After the ‘landslide,’ what now for the real left? 

By Claudia Webbe 

Labour’s low-vote landslide was enabled by the far right and opens the door wider to fascism, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE

LABOUR’S “landslide” win in the general election was based on a set of historic lows, enabled by the continued rise of the far right and shored up by the utter weariness of the electorate with a series of failed and damaging Conservative governments.

This led to a result in terms of seats that hugely flattered the unpopularity of Labour’s leadership and its austerity platform — what Channel 4 political editor Gary Gibbons called “a loveless landslide,” in which Labour has a huge majority with the support of only one in five voters.

A YouGov poll just before the election found that a big majority of those planning to vote Labour were doing so because they wanted a change from the Tories — with only 1 per cent voting because of Keir Starmer and only 5 per cent, unsurprisingly, because of Labour’s policies.

The left will of course welcome the near demise of the Tories, who lost 244 seats and a string of Cabinet ministers, and the successes for independent candidates and Greens standing on a socialist platform. The Conservative losses were on a historic scale — their 121 seats are more than 40 fewer than they managed in 1997 and 35 lower than their previous historic collapse in the early 1900s.

But the number of seats won has been used, by Labour politicians and by the media, to disguise the fundamental unpopularity of Labour’s threadbare policy platform and the authoritarianism of its leadership.

The “landslide” was won on hundreds of thousands fewer votes than under Corbyn’s leadership of the party in the 2019 general election, a result that was painted by the Labour right and the media as the “worst since 1935,” and more than three million fewer than under Corbyn in 2019. Turnout this month — the lowest since universal suffrage began — likewise reflected the disgust and disillusionment with the “two sides of the same coin” offering by the two main parties.

Ordinary people are desperate for real change and Labour, despite using the word “change” as its slogan, was not offering it.

Because of Labour’s “more of the same” policies and the lack of public engagement — whether in hustings or otherwise — the granular impact on the Tories’ number of seats was driven by the rise of Reform UK.

The far-right party, which was given intense coverage by the media during the election campaign, took more than 15 per cent of the vote, compared with the Tories’ 24 per cent. It managed only five MPs, but of the 98 seats where it finished second, Labour won 89. In many of those, a unified right-wing vote would have been enough to prevent Labour from gaining the seat, enough to threaten Labour’s eventual majority.

Labour’s win is not a turning of the page on Tory callousness and class war. It is often said that liberals are the handmaids to fascism and Labour’s refusal to offer socialist policies has empowered the far right.

In turn, the success of Reform was the main driver of a result that massively flattered Labour and hid the real political trends that were reflected in the vote tallies and low turnout.

The racist and reactionary currents underlying the rise of the right were on show in the campaign against me in Leicester East. In at least one WhatsApp group set up to attack my campaign, members of the group, whose identities originate from Oadby, freely told others to target specifically Muslim households and tell them they should vote against me because I had supported LGBTQ+ rights. Meanwhile, on social media, I was constantly the target of racist and misogynistic comments.

The success of the far right is likely to be used by the new government as an excuse or justification for a continuation of the Tories’ discriminatory and racist laws and practices — and as a basis for further attacks on our freedom to protest and resist them.

But at the same time, there were reasons for hope. The low turnout and the record votes for independent candidates and the Greens revealed the biggest ignored phenomenon of the general election: people are sick of being offered no real choice for socialism and fairness.

Many stayed at home, but five independent MPs and four Greens — four times more than that party’s previous best — were sent to Parliament to be a voice for real change. Most of these wins were at the expense of Labour incumbents, including Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South and Thangam Debbonaire in Bristol.

In 2019, Debonnaire beat the Greens’ Carla Denyer by almost 30,000 votes in Bristol West. In the new Bristol Central, Denyer beat Debbonaire by more than 10,000. These huge swings show what is possible.

In other seats, independents and small parties came within a hair of ousting senior Labour candidates — Leanne Mohamad was fewer than 600 votes from defeating Wes Streeting in Ilford North, while the Workers’ Party’s Jody McIntyre missed beating Jess Phillips in Birmingham Yardley by a similar number.

And of course, Keir Starmer himself lost almost half of his vote in Holborn and St Pancrase — the first new Prime Minister to enter office with a reduced vote — while Andrew Feinstein received 19 per cent as an independent and Jeremy Corbyn won by a mile in neighbouring Islington North.

The biggest driver of these changes was likely voters’ disgust with Labour’s lack of opposition in relation to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians and refusal to condemn the genocide in Gaza, but Britain’s electorate also wants real change and hope at home, not tinkering around the edges or the same as the past 14 years with a bit more efficiency.

How should the left respond to polarised parliamentary results in which reduced votes can win a landslide, and to the rise of the far right, which now exists as an open presence in the Commons?

Elections are important, but under a dysfunctional political system that rewards the undeserving and little-supported with huge majorities, our resistance must be outside Parliament, in protests and direct action but also the battle of ideas and narrative.

We need to harness the public’s awareness of and outrage at the genocide in Gaza to build an even stronger anti-racist movement. We must strengthen our presence in the trade unions and work concertedly toward winning democratic and functional control of those bodies, which should be the engine of socialist political and societal reform but too often are not.

We must prepare thoroughly to ensure that, when Labour carries out its plans to extend NHS privatisation and strengthen the role of profit in public services and finance, we are effective in making sure the public is aware of what is really being done.

We must be relentless in demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza and in spotlighting Starmer’s complicity in it. Support for genocide, is the greatest form of racism, that we must confront.

And of course, with Starmer refusing to reverse even the most obvious evils like the two-child benefit cap that pushes 300,000 children into poverty and drastically worsens the lives of over a million more, we must be ready to make sure that the public’s inevitable disgust at the continued degradation of our quality of life, public services and social fabric is directed at the real causes and those behind them, and not at the usual scapegoats of refugees, the unemployed and the disabled.

With the far right now openly in Parliament and threatening Starmer’s tenure — whether through continuing to stand or even, conceivably, by withdrawing in many seats to allow the Tories to recover — the pressure to move even further right will be added to his innate authoritarianism and lead to the danger of even greater repression and greater targeting of the vulnerable.

This is a hugely dangerous moment for our country and requires all of our absolute commitment to resist — but it is not insurmountable. Even Financial Times data guru John Burns-Murdoch noted that “Labour voters this time are even less enthusiastic about their party than Tory voters were in 2019. If [it doesn’t] start delivering tangible results, it wouldn’t be at all surprising to see Labour start bleeding votes in all directions.”

The left must make sure that as many of those votes bleed toward socialism, social justice and the real restoration of our society, not toward greater racism and repression.

Claudia Webbe MP is the former member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019-24). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe