11.07.2024
A Gaza election?
The low turnout and lack of enthusiasm for Labour could not prevent a Tory bloodbath on July 4. Paul Demarty examines the results, and warns of the right’s hidden strength
The headlines of the July 4 general election result were more or less as predicted by the polls. The Tories, who won the last election in high style with a majority of 80, were immolated, losing more than 250 seats. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour gained 212, giving him a majority nearly as large as that of Tony Blair in 1997.
The mood music from Starmer’s camp is thus, understandably, triumphant. At the victory presser he even smiled! But there were not many smiles from those in blue. Rishi Sunak tried to be gracious in defeat, but there was no other word for the Tory performance than, precisely, disgrace. He spoke at the same lectern at which he was drenched in a summer rainstorm all those weeks ago - his wife looking on sadly and silently behind him, like a ghost noticed in the background of an old school photo. He was asked what his legacy was; he replied that he had got inflation down to the Bank of England’s target of two percent. Truly one for the history books …
Many Tories, according to ConservativeHome’s Henry Hill in a Guardian article, were even relieved that the result was not quite as bad as it had sometimes seemed: “… when it looked at one point as though [the party] might return fewer than 70 seats, and there seemed to be the faint possibility of Sir Ed Davey as leader of the opposition, the 1997 result minus 20 or so seats suddenly didn’t look so bad.”1
Yet this is still a drubbing of astonishing proportions - the Tories’ smallest ever share of parliament, and indeed of the popular vote. London and Wales are now entirely denuded of Conservative MPs. Great streaks of Liberal Democrat orange are painted over the true-blue shires. The red wall is, apparently, rebuilt. Of the seats of all the five Tory prime ministers of the last 14 years, only Sunak’s is still standing. Talk of a ‘strange death’, compared to that of the former Liberal Party, is extremely premature, but understandable, given the circumstances. The remaining big beasts are preparing their leadership bids; but there is not a great deal left to lead.
Catalogue of failure
So, above all, the July 4 result is a rebuke to the Conservative Party for its near disintegration as a functioning instrument of state these last five years. Bloated with cronies and riven with cliques, and beset by ‘external’ shocks like Covid and war in Ukraine, it was functionally incapable of sticking to a policy and, in the end, even sticking to a prime minister. Given the catalogue of failings of the Johnson years, it is strange to reflect that he was finally offloaded in an incomprehensible scandal involving a gropey whip by the implausible name of Chris Pincher. His successor, Liz Truss, notoriously became the shortest-lived prime minister in modern history after she lost a staring contest with the Bank of England. The Tories have been 20 points behind ever since (and Truss, as noted, deservedly lost her seat, despite apparently retaining some ambition to return to the top spot). The worst that can be said about Sunak is that he was utterly incapable of fixing that damage.
While Labour has succeeded in getting a huge majority, one does not have to look very closely at all to reach the conclusion that this has little enough to do with any positive enthusiasm for the new government. Labour won barely a third of the popular vote on a historically low turnout - very slightly over a fifth of eligible electors voted for them all told, fewer in absolute numbers than voted Labour in 2019, which (you will remember) was considered a total disaster. The mismatch between popular vote share and share of seats is anomalous not just in British history, but in all the world’s parliamentary systems.
Several things have conspired to produce what is a grotesquely undemocratic result. The most fundamental is the UK electoral system, which tends to produce duopolistic competition and freeze out more radical and reactionary voices. Secondly, the Labour leadership’s strategy was to tack as far to the right as possible, but it is not clear that this did much more than alienate certain core constituencies - particularly against the background of the Gaza war, which is repellent to both the progressive left and the large Muslim populations that have tended to vote Labour over the years.
The far left is in too shoddy a state to take much advantage, but this discontent found some meaningful expression both in strong votes for ‘pro-Gaza independents’, on the one hand, and Greens, on the other. (A split vote between the two in Ilford North means we have to put up with Wes Streeting for another five miserable years.) Thus the Labour vote itself was more depressed than it might have been under sunnier circumstances.
Contradictory
That is nothing, however, compared to the pressure the Tory Party came under. After the Liberal Democrats’ near wipeout in 2015, one member quoted in the press conceded that, if you stand in the middle of the road, you are liable to get run over. Rishi Sunak’s government has found itself standing not so much in the middle of the road so much as the middle of a giant cloverleaf intersection! The Tory Party glamour, going into its 14 year reign, was a reputation for “economic competence” (which, like most such reputations, was largely a media fiction); and cruelty politics directed against indigent criminals and migrants.
We are so used to this combination that we sometimes forget that it is contradictory. ‘Lock ’em up and throw away the key’ policies cost money, because prisons are expensive (and presently, like much of the rest of the social infrastructure in this country, on the verge of collapse). The economic benefits of kicking people off benefits are doubtful at the best of times, and if a Truss-like cretin decided to go for the full ‘feast of Malthus’, starvation in British cities would hardly look good on the report card. Many such cuts have, in any case, made it harder for people to have kids, which in the longer run leads to greater demand for inward migration.
A Tory administration is obliged to play an endless, solitaire game of Jenga to keep all this going. As with Jenga, one tends to survive a few hairy moments, but the inevitable result is total collapse. The failure to achieve the ‘red meat’ demands alienates the radical right base, and calls forth outfits like the Reform Party (strictly speaking, Reform UK Party Ltd - proprietor Nigel Paul Farage). Some gambits to keep things on an even keel can backfire (viz, the Brexit referendum). As the chaos mounts up, the ‘sensibles’ are liable to float off and vote for the Liberal Democrats - or a sufficiently rightwing Labour.
This is, roughly, what has befallen the Tories. As an illustration, in my part of the world, Devon and Cornwall, the Tories nearly swept the board last time out. After July 4, they have lost every seat in Cornwall to Labour or the Lib Dems, and several in Devon (including the ‘big beast’, Johnny Mercer, in Plymouth Moor View, where he quite genuinely had some local popularity as an individual). In at least half of these seats (including Mercer’s), the Tory vote plus the Reform vote is a winning ticket, sometimes very comfortably. Of the four former prime ministerial seats lost last week, three would have been won but for Reform.
That is true for England. The other important component of Labour’s now imposing majority, of course, comes from Scotland. The case is similar in some respects, but simpler: the Scottish National Party, like the Tories, are ending a long period of near total dominance, both in devolved government and in Scotland’s Westminster contingent, in a scandal-plagued state of fractious exhaustion. They have looked vulnerable to the Tories and Labour alike, but only one of those parties was likely to benefit, given the wider picture. As a result, the political map has reverted somewhat to type: the Nats holding the highlands, with a red belt of Labour seats in the south.
By-election
Add all this up, and this historic general election - this narrow, crushing victory - resembles nothing so much as a giant by-election. It is as if the entire Conservative Party (and the SNP) has been caught taking a bung or assassinating its secret lover’s Great Dane, and resigned under a cloud; all the strange creatures of politics have assembled in the obscure, declining provincial town that is Britain in 2024; and, on a pitiful turnout, a fragmented vote delivers 100% of the seats to a predictable winner. Of course, Labour has merely a near two-thirds majority, but that is perilously close to rebellion-proof. The only true thing Rishi Sunak has said in the last five years is that voting Reform would let Labour in.
It is a dangerous thing to try to predict future political trends on the basis of by-election results. It is especially true of this very grand one - simultaneously overwhelming and oddly indeterminate. A more proportional, multi-party system is trying to birth itself out of the dysfunctional majority-making machine that is the present one (though scant chance of Starmer, of all people, playing midwife). Is this a blip, and will normal two-party service be restored, one way or the other, soon? Or is this the new normal, with vastly different outcomes attending the chaotic eddies of electoral arithmetic?
We do not buy the analysis that the Tory Party is likely to be finished off by this blow. Indeed, we probably would not do so if Henry Hill’s nightmares had been fulfilled, and they had not even managed to form the official opposition. Class parties do not simply die. The Conservatives will retain their position as capital’s first eleven, as illustrated by the tardiness with which The Sun finally plumped for Labour. It is not, as we have previously argued, The Sun wot wins it; but it is an important bellwether. Rupert Murdoch’s reluctance to get on board is telling.
That is not to say the Tories do not face serious challenges in the short term. The entry of five Reform MPs into parliament gives a persistent voice to a challenger from the right. There are those within the Tories who seek to absorb them, and perhaps place Farage in the leadership. That will not happen before the next leader is elected, but the unignorable presence of a ‘prince across the water’ will be destabilising.
More fundamentally, what has been broken is a very short-lived electoral coalition - of older working and middle class voters in the deindustrialised north and (also older) middle class voters in the south-east. Brexit has broken it: the prosperity of the Home Counties is ultimately an outlier of the prosperity of London, which benefited handsomely from free economic interchange with its nearest neighbours. Those among the plebeian classes who had any hopes for Brexit precisely hoped for national regeneration, free from Brussels diktat, and reductions in migration numbers. These things simply cannot be held together in the face of the reality of Brexit. It is up to the Tories to come up with a new strategy, which may take some time. Yet they will do it in the end. The raw material is there: only the overall design is lacking.
Complacency
What of our own side? Certainly, there are those on the left who take heart. “Labour’s support is shallow and quite narrow”, wrote Charlie Kimber in Socialist Worker, going on to survey the strong showings of the ‘independents’, Greens and Corbyn himself. The conclusion will be familiar to any regular reader of that paper: “Elections matter, but the fight for Palestine and against austerity will crucially take place in the streets and workplaces.”2
Reading Andrew Murray’s take in the Morning Star, one could almost believe Starmer had lost. After all, his vote was, in absolute terms, down on 2019. Reform is eating away his votes in some Labour heartlands (a doubtful proposition, but we suppose academics will look closer at this, as time goes by). The Gaza war has resulted in humiliating Labour defeats for a handful of barely-known candidates, and, of course, Jeremy Corbyn’s victory. A strong challenge from Andrew Feinstein means that Starmer’s own vote has dramatically fallen. So it goes on.
Murray mentions the case of Faiza Shaheen, axed and replaced “with an unwanted Starmeroid imposed from outside … The lesson: racist factionalism doesn’t work.” He concludes:
Thursday’s result was a vindication of Corbynism as well as Corbyn himself. Should, as I would expect, the new government led by the former state prosecutor be unwilling to face that reality - well, it will have to be made to. For Labour to carry on as proposed is the road to Farage, Suella Braverman and perhaps still worse. Mass pressure for real change has never felt more critical.3
But for the slightly SWPish final sentence, this article is very much an example of that broader genre, where a pundit declares that everything will go to hell if some powerful person does not implement all the pundit’s particular suggestions. It is an unusually complacent and ridiculous example of the genre, however, since Murray was an influential figure in the Corbyn leadership himself - along with others, like Seumas Milne, of similar political backgrounds and inclinations (in the pro-Soviet, left-centrist Straight Left faction of the old Communist Party). The result of all his cunning plans was the defeat of 2019, the ejection of Corbyn from the leadership and - at length - from the Labour Party, and the election of a rightwing leadership which now has at its command a huge majority. Yes, Sir Keir really ought to sit up and listen …
In some respects, Murray has a point. The shallowness of Starmer’s support will embolden his opponents, on the left and the right. He does not mention it, but the same will surely be true of the Tories, once they finish the traditional leadership-campaign bloodletting in the coming weeks and months. It matters not that Starmer has not foolishly announced a target net-migration number, like his Tory predecessors; he will be held to one anyway by Farage, the Tories and the press. His obvious unwillingness to deviate even fractionally from US policy is trouble enough with the Gaza slaughter, and will be more so if - as now looks likely - Donald Trump returns to the Oval office next January.
The idea that the left will be the main beneficiary, however, is sheer wish-fulfilment. It perhaps has some sense if we include the Greens there, but a glance at the German equivalent, war-crazed and presiding over the return of coal-fired power plants (burning the dirtiest coal) in order to prosecute America’s war aims in eastern Europe, ought to be sobering to a man of Murray’s views. So far as the left of the workers movement goes, we are in a shocking state. We should face this reality squarely, rather than play-acting at bourgeois political reality.
The obliteration of the Conservative Party was closely followed by a shock defeat for France’s far-right National Rally in the assembly elections across the channel. Both can be interpreted optimistically as rebukes for the nationalist right. Murray is sensible enough to see the threat of “Farage, Suella Braverman and perhaps still worse” over the horizon. The overall picture is a general drift to rightwing nationalism, in the imperial centres and the periphery alike. It is not uniform - how could it be? - but we are entering a dangerous world. In such circumstances we should be plain - the most likely beneficiaries of discontent with Starmer’s supermajority, all things being equal, will be the far right, both within and without the Tory Party.
All things need not be equal. The left’s weakness is partly a function of extremely difficult circumstances, especially since the fall of the USSR, which discredited socialism (not wholly unjustly) and led to the collapse of left political forces far afield. It is, however, partly a matter of choice. We remain attached to strategies that have failed, again and again - whether the too-clever-by-half attempts to split the Labour centre-left from the right with opportunist gestures, or facile, anarchistic anti-electoralism.
We cannot assert ourselves because we lack what Labour has, and the Tories have, and even the Greens - a party. We could have the rudiments of one within months, if we chose to take the task of building one seriously.