Keir Starmer's Blue Labour is set, according to the latest MRP done by Yougov and Sky News, to underperform Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in 2017. In 2017, Corbyn's Labour, despite all the internal sniping by the Right, and attempts to unseat him, not only secured the biggest increase in Labour's vote and vote share since 1945, but also deprived Theresa May of her parliamentary majority, as well as turning the Labour Party into the largest party in Europe, with over 600,000 members. Corbyn's Labour secured nearly 13 million votes, representing 40% of the votes cast.
By contrast, Starmer's Blue Labour has seen its membership collapse, as it has also prevented any internal dissent, by an authoritarian regime that has systematically expelled opponents. Faced with a Tory government that has almost universal disapproval and disgust, Starmer's Blue Labour looks set, according to the poll to underperform Corbyn's Labour in 2017, by securing only 39% of the vote. Only the actual polling will tell us how many votes it actually obtains, but it looks unlikely to beat Corbyn's 2017 performance.
Yet, in 2017, Corbyn's better electoral performance secured only 262 seats, compared to the Tories 317, whereas Starmer's Blue Labour is forecast to win 431 seats, compared to the Tories 102, giving Blue Labour a majority of 212. What the poll also showed is that both Sunak and Starmer are intensely disliked by voters. You would have to go to the dislike for both Trump and Biden to get any similar kind of comparison of voters faced with the unsavoury choice between two turds out of the same arse.
What this shows is not that Starmer and Blue Labour are going to win this election, but that Sunak and the Tories have lost it, a process that began with Boris Johnson, as all of the nonsense and contradictions arising from Brexit tore them apart, and which now looks set to tear Blue Labour apart when it takes office. It illustrates not just the sham nature of bourgeois-democracy in general, but of the particularly corrupt nature of British bourgeois-democracy, and its electoral system that amounts to systematic and legalised ballot-rigging.
Starmer's Blue Labour is set to have the largest majority since 1832, and yet will have secured a smaller vote share than Corbyn's Labour in 2017. According to the MRP, the Liberals are set to obtain 12% of the votes, but get 72 seats, whereas reform are set to get 15% of the votes, but only 3 seats! Similarly, Greens are set to secure 7% of the votes, but only 2 seats.
The supporters of Blue Labour will undoubtedly trumpet their victory in securing so many seats, and such a majority, but the reality is that they will have done worse than Corbyn's Labour in 2017, in conditions that were not only far more favourable to them, but almost unique, given the melt down of the Tory Party in the intervening period. In 2017, the Labour Right did all they could to undermine Corbyn, and that continued over the next two years, as they mounted the campaign to unseat him, and to smear party members with fraudulent charges of anti-Semitism supported by the Tory media. No one was more shocked and disappointed than the Labour Right, when Corbyn's Labour did so well in 2017, which caused them to redouble their efforts to undermine him.
We will have to see how many votes Blue Labour secures even compared to that 2019 performance, which the Labour Right, and Tory media wasted no time in proclaiming to be the worst since 1935, which, in terms of votes, and vote share, as against seats, it was not. But, even compared to that performance, Blue Labour's performance, in terms of votes, in this election is likely not to be anything to write home about. basing yourself on ephemera such as the number of seats won, as against the underlying trends of votes, as an index of social movements is a delusion.
Boris Johnson, in 2019, won an 80 seat majority based on the idea of "Getting Brexit Done", and taking back control. He built a shaky electoral coalition of traditional middle class Conservatives, and petty-bourgeois Tories, dragging behind them declassed elements in the decayed urban areas of the North and Midlands. That coalition contained an inevitable contradiction between the middle-class Conservatives that backed Remain, and the petty-bourgeois Tories, and declassed elements that backed Leave, on the basis of a lie.
Even in 2019, the consequence of that was manifest, as in the Spring EU, and local elections, those middle-class conservatives, swung increasingly behind the Liberals. Every since, the Liberals have been gaining ground in those areas at the Conservatives expense. But, Brexit was built on a lie, and increasingly the lie was exposed. The lives of the immiserated petty-bourgeois, and particularly of the declassed elements got markedly worse, not better, after Brexit, despite all the talk about "levelling-up". Instead, most of those decayed urban areas simply looked like they had just been levelled, or needed to be levelled by bulldozers, are they fell into even greater decay.
The chaos inside the Tory Party was just the external manifestation of these contradictions, and the inability of the government to make good on its unachievable promises. The electoral coalition fell apart, as the middle-class Conservatives, in the "Blue Wall", have deserted them as they flock to a Liberal Party that more closely represents their bourgeois values and interests, as epitomised in the opposition to Brexit. But, as the Brexit lies were exposed, so too the Tories lost that flaky support of the petty-bourgeois and declassed elements in the North and Midlands too. Some of the latter has gone to Reform, where it will be disappointed again, leading some of it to move even further Right to the BNP etc., whilst others will have returned to their usual apathy, and others will have voted for a Brexit supporting Blue Labour, where they will again have their reactionary dreams of "Making Britain Great Again", dashed.
Blue Labour's electoral coalition is so full of contradictions, and based on the same reactionary nationalist lies as those of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage that is must inevitably blow apart in short order, and in a similar manner. Blue Labour has already enraged and antagonised a large part of its core, progressive working-class vote, many of whom will only turn out to vote Labour, out of an even greater hatred of the Tories, and knowledge that given the corrupt nature of Britain's electoral system, other parties such as the Liberals and Green, let alone the smaller socialist parties and sects have no chance of winning enough seats, even if they win a large number of votes. But, that does not change the fact that a large groundswell of dislike for Starmer and Blue Labour exists, in conditions where the working-class is rising from its knees for the first time in nearly 20 years, and starting to organise itself once more.
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