, that drives us to despair and rage in equal measure.
Speaking at a victory rally at 5 a.m. this morning, Keir Starmer told his supporters, ‘We can look forward to walk into the morning, the sunlight of hope, pale at first, but getting stronger through the day’. It was not quite as poetic as Wordsworth’s greeting of the French Revolution ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!’. But he made his point.
The dawn that has broken on Britain has an eerie light
But the dawn that has broken on Britain has an eerie light. Labour is winning a massive majority on about 35 per cent of votes cast. To put that another way, it will have about two-thirds of the seats on about one third of the vote. Meanwhile, the turnout at the time of writing looked like it would end up at around 58 per cent, close to the lowest since 1918. If this was a new dawn, not many wanted to stay up to greet it.
Write like this and you send Labour people wild. Labour has won a historic victory. The Tories have suffered the worst result since the beginning of democracy in the 19th century. Keir Starmer has put the moral and political disaster of Corbynism behind him, and become only the fifth Labour leader in 100 years to win a general election. And all you commentators want to do is bitch. But there are good reasons to focus on the disturbing trends the election revealed.
A large part of Starmer’s appeal to the centre left – and a reason why extremists of all varieties despise him – is that he offers an antidote to the left populism of Corbyn, the right populism of Johnson, Scottish nationalism, English nationalism, the disaster of Brexit (I know conservative readers don’t think it is a disaster, but in economic terms it is) and the extraordinary irresponsibility of Liz Truss.
Starmer would turn the UK into a post-populist country. A grateful and exhausted nation would thank him for it. Speaking in January, Starmer said he did not offer ‘a grandiose utopian hope. Not the hope of the easy answer, the quick fix, or the miracle cure. People have had their fill of that from politicians over the past 14 years.’
But have they had their fill? Are we sure of that? The reason why Labour can win so much from the Tories with so little is not just because Labour and the Lib Dems took Conservative voters, but because of the rise of the radical-right Reform party. It split the anti-Labour vote with cataclysmic consequences for conservatism.
It is close to a national disgrace that Nigel Farage can prosper after repeating the propaganda lines of Vladimir Putin by saying that the expansion of the EU and Nato gave his regime a ‘reason’ to tell the Russian people ‘they’re coming for us again’.
It says everything about the cowardice of the Conservative leadership that it took until the final days of the campaign before Rishi Sunak and his colleagues plucked up their faltering courage and found the strength to take the fight to Farage.
The temptation for Labour will be to let the right’s civil war rage. Enormous political space is opening up for Keir Starmer. Margaret Thatcher could push through her radical policies in the 1980s because Labour split and its moderate wing broke off to form the Social Democrats. In the 2020s, Labour is benefiting from the divisions of its opponents.
Labour has taken a strategic decision not to be the party of Muslim anger as it was under Corbyn. But that decision has consequences
What’s left of the Parliamentary Conservative party will be convulsed with arguments about whether it should merge with the Faragists – the favoured policy of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss – or whether it should fight back. (The voters sacked Rees Mogg and Truss last night, which may offer a clue about which path to choose.) But Labour cannot sit back and enjoy Conservative disarray.
It need only look at the strength of Reform in working-class seats – or look to the United States where Trump is not only winning white working-class votes but black and Latino working-class votes as well – to know that the centre-left ignores the radical right at its peril.
In any case, extremism is hurting Labour too. The passions and loathing the Gaza war have unleashed ought to stun mainstream opinion. In Leicester South, Jon Ashworth, the party’s shadow Cabinet Office minister, and one of Labour’s best communicators, lost to the independent Shockat Adam, who declared: ‘This is for Gaza,’ after winning by just under 1,000 votes.
No one saw that coming, including the Labour party.
Meanwhile, in the sole Tory gain of the night Shivani Raja took Leicester East for the Conservatives. Communalism is now reflected in politics. The Tories are the Indian party, or try to be. Muslims used to vote Labour. Infuriated by Labour’s initial refusal to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, they turned to more appealing candidates.
In Blackburn, Labour’s Kate Hollern lost by under 200 votes to the independent Adnan Hussain. And in Dewsbury and Batley, Heather Iqbal, a former adviser to the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, lost by nearly 7,000 votes to Iqbal Mohamed.
The Gaza protests almost cost Wes Streeting his seat. You can’t say that the triumph of Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North and the Green party’s defeat of Thangam Debbonaire, one of Labour’s best politicians, in Bristol were solely due to Gaza. But it was a factor.
Labour has taken a strategic decision not to be the party of Muslim anger as it was under Corbyn. But that decision has consequences.
"This election has been the worst election I have ever stood in."
— Channel 4 (@Channel4) July 5, 2024
Jess Phillips is met with boos and jeers from the audience as she narrowly wins her Labour seat in Birmingham Yardley.
Watch #C4BritainDecides NOW on @channel4 until 9am. #GeneralElection2024 pic.twitter.com/Q5sHv6DtQh
Jess Phillips, who narrowly hung on to her seat in Birmingham, as she fought off George Galloway’s party, described them when she said this was ‘the worst election’ she had stood in. Women who campaigned with her were intimidated. She was constantly on the phone to the police.
Underlying the rolling anger is not just Gaza, there is little a Labour government can do about that, or even immigration, but the UK’s decline. If you want to understand the thinking of the new government read Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back by Torsten Bell. He is a former director of the Resolution Foundation, whom the party has sensibly parachuted into a safe seat.
Extremism is hurting Labour too
The 1945 Labour landslide had the Beveridge report. The 1997 landslide had Will Hutton’s State We Are In. The 2024 landslide has Bell. He delineates the failures of the Tory years. You can measure it in the numbers experiencing destitution, that is lacking the resources for the very basics: staying warm, dry, clean and fed – which hit 3.8 million people in 2022, up two and a half times compared with 2017.
Or you can look at the use of food banks – in the spring of 2023 one in five Britons were skipping meals or eating less because of financial constraints.
Or most pertinently in the stagnation in living standards since the great recession of 2008. Or indeed, for some groups, most notably the middle-aged men who are likely to turn to the radical right, absolute falls in real wages.
As Bell says, forget about comparisons with the US. ‘A middle-income German household is now a massive 20 per cent (£6,400 a year) richer than their British equivalent (which is living on £30,000 a year), while the income premium enjoyed by the French equivalent is a smaller, but still very significant, 9 per cent (£2,800 a year).’
I know I will regret writing this, but when I look at our new government I am filled with cautious optimism. Starmer and his colleagues have been through the derangement of the Conservative years and of the Corbyn eruption on the left. They emerged with the sound social democratic instinct that the best way to fight extremism is to improve the material conditions of the vast mass of working and middle-class people.
Even if you are a Conservative and disagree, I want to suggest that you should hope that our new Labour government succeeds. Because, if by 2029 Labour has failed, you should wonder what rough beast, its hour now come, will slouch towards Westminster to be born.
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