Labour’s “Loveless Landslide”: The 2024 British Elections

Kim Moody

Keir Starmer ran a campaign based on “stability” and on becoming Prime Minister promised “pain.”

AFTER FOURTEEN YEARS of Conservative Party austerity, scandal, incompetence and chaos, the Labour Party swept Britain’s (aka United Kingdom, UK) July 4th general parliamentary election, winning 412 of the House of Commons’ 650 seats.(1) In what amounted to a punishment for the wreckage that the Tories, as British Conservatives are known, left behind, they lost a staggering 251 seats, ending up with just 121 Members of Parliament (MPs).

Labour, on the other hand, gained an impressive 211 seats. Yet beneath what pundits are calling a “loveless landslide,” Labour’s massive parliamentary majority rests on a minority of 33.7% of the total vote. Far from a mandate and just ten percentage points more than the discredited Tory’s 23.7%, this was less than the 41% of votes for a plethora of “third” parties and independent candidates.

The long-term fragility of its parliamentary majority is further underlined by the fact that at 9.7 million Labour actually drew fewer votes this year than the 10.3 million in the disastrous 2019 election that cost it seats in many of its traditional working-class constituencies.(2)

Besides the massive disgust with Tory rule, the secret behind this disjuncture between Labour’s big majority of seats and its minority vote lay oddly enough in the first-past-the-post voting system. Building on disillusionment with the Tories and on what political scientists call “vote efficiency,” with votes spread more evenly across election districts, Labour consciously sought to win back traditional Labour seats, the so-called “Red Wall,” and take longstanding Conservative seats by small margins.

They focused on what they called “hero voters,” i.e. the 20% or so, many of them former Labour voters, most likely to reject the Tories, according to two Labour advisers writing in The Observer newspaper.

These Labour advisers recently visited the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, DC, a centrist think tank close to Democratic Party leadership, in hopes of aiding the Harris-Walz campaign. Their main advice was that “cost of living and immigration are the two biggest issues.”(3)

Students of the U.S. Democratic Party will recognize that its problem is one of “vote inefficiency” with its concentration of voters in large urban districts and only a little more than a dozen mostly coastal deeply “blue” states that make winning Congressional majorities and the Electoral College difficult.

Labour’s “efficient” strategy was aided by the tactical voting of many who cast their ballot for either Labour or the Liberal Democrat candidates most likely to beat the Conservatives in that constituency — all of this in the context of what for Britain was a low turnout of 60%.

While this worked well for Labour, it meant scores of vulnerable seats at the next election and a further fragmentation of the British “two-party” system as smaller parties and independents made significant gains.

A Subterranean Multi-Party System

Looked at from the vantage point of parliamentary delegations where the two major parties have 82% of the MPs, Britain appears to still have a more or less stable two-party system, as one is supposed to expect from the first-past-the-post-single-member district system.

Beneath the waterline of this ship of state, however, are turbulent currents where half a dozen parties and a group of leftist independents have all made gains. The biggest winners after Labour were the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems) who soared from eight to 72 seats with 12% of the vote — 60 at the cost of the Tories in their heartland of southern England.

The Greens with 6.7% of the vote grew from one to four seats. The Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru won four, up from two. On the other hand, the Scottish National Party, troubled by scandal, crashed from 47 MPs to nine, mostly replaced by Labour — ending the likelihood of an independence referendum for some time to come.

Altogether, excluding Northern Ireland’s unique party system, the parties and independents that are more or less to the left of Labour on most issues have 94 MPs.

The worrying gains, however, came from the far-right Reform UK Party which in its first time out won five seats with 14.3% of the vote. Resurrected from the shambles of Trump Wannabe Nigel Farage’s previous but largely unsuccessful electoral efforts — the Brexit Party and United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) — Reform UK includes among its MPs open racists and Hitler fans.(4)

Perhaps even more alarming, in addition to its victories, it became the second party in 103 constituencies, in 89 of them nipping at Labour’s heels.(5) In effect the far-right anti-immigrant rioters who swept the streets of England this summer and attacked immigrant residences (more below), now have a voice in parliament.

Somewhat countering this shift toward the far right were the four independent, pro-Palestinian candidates plus Jeremy Corbyn who, having been expelled from Labour, ran as an independent and handily beat the official Labour candidate by 7000 votes.

The victory of the four other independents reflected Labour’s declining share of the British Muslim vote, plunging from 65% in the last election to 36% this year due mainly to Labour’s refusal to oppose Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and the West Bank.(6)

Under Corbyn’s leadership these five MPs have now formed an alliance and will work as a block in parliament.(7) On top of this, Corbyn addressed a meeting to form a new left political party to be called Collective. As one of the organizers put it, “There will be a new left party that will contest the next election and hopefully be a meaningful counterweight to Reform and the right-wing drift of the Labour Party.”

Among those present were former UNITE leader Len McCluskey and filmmaker Ken Loach. They hope to recruit from among the tens of thousands who voted for independent left candidates, including those that didn’t win.(8) Even in the UK’s fracturing party system, this is an ambitious goal to say the least.

Northern Ireland (NI), with its 17 seats in the British parliament, has a completely different party system. In that context, the nationalist Sinn Féin held its seven MPs and is now the largest NI party in the UK parliament since the right-wing Democratic Unionists lost seats to the other unionist (i.e, British loyalist) parties.

Sinn Féin, however, in the past has not taken its seats in the UK parliament as a matter of nationalist principle. It is nonetheless, the largest party in NI local councils and in the devolved assembly at Stormont, where it now leads the regional government.

In general, this election accelerated a trend that has seen longstanding party loyalties diminish as people switched votes from one party to another: Tory to Labour, Reform UK or Lib Dem; from Scottish National Party back to Labour; from Labour to Reform UK or Lib Dem.

As Guardian columnist Rafael Behr put it, “The era of automatic party affiliation, handed down across generations and worn as a badge of identity, is over.”(9) Clearly, the two-party system has been shaken. Those who think the first-past-the-post system inevitably means an exclusive two-party duopoly might want to examine this more closely.

Assessing how this affected the class distribution of votes is more difficult because the British system of “social grades” lumps together working class, lower middle class, and petit-bourgeois people in its lower social grades. According to the You Gov post-election poll, however, the ABC1 grades — which include the upper middle, professional and managerial groups, and the bourgeoisie — voted for Labour by 36% (more than any other social grade), 25% Tory, 14% Lib Dem, and 11% Reform UK.

The lower, more working-class grades (C2DE) voted 33% Labour, 23% Conservative, 20% Reform UK, 11% Lib Dem, and the rest for smaller parties. The lowest grades (DE), which include the unemployed, voted 34% Labour, 23% Tory, and 19% Reform UK.

Measured by income alone, the higher the income (£50,000 and more) the more likely (40%) the vote for Labour, the lower the less likely (32-34%). The most educated voted Labour at 42%, the less educated at 28%.

Most disturbing was that the less educated voted by far more for Reform UK at 23% than any social group. This reflects a class realignment that has hit most social democratic and center-left parties, as well as the U.S. Democratic Party, over the last few decades.

Labour’s “loveless landslide” did not represent a victory for the working class. How it ran and how it plans to govern underline this all too graphically.

Promising & Delivering Pain — With Some Aspirin

Under the increasing authoritarian party leadership of Sir Keir Starmer — former Crown Prosecutor, and purger of Jeremy Corbyn — Labour ran a campaign based on “stability” and fiscal responsibility: i.e. austerity. Upon becoming Prime Minister (PM), Starmer promised “pain.”

The rationale for the forthright embrace of what were once Tory-like economic policies was the miraculous discovery of a £22 billion “black hole” left by the defeated Conservative government. UK debt is high, to be sure, but since annual government expenditures now reach over a trillion pounds, this is not exactly a staggering amount. Nonetheless, Starmer promised to put UK accounts in order and that means policies on the cheap.

For example, while Labour has no real plan for fixing the overburdened and underfunded National Health Service (NHS), one current suggestion is that its already overworked staff should work longer hours and weekends. (The Prime Minister must have been reading Chapter 10, “The Working Day,” Volume I of Capital.)

More likely to be successfully implemented is Starmer’s proposal to reduce the long delays in diagnostics and treatments by relying even more on the already extensive involvement of the private sector.

Despite the desperate condition of the NHS revealed in the recent report by Ara Darsi commissioned by Labour, Starmer continues to insist he will not raise taxes to fund the billions needed to fix the health service. He simply says that the NHS needs to “reform or die,”(10) an indication that the burden of change will fall on the staff — a plan that cannot work.

What is not in doubt is his full-force drive to fix the government’s finances at the expense of the working class. This first became clear in his insistence on keeping the two-child limit on basic welfare benefits, a policy that leaves many poor families without enough income to sufficiently feed all their children.

On this issue Starmer faced his first back-bench rebellion as seven Labour MP’s voted along with the Scottish National Party against this policy. They quickly saw the party whip removed, meaning they were suspended from the parliamentary party for at least six months.

This drama was repeated in early September when Starmer pushed a bill to end the £300 winter fuel allowance for all but the very poorest pensioners. This would leave millions further at the mercy of energy companies as they raise prices to the allowed maximum. (I just got our bill from British Gas informing me my gas bill would rise again this winter. We are not quite poor enough to get the fuel allowance this year.)

Fearful of being suspended, this time, with the exception of Corbyn-ally John Trickett who courageously voted to keep the allowance for all pensioners, some 50 Labour MP’s abstained or absented themselves, most with permission, when the bill (put forth hypocritically by the Tories) to preserve the fuel allowance for all, came up for a vote.(11) Their fate remains to be seen as of this writing.

Starmer is an enthusiast for government-business partnerships as solutions for social problems. Outlining his technocratic vision of Britain’s future under Labour, Starmer wrote in his 2021 Fabian Society pamphlet The Road Ahead, “It is a future where a modern, efficient government works in partnership with a brilliant, innovative private sector to create good jobs and harness the potential of technology.” This idea was repeated many times throughout the pamphlet.(12)

Partnership is apparent in his solution to Britain’s housing crisis. While he has forwarded legislation to end “no fault” evictions by private landlords, his policy for taking the pressure off  rising housing costs and creating more homes is to loosen planning and building regulations so developers can build more cheaply.

The builders of Grenfell Towers cut corners on meeting regulations, causing 72 deaths. https://twitter.com/Natalie_Oxford/status/ 874855898614820865/photo/1

This has come just as the long-awaited report on the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire that killed 72 tenants due to faulty building materials revealed that developers, producers, and construction firms lied to avoid existing regulations and standards.(13)

Another example of government-business cooperation is the salvation of the Tata Steel works at Port Talbot, Wales, via a grant of £500 million in return for Tata putting up $750 million. This will go to building new electric arc plants and closing the old blast furnaces. It will mean the loss of 2500 jobs in a town totally dependent on the steelworks.

The deal, originally made by the Conservatives, was picked up by Labour who said they would get a better deal with job guarantees. They didn’t, and the Labour government simply dropped its earlier pledge to “push for job guarantees.”(14)

Unable to dodge the outrageous failures, actions and profiteering of the nation’s privatized energy companies, Labour proposed to create a publicly-owned company, Great Britain Energy. Rather than renationalizing the entire industry, however, this public firm will compete with the likes of the French-owned energy supplier EDF in the hope that the market will solve the problem.

On the other hand, the nation’s inefficient private railroad copanies will be brought into public ownership gradually s their licences expire. The crisis of the country’s water companies who have been dumping sewage and other toxic waste into rivers and lakes has yet to be addressed by the government.

So far at least, Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves have resisted the idea of raising taxes on the rich and corporations. The escape from the pain the new government offers the working class is to be achieved over its five-year term by economic “growth.” This in turn is to be produced by, you guessed it, “partnership” between business and an active, but not growing state.

To stimulate economic growth the state will provide a National Wealth Fund of £7.3 billion — less than a third of what Corbyn proposed. As Marxist economist Michael Roberts put it, this is “a fraction of what even the LSE (London School of Economics) economists reckon is needed.”

Given that Britain has seen its anaemic “recovery” fall from a mere 0.6% growth in the second quarter of this year to nearly zero in July and August, while major European Union economies are either stagnant or in recession this is wishful thinking at best.(15) So Labour’s economic innovation is a kind of inadequate industrial policy to spur investment combined with market deregulation, and neoliberalism to discipline the working class.

Starmer’s authoritarian and tough-on-criminals and “illegal” immigrants proclivities from his days as Crown Prosecutor have emerged in his approach to immigration and the August anti-immigrant riots led by far-right groups and activists.(16)

Pledging like his Tory predecessors to “smash the gangs” and “stop the boats” of asylum-seekers crossing the English Channel, he plans to call in MI5, Britain’s version of the FBI, to help provide what the Home Office calls “formidable covert capability,” rather than creating viable routes to asylum for desperate people who are certain to find other dangerous paths to asylum.(17)

This will be coordinated by a Border Security Command to be led by someone with a military or police background. The Guardian reports the Labour government is considering the approach taken by near-fascist Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.(18)

Similarly, his method of dealing with the far-right rioters in August was purely one of law-and order, focusing almost exclusively on violence and dismissing the rioters merely as thugs, while avoiding any political response to the obvious depth of racism they were exploiting.

Over 400 have been convicted of various criminal offenses and about 200 sentenced as this is written. The left and the social movements can take no comfort in this response since it is likely to be used on them, as Starmer did against the 2010 student “rioters” when he was Crown Prosecutor.(19)

What stopped these attacks on immigrants, however, was not the police, whom the right wingers relished engaging, or the courts that sentenced some to long terms in prison after the fact. It was tens of thousands of anti-racist demonstrators who flooded the streets of England, far outnumbering the racists and preventing them from taking to the streets and attacking immigrants again in city after city. There is a clear lesson here for anti-racist, anti-fascist activists in the United States.

The Good Stuff — Maybe

Despite Labour’s increasingly declassed voter base, it still depends somewhat on the unions for both funds and election-time activists. So it had to deliver something. The first gifts were above inflation agreements for some NHS workers, though not enough to wipe out past wage erosion. But it comes with a warning of moderation in the future.

Labour also proposed to introduce a bill in its first 100 days, known as “Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay — Delivering a New Deal For Working People.” The bill contains first instalments of a comprehensive plan drawn up in 2021.

The current bill, to be introduced later in the fall, includes limits on precarity, such as a ban on the much-hated zero-hours contracts that give the boss total flexibility and ending “Fire and Rehire,” — policies that if properly implemented would make a difference for many workers.(20)

Not surprisingly, the bill is meant to produce “partnership” between unions and capital, which is supposed to contribute to economic growth. Some provisions already include loopholes such as demands from workers or unions for flexible hours with “employers required to accommodate this as far as is reasonable.”

A further worrying sign is that a poll of senior managers found majority support for the bill as it was described. It is expected to face long consultations with business which are likely to water things down. The rest of the “New Deal,” which concerns trade union rights, is to be introduced over Labour’s five-year term.(21)

Starmer also made an appearance at the annual Trade Union Congress conference, something sitting Prime Ministers seldom do. His message, however, was, once again about “partnership” and the hard times and pain ahead. Some union leaders expressed optimism about the “New Deal,” but Starmer received only a muted and polite standing ovation.

This would not be a balanced assessment of Labour’s first couple of months if it didn’t include the new government’s effort to further Britain’s always unfinished bourgeois revolution by expelling the last 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords.(22)

This very partial example of what historians call “passive revolution” (no barricades or guillotines), however, leaves in place the remnants of Norman-imposed feudalism: the 69% of Britain’s land still owned by 0.6% of its population — mostly aristocrats descended from (11th century) Norman invaders.(23)

Today’s Labour Party follows that path of social democracy in most of Europe. The notion that neoliberalism has run its course in the center-left has proved more a hope than a reality in the UK, as in most of Europe.

Labour is no longer the party of the working class or even the party of Jeremy Corbyn. Its membership has fallen from 564,443 in 2017 under Corbyn to 370,450 by the end of 2023, a dramatic drop of nearly 200,000. In 2021 its National Executive “proscribed,” that is, banned, four left Labour publications.

Since then its organized left wing has been depleted by expulsions, suspensions and threats, its remnants largely silenced. A spokesperson for the left organization Momentum, itself a shadow of its former self, said, “Repeated attacks on pluralism and party democracy in order to weaken the left and threaten independent-minded voices within the party has come at a cost.”(24)

The recent back-bench rebellions are a good sign, but they have been limited in numbers and cautious in light of Starmer’s willingness to retaliate. Its major political challenges will come from parties and groups, left and right, outside the two-party matrix.

Of course, events outside the Labour Party and parliament can open new possibilities — if workers and oppressed minorities, sick and tired of being sick and tired, as one Black British activist recently said, quoting U.S. civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, take to the streets again.

Notes

1. All election results and figures are from The Guardian, “Parliament Results,” unless otherwise cited, accessed July 12, 2024, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/results.
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2. Richard Seymour, “Majority Without a Mandate,” Side Car, New Left Review, July 5, 2024.
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3. Deborah Mattinson and Claire Ainsley, “What Keir can teach Kamala — identify your ‘hero voters’,” The Observer, September 8, 2024: 39; Alexander Burns, “What Keir Starmer’s Advisors Told Democrats in Washington,” Politico, September 12, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/12/what-keir-starmers-advisors-told-democrats-in-washington-00179007.
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4. Aditya Chakrabortty, “Reform’s rise casts a dark shadow over Labour’s win,” The Guardian, “Journal,” July 6, 2024: 4.
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5. Rafael Behr, “Europe can look at stable politics here, but there’s little to learn,” The Guardian, “Journal,” September 4, 2024: 2.
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6. Kenan Malik, “Muslims aren’t single-issue voters. Gaza was a lightening rod for their disaffection,” The Observer, July 14, 2024:54.
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7. Jessica Elgot, “Jeremy Corbyn: Ex-Labour MP to form independent alliance,” The Guardian, September 3, 2024: 11.
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8. Jessica Elgot, “Collective: Corbyn addresses meeting to form new party of the left,” The Guardian, September 16, 2024: 9; Hamish Morrison, “Jeremy Corbyn addresses meeting on creation of new left-wing party, Yahoo, September 16, 2024, https://uk.news.yahoo.com/jeremy-corbyn-addresses-meeting-creation-100654188.html.
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9. Rafael Bahr, “This election has upended British politics. A strange new landscape is revealed,” The Guardian, July 5 2024, https://www.theguardiand.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/05/election-results-labour-conservatives-upended-british-poltics.
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10. Denis Campbell and Jessica Elgot, “Thousands dying due to NHS delays, inquiry finds,” The Guardian, September 12, 2024: 1.
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11. Pippa Crerar, “Labour: Silent protest from abstaining MPs gives little comfort to government,” The Guardian, September 11, 2024: 5. It was Johnn Trickett who wrote “Northern Discomfort,” in 2019, warning the Labour leadership of the likely loss of several long-time Labour seats in the deindustrialized North.
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12. Keir Starmer, The Road Ahead, Fabian Ideas No. 657, The Fabian Society, 2021: 4.
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13. Robert Booth and Emine Sinmaz, “Grenfell: a disaster caused by ‘dishonesty and greed,” The Guardian, September 5, 2024:1, 6.
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14. Jack Simpson, “Port Talbot facing 2,500 job losses in steel deal,” The Guardian, September 11, 2025: 1, 31.
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15. Larry Eliot, “Economy flatlines for second month as recovery stalls,” The Guardian, September 12, 2024: 27; Michael Roberts, “Saving European capital: It’s an existential challenge,” Michael Roberts Blog, September 12, 2024.
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16. For background on Starmer’s authoritarian bent see  Oliver Eagleton, “Britain’s Next Prime Miniter Has Shown US Who He Is, and It’s not Good,” New York Times, July 3, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/opinion/britain-election-keir-starmer.htm?pgtype=Article&action=click&module=RelatedLinks.
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17. Rajeev Syal, “Cooper enlists MI5 to track gangs behind channel boats,” The Guardian, September 6, 2024: 2.
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18. Aletha Adu and Rajeev Syal, “PM accused of seeking to copy far right on migration,” The Guardian, September 16, 2024: 1, 8.
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19. Eagelton, op. cit., footnote 16, 2024.
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20. Joe Faragher, Personnel Today, July 18, 2024, https://www.personneltoday.com/employment-rights-bill-what-will-be-in-labours-new-legislation/.
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21. Andy Beckett, “Starmer’s plan to help workers: a new era or no big deal?,” The Guardian, “Journal,” September 13, 2024: 1-2; Institute for Employment Rights, “Tracing the path to a new deal for working people, “ September 10, 2024, https://www.ier.org/comments/tracing-the-path-to-a-new-deal-for-working-people/; Faragher, July 18, 2024.
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22. Eleni Courea, “Labour moves to expel last 92 hereditary peers from Lords,” The Guardian, September 5, 2024:5.
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23. Johann Hari, “Britain’s land is still owned by an aristocratic elite — but it doesn’t have to be this way,” The Independent, February 5, 2005, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/britain-s-land-is-still-owned-by-an-aristocratic-elite-but-it-desn-t-have-to-be-this-way-5385094-html.
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24. Daniel Green, “Labour Party membership dips below 400,000 for the first time in almost a decade,” Labour List, August 23, 2024, https://labourlist.org/2024/08/labour-party-membership-400000-keir-starmer-jeremy-corbyn/; Tom Blackburn, “Keir Star­mer is shrinking the Labour party,” The Guardian, July 25, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/25/keir-starmer-shrinking-labour-party-members-broad-church.
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November-December 2024, ATC 233