Kin Cheung/AP Photo
Labour Party leader Keir Starmer smiles as he speaks to his supporters at the Tate Modern in London, Friday, July 5, 2024.
The Labour Party won about 412 seats in the House of Commons, just below Tony Blair’s 1997 record victory; meanwhile the Tories fell to about 121, their worst showing ever. But polls had predicted that Labour would beat the Tories in the popular vote by about 20 points. In the election, they won by only ten points, about 34 pecent to the Tories’ 24 percent.
This was far below Labour’s performance in several recent elections. In fact, Labour got a much higher share of the popular vote (40 percent) in 2017, when they lost the House of Commons, than this year when they won.
Labour’s vote was well over 40 percent in ten other postwar elections, beginning with its first great victory in 1945. And turnout this year, at just under 60 percent, was the lowest since 2001.
So this victory was less than an overwhelming mandate than a spectacular Tory collapse. The fact that a one-third popular vote for Labour translated into a two thirds majority in the House of Commons is due widespread disgust with the Tories and the fact that the conservative vote was split between the Tories and Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party, combined with Britain’s “first-past-the-post” system of awarding seats.
Labour leader Keir Starmer, not wanting to screw up a sure thing, trimmed so much that he depressed support for his party. The good news, however, is that at bottom Starmer is more than the bland technocrat that his detractors claim. He’s even something of a socialist.
Labour has managed to re-inject class into British politics. Starmer resisted pressure to promise no tax increase on the upper classes. He’s serious about massive reinvestment in the National Health Service, which was once the crown jewel of British socialism.
He has also proposed an extension of the 20 percent value added tax to private school fees, which will hit only six percent of the most privileged Brits, and to dedicate the proceeds to under-funded state schools. Effective class warfare doesn’t get much more palpable than that.
Unlike most recent Labour leaders—Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn, all of whom had affluent childhoods, Starmer is actually a product of the working class. His father was a toolmaker; his mother was a nurse. His was a passionately Labour household; he was named for the Labour Party’s first leader, Keir Hardie.
Starmer’s deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, is a key architect of Labour’s strategy of restoring class to British politics, something that she has lived. Rayner was a mother at 16, she worked in a nursing home before becoming a trade union leader, and then a Labour candidate for Parliament.
British voters, especially the non-rich, have suffered a real slide in living standards since the 2008 financial collapse. This is due to the fatal combination of Tory austerity economics and the suicidal exit from the EU.
The Tory model for the British economy has collapsed, as have Britain’s public services. It no longer works to build Britain’s economy on banking and hope that some of the prosperity trickles down. Brexit has destroyed Britain as a financial center, as well as adding massive costs to ordinary economic activity.
Starmer needs to preside over a serious program of public investment, to modernize Britain’s economy and move it away from the failed model of reliance on finance. If he succeeds, he can claim a real mandate and make Labour the natural majority party for a generation.
He will be helped by the continuing divisions on the right, and the very real prospect that in the next election the Tories could lose even more seats and cease being the official opposition. But as the election showed, Tory collapse is not quite tantamount to Labour success—something that Starmer still needs to earn.
