The Labour Party today has a Commons majority of 165 seats, slightly down from the 174 majority on election night. This was almost identical to Tony Blair’s 1997 majority of 178. But extraordinarily, the 178 majority was won on 43.2% of the vote, while Starmer’s 2024 174 majority was won on just 33.7% of the vote — the smallest vote share for any single-party majority government in British history, and yet producing one of the largest majorities.
The system is throwing up perverse results as never before. The reason is that 2024 saw the lowest combined Conservative and Labour vote share since 1910, at 57.4%. This is fundamentally different from the threat to the two-party dominance by the Liberals and Social Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s, when the combined Labour-Tory vote share never fell below 70.0% (1983). So if you are thinking you have seen this before, you are very wrong. This is a far greater shift in voter behaviour.
In the 2010 general election, the combined Labour/Tory vote fell to 65.1%, but 2024 was a further step-change down. Every single opinion poll since has shown that this is a systemic decline, not a blip.
Then we get to the local elections held in England last Thursday, where the combined Labour and Tory vote was 37%, with Labour at just 14%. While these were predominantly (but by no means all) non-metropolitan English elections, Labour suffered near wipeout, losing 65% of the seats they had held under Starmer’s leadership in 2021 in an already devastatingly low performance.
It is important to note that these results for both Labour and the Tories were much, much worse than their local election performance in 2013 at the height of UKIP success, the previous low point for Labour and Tory performance in local elections. Again, you may think, “Oh, I have seen this before. It will pass.”
You have not seen this before, and it will not pass.
The BBC and Sky both made psephological projections for how the local elections would reflect in a general election. These are complicated calculations based on voter movement and with calculated compensation for the kind of seats being fought. It is not a simple projection from irrelevant types of Tory areas to the whole nation. The BBC projection to general election vote share was Reform 30%, Labour 20%, Liberal Democrats 17%, Conservatives 15%, Greens 11%, and Others 7%. The Sky projection was Reform 32%, Labour 19%, Conservatives 18%, Lib Dems 16%, Greens 7%.
Neither the BBC nor Sky projected this to general election seats, but it is undoubtedly the case that both Labour and the Conservatives are steering into the abyss, the tipping point where first-past-the-post massively punishes those who have substantive support but are not winning constituencies (the Liberal Democrat and, to some extent, the Green position for decades). Which of Reform, Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Green parties will emerge on top in England is a genuinely open question. Before going on to institutional and policy questions, I might say that my own thought is that the tendency of first-past-the-post everywhere to encourage two-party systems may well lead to Reform and the Liberal Democrats being those two parties; and that is certainly as probable as any other combination.
Institutionally, the Labour Party seems very strong, in that it is rooted in the trade union movement which created it and still funds it. Even under the lurch to the right under Starmer, the Labour Party retains some progressive policies which relate specifically to the rights of those in employment, and increases in the minimum and living wage and the Employment Rights Act reflect this. These are the inescapable tribute to the union paymasters, and a good thing too. Starmer’s right-wing economic policies rather focus attacks on those receiving benefits (some of whom are, of course, in work).
But institutional backing does not in itself ensure continued primacy. The Liberal Party had the active backing of a great many of Britain’s landed and industrial magnates. It did not founder for lack of institutional finance and muscle. Let us merely note that the Conservatives are in more jeopardy than Labour as their finances are reliant on contributions from wealthy individuals and companies which are ad hoc rather than institutional and susceptible to frictionless switching to Reform.
So what are the actual politics of this? Well, Reform voters are primarily motivated by dislike of immigration. While there are respectable economic arguments over the desirability of immigration, the simple truth is that most Reform voters are rather motivated by racist dislike of foreigners. I know that I have commenters here who like to deny this, but frankly, I do not live under a rock, I have fought elections, I used to live in the then-UKIP hotspot of Thanet, and I do not have a romanticised regard for the working class, and I have no doubt that Reform primarily channels racism.
But the interesting thing is that does not mean that Reform voters are “right-wing” in an economic sense. Opinion polls have found that most Reform voters favour renationalisation of public utilities, for example, and Farage has appealed to this by advocating for the nationalisation of the water industry and backing the nationalisation of the steel industry. Reform voters also favour rent controls, employment protections, and minimum wage legislation. On the left/right axis in economic policy, Reform voters are very substantially to the left of their party leadership, who almost certainly do not really believe in any of those things at all, though they may sometimes pretend.
George Galloway with the Workers’ Party has attempted to provide the mix of social conservatism in culture wars, including anti-immigration messaging, combined with left-wing economic policy, which might define a kind of left-wing populism, but failed miserably in Runcorn. It is only fair of me to make my own position clear, having stood for the Workers’ Party in the General Election on the issue of stopping the genocide. I do not support the culture wars agenda of the Workers’ Party and would not associate myself with the “Tough on Immigration, Tough on the Causes of Immigration” messaging the party used in Runcorn, even with the second half of that message emphasising an end to imperialist destabilisation of vulnerable countries. It is still too dog-whistle for my taste.
It remains my belief that Starmer has always been a deep-state operative and that he is deliberately driving the Labour Party to its own destruction. Among the strongest evidence for this, in my view, is the fact that all of the documentation on his involvement in the Assange case, the Savile case, the Janner case, and other high-level paedophile cases while he was Director of Public Prosecutions was allegedly destroyed by the state while the Conservatives were in office and Starmer in opposition. The Deep State was protecting him and preparing his way to power.
It is also interesting that the only time the mainstream media really turned on Boris Johnson during his premiership was in attacking Johnson for referencing Starmer’s involvement in the Savile case, which brought a torrent of media abuse of Johnson in defence of Starmer, even though it was one of the rare occasions where Johnson actually told the truth.
But even if you do not accept my theory that Starmer may be destroying the Labour Party on purpose, perhaps you might accept that Starmer would prefer to see the Labour Party destroyed than see it in power as a left-wing party. The Thatcherite agenda of austerity, benefit cuts and attacks on the non-working and disabled, monetarism, militarism and jingoism, with anti-immigrant policies allied to unquestioning Zionism, is perhaps a true reflection of Starmer’s core beliefs; as these align precisely with the Deep State agenda, the question of whether Starmer is a true believer or a blank cipher for the Deep State is moot.
With Labour emphasising “stop the boats” and deportations, there simply is no left-wing party among the complex five-party pattern emerging in English politics. It is also worth noting that under John Swinney, the SNP is firmly under control of its own neoliberal right wing in Scotland.
It is tempting to believe that a left-wing party must emerge to fill the gap in what is offered to the electorate, but that is not automatic. We may simply have a position where there is no left-wing choice of any stature. Jeremy Corbyn, for whom I have respect, has never indicated the dynamism and toughness required to drive a new party to success. Furthermore, he remains surrounded by the “soft Zionist” crew who convinced him as Labour leader that his best course was to continually apologise for non-existent anti-Semitism and speed up the expulsion of left-wingers from the party.
While a time of great political change is a time of great possibility, my own view is that what is going to emerge in England is going to be a dark period, with the extraordinary authoritarianism of the UK government, as already witnessed in the Public Order Act, Online Safety Act, and major police harassment of dissidents, becoming even more pronounced.
In Scotland, I am ever more confident of the prospects of Independence to escape from this. Scots do not want a right-wing government, and Reform will only split elements of the Unionist vote — it is no real threat to the Independence vote. As it becomes obvious that Westminster rule is going to be authoritarian right-wing rule for the foreseeable future, Scots will increasingly wish to quit the Union fast. Farage is an English archetype which is deeply unappealing to Scots, and, unlike Sturgeon, Swinney does not have the charisma to lead the Independence movement away from its goal.
My own focus in the coming year is very much going to be in moving forward on Scottish Independence. I hope to be adopted by the Alba Party as a candidate for the Scottish Parliamentary elections in 2026.
We are at the beginning of the biggest change in the UK political system for over a century. Get ready to play your part; inaction is not a sensible option in these dangerous times.
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