Let’s talk about Britain.
Keir Starmer won a huge majority. But it’s not the victory it may seem.
I decided to start writing more long form content starting with the UK election, mainly because I think the complicated results require a bit more explanation than I can give on Twitter. Also, I just finished a master’s degree and need to come up with a reason to keep using the rest of my Microsoft Word subscription before they disable my school email. I mainly cover the Anglosphere - my French is ne pas bien - so while I fortunately don’t have to write about Marine Le Pen, I did once have to read Nigel Farage’s book, so have some sympathy.
By this point, you’re aware of the top line story of the week: Sir Keir Starmer has ended fourteen years of Conservative rule by doing the impossible: getting the Conservative Party to spend eight of the previous fourteen years imploding in on itself to the point that one of their leaders lost a rotting competition against a vegetable. With a majority larger than the entire parliament of some countries, Starmer has already begun delivering results - at least, if you consider putting three Brits at the start of their home Grand Prix “delivering results.”
So what did we learn?
THE GOOD NEWS (if you’re Keir Starmer) - there is no shortage of reporting about Starmer’s frail popular vote mandate. We’ll get to that below. But let’s start with the obvious - the guy has a 400+ seat caucus. He’s reshaped the Labour Party in his “don’t call it New Labour” image, and even if he faces some backbencher revolts over the next five years, he’s got enough of a majority to push through his manifesto. Which, despite grumbling from the left, is quite ambitious, including increasing health funding, a publicly-funded energy company to compete in the electric market, and cracking down on crime. At Starmer’s rowdy 5 AM victory speech, he stressed that it will take time to deliver the “national renewal” he promises, clearly concerned about the fickle nature of modern democracy that punishes any long term thinking. But Starmer has set achievable, actionable goals - promising actions that are within a government’s wheelhouse, without promising to change society. He’d be a great mid-level manager.
THE BAD NEWS (if you’re Keir Starmer) - Okay, let’s talk about the legitimate concern Labour should have coming out of this election. This is the national popular vote for 2019 and 2024:
Conservatives - 43.63% to 23.7%
Labour - 32.08% to 33.69%
Liberal Democrats - 11.55% to 12.22%
Scottish National Party - 3.88% to 2.52%
Brexit/Reform - 2.01% to 14.29%
Greens - 2.61% to 6.39%
There’s plenty of debate about First Past the Post and the spread of votes that led to this result. Obviously winning a massive majority while having a flat vote increase (outside of Scotland, where most of the Labour increase came from the SNP) means electoral reform is not likely to be a top issue for the first term of Starmer’s government. Generally when I’m reporting election results on Twitter, I will do a regular update on national popular vote even in non-proportional countries where the national vote doesn’t matter. I think it’s still an interesting data point. On Thursday, it was clear that the national vote was going to be so disconnected from the seat count that I didn’t bother.
Still, Starmer’s massive majority came from the collapse of the Conservative and Scottish National Party vote and the split of right wing votes between the Tories and Reform. One underreported story is just how much of a saving grace Nigel Farage standing down in Conservative target seats in 2019 was to Boris Johnson, enabling him to win his historic fourth-term majority. But Labour will see real pressures from the right and left and with less than a third of the popular vote, their political mandate is not nearly as strong as their parliamentary one.
SHIT, FARAGE IS HERE - Believe it or not, Nigel Farage has never served as an MP in the UK parliament. He’s tried, many, many times. He literally got in a plane crash trying to be elected as an MP. But on Thursday the good people of Clacton, best known for sending us Douglas Carswell as UKIP’s sole elected MP (who, in case you are wondering, now lives in Mississippi and writes “anti-woke” children’s books about how great America is), elected him, one of five Reform MPs who will turn up to Westminster in a few days. Farage served most of his time in Brussels in the European Parliament - and surely he will be disappointed in the absolute downgrade in facilities he will encounter in Westminster!
Let’s be clear. Reform’s 14% of the vote and five seats are not the Canadian 1993 style wipeout and takeover of the traditional Conservative Party that Farage himself wanted. Reform’s five seats will rarely get speaking time in parliament, and are completely inconsequential in terms of government given Starmer’s majority and the fact that the Conservatives avoided extinction. Farage himself didn’t seem that interested in running this time, believing that Donald Trump really needed his help (spoiler alert: he didn’t), only to come in mid-election and take back over the party he started. The vote share isn’t even a massive surprise: in 2015, pre-Brexit, UKIP (Farage’s previous party) won 12% of the vote.
That’s not to say that Reform can be safely ignored. Farage used to argue that UKIP was not a single-issue pro-Brexit party, they also had many populist and right-wing government ideals. David Cameron took a bet that without the central issue - secession from the EU - UKIP’s vote share would collapse. He was right, for a while. UKIP’s vote share did collapse in 2017 and in 2019 pro-Brexit voters largely supported the Conservatives under ally Boris Johnson. With Brexit now secured, the other issues in UKIP’s plank, primarily immigration, continues to dog the Tories (and to a lesser extent, Labour).
THE LEFT ISN’T (TOTALLY) DEAD - much of Starmer’s early tenure as Labour leader involved fights with the Labour left, who were supportive of previous Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer made a point, even at his victory speech and in video ads, of his work to deliver a “changed Labour Party.” While there has not been as much of a splintering on the left as on the Conservative’s right, this boiled over to challenges during Labour’s preselection of candidates for this election. Jeremy Corbyn, the aforementioned former Labour leader who led the party to it’s worst result in decades in 2019, was expelled from the party and stood as an independent.
He was one of several leftist independents who won in Labour constituencies, some where centrists had been preselected over the preference of the more activist local party membership. Even an incumbent wasn’t immune, with shadow minister Jonathan Ashworth losing his seat on the evening he should have been promoted to government. Most of them have been animated, like young leftist activists in many countries, by the war in Gaza and their frustration at Labour’s position on the issue. The Greens also saw a significant increase in their vote share, in fact taking the largest increase in vote share aside from Reform.
OH YEAH, THE TORIES - it’s hard to say there’s good news for the Conservatives, but honestly there is. They weren’t wiped out. Some of the worst poll projections had them as low as 60 seats, some polls had them third in the popular vote below Reform. Some had generations of potential Conservative leadership wiped out. That didn’t happen, but it shouldn’t cushion what was an absolute cataclysmic event for the party. They lost nearly two-thirds of their caucus, a huge portion of their cabinet, and more than that, the Conservative Party infrastructure just seemed to give up during this election. They will have to navigate opposition being squeezed on all sides - from the right by Reform and from the center by the resurgent Liberal Democrats. Unless Labour’s internal divisions re-emerge in government, it seems hard to see the Conservatives recovering enough by 2029 to be able to form government. But then again, that was said in 2019 about Labour, too.
SO WHAT ABOUT THE CENTER-RIGHT? The Tories have shown again that center-right governing parties seem incapable of managing their populist wings without being either taken over (like in the US and Canada) or splitting, like what happened here. From my perspective as someone on the non-populist/liberal center-right, hopefully the lesson being learned here is that trying to appease the populists with “tough on immigration” gimmicks like the disastrous Rwanda plan and mandatory national service for young people is a fool’s errand, and instead figuring out how to message a broadly liberal/center-right governing message to the population that feels most aggrieved and attracted to populism is the only way these traditional governing parties will recover and avoid the fate of the French center-right.
WELL THAT WAS FUN. I love British elections, of all election nights I commentate on they are probably my favorite. From the candidates standing on stage, overnight counting, and Elmo running against the sitting Prime Minister, their election night is a made-for-TV advertisement for Britain that money couldn’t buy.
—
WHAT’S NEXT? I hope to do more long form writing like this, I haven’t done it in years outside of an academic setting and something about sitting back with a cigar, a glass of whiskey, and a fire writing my thoughts about a far away election really appeals to me. (For transparency, my wife does not permit me to smoke cigars, I’m drinking water, and the fire is a YouTube stream. I’m not allowed to be that cool.) There’s no shortage of topics, with South Africa’s perilous coalition government, Trudeau’s leadership on a knife’s edge, and a left-wing pro-Gaza revolt in the Australian Labor Party right now. Oh, and apparently America is having some sort of election. I can’t promise anything, but until next time.
Meanwhile, follow me on Twitter @KevinYeaux and on BlueSky @KevinYeaux.bsky.social