What Just Happened?

What actually just happened in the UK General Election, as against the headlines and sensationalism of the media story, and the narrative presented by the Starmer-Rights and Starmtroopers, as well as by the Tories?

Well, its true that Blue Labour has won an historic victory in terms of the number of seats won, and size of its majority, just as its true that the Tories suffered an historic defeat in terms of seats lost. However, as I set out before the election, in terms of votes and vote share, that is certainly not the case, and the basis of the result has little to do with a surge of support for Blue Labour, and everything to do with the corrupt nature of bourgeois-democracy, and the particularly corrupt nature of the British voting system that amounts to systematic and legalised ballot-rigging.

Before the election, I set out that Starmer's Blue Labour was set to underperform that of Corbyn's Labour. At that time, the latest poll data was from an MRP that gave Blue Labour 39% of the vote, as against the 40%, obtained by Corbyn in 2017. As I pointed out, only the actual vote would show what votes Blue Labour obtained, and now we have that data, it is even worse. Labour has won less than 10 million votes (9.7 million), compared to 10.3 million votes for Corbyn's Labour in 2019. Remember that 2019 was supposed to be the worst ever result for Labour in an election, a point that the Starmer-Rights, and the media have repeated ad nauseam, in presenting the narrative that elections can only be won from the centre, and that Corbyn's Labour was unelectable.

Compared to Corbyn's Labour in 2017, the contrast is even greater. Then, Corbyn's Labour won 12.9 million votes, a full 3 million votes more than Starmer's Blue Labour has won in this election (that is 33.3% more votes!). In that election, not only did Corbyn's Labour win a third more votes than Starmer's Blue Labour has won in this election, but that also, can't be explained by simply a much larger turnout of voters, because in 2017, Corbyn's Labour secured 40% of the vote, whereas Starmer's Blue Labour has secured only 33.8% of the vote in this election! So Starmer and Blue Labour have not only performed far, far worse than Corbyn's Labour in 2017, both in votes and vote share, but markedly worse than in 2019, too, in terms of votes, and almost the same in terms of vote share (in 2019 Corbyn's Labour got 32% of the vote share). Yet, as the Starmtroopers, and their supporters in the Tory media have kept telling us, 2019 was supposed to be the worst ever result for Labour going all the way back to 1935!

In the election analysis, during the night, Starmer-Right MP's, and spokespeople, such as Harriet Harman could only respond to this, by saying that this was justified, because Blue Labour had not stacked up votes in seats where they already had a majority, but had targeted seats they needed to win, given the nature of the electoral system. In effect, that is the same argument used by Donald Trump, in the US. It validates a corrupt electoral system. More importantly, the argument presented is in any case wrong. The facts of the election show that Blue Labour have not won seats, because they have cleverly targeted seats, and increased their votes, and vote share in them. If anything, their votes and vote share, in each constituency, on average, has declined, not increased.

Blue Labour has won a large number of seats, despite getting a significantly smaller number of votes than it did, even in 2019, simply because the Tory vote was split, with a large amount of it going to Reform. In other words, no love, or even liking of Blue Labour, whose number of votes in each seat failed to increase, and in some case, fell, but an even greater hatred of the Tories. In Leave voting areas, that hatred of the Tories, manifested in increased support for Reform, and in Remain supporting areas, it manifested in increased support for Liberals and Greens, hence the Liberal surge in the Blue Wall, and Greens winning seats from Tories in rural areas, as well as from Labour in Bristol.

Where Blue Labour's vote fell compared to 2019, the Liberal vote remained more or less the same, whilst its vote share rose from 11.6% to 12.2%. The Greens more than doubled their vote from 800,000 to 1.9 million, and their vote share rose from 2.6% to 6.8%. It is worth noting that, although the Greens obtained as many seats as Reform (though Reform won twice as many votes), the practice of the media, which has gone on since long before the Brexit vote, of giving outsized publicity to Fartage and Reform, whilst giving little air time to the Greens, has continued.

In summary, although Blue Labour has won an historic parliamentary victory and majority, in terms of seats, it is entirely due to the corrupt and undemocratic nature of British bourgeois-democracy, and electoral system. Despite the fact that, in 2019, the entire media conducted a vicious campaign against Corbyn, and Labour, assisted by the Right and Centre within Labour, Corbyn's Labour, in 2019, won more votes, and almost the same share of the vote, as Starmer's Blue Labour in 2024! Far from Starmer's Blue Labour having masterfully focused its attention on target seats, to increase its votes its vote and vote share in all constituencies has either been unchanged, or else has even fallen! It has won in those seats, only because the Tory vote was split, with Reform taking a large chunk of it.

If there is any evidence of voters having any enthusiasm for parties other than the Tories, it is not in favour of Labour, but of Reform, Liberals and Greens, as well as for individuals, such as Jeremy Corbyn, in Islington, and Faisa Shaheen, standing as Independents, largely on the basis of opposition to the reactionary politics of Blue Labour, for example, in its support for genocide in Gaza. Corbyn retained his seat securing nearly 50% of the vote, whilst Faisa Shaheen, who had been similarly blocked by the Starmtroopers, having almost beaten Iain Duncan-Smith in 2019, came within a couple of dozen votes of the Blue Labour candidate, parachuted in by Starmer. The result of this action by Blue Labour, was to split the vote, and let Duncan-Smith retain the seat, which Shaheen was set to have won with a clear majority.

The lack of enthusiasm for Blue Labour is seen in the turnout, as well as in the decline in its total vote. Some Tories, like Nadine Dorries, have tried to claim that the same was true of Tory voters. That is clearly not true. In Leave voting areas, its not that Tory voters sat on their hands. They went out and voted for Reform. Similarly, in Remain supporting areas, Tory voters went out and supported the Liberals and Greens. In, 2019, turnout was 67%, in this election, it is only 60%, reflecting the meagre offering, in fact, of all parties. In Corbyn's seat of Islington North, by comparison, turnout was 68%. Similarly, in Starmer's seat, turnout was only 54%, and Starmer himself saw his share of the vote fall by 17.4%, nearly all of which went to Andrew Feinstein.

The media have spoken about this win by Blue Labour as bucking the trend seen in France, in its Assembly elections, and across the EU, in the recent European parliament elections, of a move to the Right. They have described Blue Labour as “centre-Left”. But, that is completely false. The Labour Party from its inception has always been a bourgeois party, not a socialist party, but, at least it was a social-democratic party. That fact, usually meant that it could be described as centre-Left, although, under Blair and Brown, it was more accurately described as centre-Right, certainly compared to the governments of Attlee and Wilson, let alone the Labour Party of George Lansbury, all of which were more akin to the position of Corbyn.

But, Starmer's Blue Labour is qualitatively different to the centre-Right Labour Party of Blair and Brown. It is clearly a right-wing nationalist and populist party that has gone in search of that vote amongst the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie and lumpen proletariat that backed Brexit, and mourns the loss of the days of the British Empire. In order to hold itself together, given all of the contradictions that entails, it has had to become increasingly authoritarian, with Starmer serving the role as Bonaparte, and is supported with all of the attendant machinery of the party, now backed by former members of the Secret Service. This has all the hallmarks of the kind of transition seen in the past of former socialists such as Pilsudski, Mussolini, and Oswald Mosley, or indeed of national socialist parties such as Paole Zion.

Starmer's Blue Labour is not centre-left, but a reactionary, nationalist and populist party whose trajectory is set further in that direction, as the contradictions within it explode, as the lies it has told for the last four years are exposed, it quickly fails to live up even to the timid and vague promises it has made, and is led into confrontation with the working-class. That starting position, and direction of travel is manifest in Starmer's forthright commitment never to rejoin the EU in his lifetime, or even the single market (though in reality the latter is no longer possible without the former).

A look across the aisles shows that the Conservative ranks are going to be made up of a larger proportion of actual Conservatives, rather than Tories, as the Leave supporting Tories have lost votes to Reform, that has replaced them, or else took enough votes from them to let Labour in, even on a reduced vote share. In those areas, as I have described before, Tory members are likely to merge with Reform. In the middle-class, Remain supporting Conservative seats, they lost votes to the Liberals, but, it was the Remain supporting Conservative MP's that were able to do best in those conditions. As I wrote a while ago, the global ruling class is currently denied a party in Britain that can properly represent its interests, and have the potential of becoming the government. That's why it has had to utilise its permanent state machinery instead.

The Liberals most adequately represent the interests of that global ruling class, now. With 71 seats, as against the 120 odd seats of the Conservatives (some of whom will defect to Reform, as the party splits) the obvious response is for the ruling class to engineer a merger between the Conservatives and Liberals, much as happened in the 19th century, after the Repeal of The Corn Laws, in relation to the Peelites, or as happened, in the 1980's, when Labour was split by the SDP, which, then subsequently merged with the Liberals to form, today's Liberal Democrats. However, that would still only give them around 200 seats, way short of a majority, but providing a more solid base for challenging the reactionary, nationalist and populist trajectory of Starmer's Blue Labour. Moreover, the manoeuvres that occurred under Corbyn's Labour, with Change UK, indicate the likely line of travel, too.

Fartage is right, when he declares that he is coming for Blue Labour. As the nationalist Right splits from the Tories to merge with Reform, his competition for that ground will no longer be the Conservatives, but Starmer and Blue Labour. A merger between the Conservatives and Liberals (presaged in 2010 by the coalition of Cameron and Clegg), as Blue Labour comes increasingly under pressure, as its lies and contradictions explode, in contact with reality, will drive a significant number of Blair-Right MP's into a realignment with the Conservative-Liberals, to form a new, centre-Right party of capital that will be able to form a majority. As they lunacy of Brexit manifests itself even more obviously at that point, the central pillar around which that new party will be formed will be a progressive Europeanism.