Labour’s Efficiency and the Continued Ascendancy of Farage
“Believe me folks, this is just the first step of something that is going to stun all of you.” Nigel Farage is a man who likes to speak in hyperbole, and increasingly draws comparisons to Donald Trump. But, Farage is a strategist, and thinks in the long-term, not a trait Trump has demonstrated. It is both this fact, and the ever-favourable conditions, that suggest Farage - despite being around for the best part of three decades already - might be around for a lot longer.
Farage is better understood as a Marine Le Pen like figure - willing and able to play the long game over several decades to achieve tangible political objectives. Farage has been campaigning for Brexit since the mid-1990s, and lost 7 attempts to win a seat in parliament, until his successful 8th attempt for the seat of Clacton at this election. In that time, he has successfully played the by far the most prominent role in delivering Brexit, alongside bringing down multiple Conservative prime ministers, was a member of the European Parliament, and has probably been one of the most influential politicians of the last 50 years. This was not a sudden rise to political prominence in the way of Donald Trump in 2015-16, but a decades-long strategy and a unique ability to communicate with voters.
Farage will understand that the results of this election could speak to a promising future for Reform. This isn’t to make a nonsense claim that Farage or Reform have somehow been the winner of this election.
This election has, of course, been an enormous win for Labour. Their electoral strategy since Starmer took over has been about as effective as possible at distributing their vote evenly across the country, maximising the number of seats that they win in a first-past-the-post system. They have also been incredibly fortuitous at the circumstances of the utter collapse of the Conservatives and the Scottish National Party, but of course you can only beat the opponent in front of you. And, under this electoral system, they have thoroughly trounced their opposition.
In fact, this is one of the most efficient distributions of voters at any election in modern times. The average majority in a seat has gone down from 11,200 in 2019 to 6,700, the lowest average since 1945. Labour’s share of the vote is about 35%, which will be the lowest share of the vote won by a majority single party government.
Labour won a majority of 66 on a very slightly higher vote share in 2005, and the Conservatives won a majority of just 12 on a vote share of 36.9% in 2015. John Curtice has suggested that Labour in fact gained no votes in England, lost votes in Wales, and their gains were entirely in Scotland. Their enormous seat gains in England, then, are a result of incredibly efficient distribution across the map, allowing them to win a large number of seats by small majorities under the first-past-the-post system. Bizarrely, it is less than 2 points more than they won in 2019, which was Labour’s lowest number of seats won since 1935. Labour have more than doubled their number of MPs from 2019-24.
It would be fair to lament the unjust nature of an electoral system which is capable of producing such absurdly disproportionate results, but, ultimately, it is designed in part to do exactly that, and Starmer’s Labour understood that to win they had to play the game in front of them. They have been incredibly successful at achieving their primary objective: winning an election, and doing so with a significant enough majority that parliament itself will not be a roadblock to their agenda.
Labour need to be weary, though, of the pitfalls of having such an efficient vote-spread. If it only took a small swing in their direction, but spread evenly across the country, to win a lot of seats, it is also the case that small swings against them, if also evenly spread, will bring their majority down fast. Labour cannot be timid in office, in an attempt to please everybody, and actually pleasing nobody. Though no particular group of voters might swing heavily against them, they drop just a few percent everywhere.
An argument is already becoming clear from leading psephologists - that this election was about publishing the Conservatives, and there is little evidence of a groundswell of support for Labour’s programme, which did not offer a fundamental break with monetary or fiscal policies of the Conservatives. Yes, this may have been the correct strategy to achieve the large parliamentary majority that they now have under our current system, but Labour must be wary of a far-right who will take advantage of a lack of real change once in office.
Like anybody analysing the election, I’m going to claim here that it broadly supports something I’ve already said. In my previous post just a few days ago, I outlined how the inability to build a new political economy after the pre-2008 order collapsed has fed the far-right globally - a stark example of which we are likely to see on Sunday in the second round of the French parliamentary elections. Macron’s reformist agenda which has not brought substantial material change to those who need it might be about to result in the far-right entering government. Since 2008, voters have sought system-level change, largely through the far-right, but there were far-left populist movements too, as there also is in France, with less success.
In the UK, our electoral system makes it significantly harder for a far-right party to simply come in and win, but the Brexit vote and subsequent votes in favour of parties promising to deliver Brexit can reasonably be argued as an attempt to seek system-level change to the country’s political economy - even if voters might not quite term it that way. ‘Change,’ is the simple way of putting it. Whether Brexit was a ‘far-right’ movement or not is more contestable than the advance of far-right parties in Europe, but the rhetoric around it, Brexit being favoured by far-right parties, and shift rightwards of the Conservative Party on social issues in this period does suggest that the two are fundamentally related.
And what happened at this last election, where system-level change was not offered by either party? Turnout has fallen to its second lowest since the franchise included both men and women. Labour’s vote share has seen a very modest increase, helped partly by the falling turnout - they have fewer actual votes than either of the previous two elections. Reform won 15% of the vote.
It may be possible for Labour to offer modest reform and be rewarded with another majority at the next election, albeit surely reduced, at the next election, thanks to the distortions of the first-past-the-post system. But that would merely paper over the cracks of a surely advancing far-right. Farage said it himself, this time he took Tory voters, but next time, he will come for Labour voters, non-voters, and anyone else who is increasingly disaffected if there is not a building of a political economy which reverses the insecurity and powerlessness of the the decades of globalisation and financialisation, and then the collapse of any material benefits to that model in 2008.
Keir Starmer has the opportunity to create this new world which drains the power from the far-right in a way which few other governments in the US and Europe have had. The UK’s political system centralises power around our government, provided they can command a majority in the commons. In most other systems, there tends to be more checks and balances, or conflict between a president of one party and a congress/parliament of another party, or over which they have little control.
Starmer, however, for the next 5 years is the commander of the political landscape. There will of course be enormous other challenges, but parliament will not stand in his way. This is power like no other, so he should use this rare opportunity to be bold, and seek changes to the political and economic system which return control, security, and prosperity to those parts of the country without it. This may well mean losing parts of his broad but thin coalition, but it would also tackle head-on the advance of Reform, who may well be in effective alliance with the Tories by the next election. Those who are seeking change which improves their lives may well vote for a Labour Party which tries to build a system which improves their lives. To do nothing might see them survive another election, such is our electoral system, but the absence of change will surely see us in a situation similar to the French sooner or later. This is a unique opportunity to turn course.