No, please, don’t do any more election analysis!
There were one or two points worth noting – this one, for example…
That Starmer could call Corbyn a failure in 2019 when he got over twelve million votes, and then claim a phenomenal success on nine million in 2024 demonstrates at a stroke that most of the words spilled on the BBC about how Starmer ‘did it’ are pure fiction.
One sentence will answer the question that raises: Labour get in when the Tories have fallen into utter disarray and need the B-team to take over for a bit.
Here’s the analysis we need to focus on: either our voting system is rubbish or it’s not designed to do what we think it is doing.
What would commentators need to be discussing, in order to make any sense?
We’ve had boundary changes since the last election. How many people even noticed? I’ve heard from people who only discovered they’d changed constituencies when their polling cards arrived. They didn’t even know the names of the candidates in their new constituencies. How many commentators are discussing the consequences of that, or of voter ID? Or what happens when you have eight or more candidates in an election designed for two, where an organization with a bit of money to spend can sabotage any election they don’t like the look of by running an extra, ‘distractor’ candidate, or by withdrawing one?
The team, the money and the data
If you’ve got all the resources to hand, you can do what you like, feeding in candidates you want and blotting out those you don’t so, for example, Labour felt safe to conclusively wrong-foot Faiza Shaheen by expelling her from the party mid-campaign, putting a new Labour candidate in to split the vote, which let the despicable IDS keep his seat; and to forbid Jovan Owusu-Nepaul from campaigning, thus giving Clacton to Nigel Farage.
Click here to read the Labour List article above.
Click here to read about the Clacton situation.
Clacton results below.
Perhaps Shaheen would have lost Chingford, and Farage won Clacton anyway – who knows? Who cares? The voters’ wishes in those constituencies were entirely irrelevant to the Labour Party.
Belief in our democracy rests on the idea that a good speaker with a good heart will win people over – the idea that a genuine motivation to do something people want will get the votes – and like all good lies, it’s halfway true.
People like that will get the votes from people who hear them.
We had a very good example of that in Hastings in Phil Colley, who was largely unknown outside his own circles before the election but who spoke very well on Gaza, the NHS, housing and water companies at two or three events during the campaign. He won over a good number of the people who heard him at those three events. As a result, he got around 350 votes, whereas the polished, vacuous statements on all those things from the Labour candidate, backed by the funds, the data and the targeting of the gargantuan organization that is Starmer’s Labour got her 19 thousand votes.
To win the thousands of votes you need in a general election, you need the means to be heard by tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. This remarkable feat was managed by a handful of people who are now indie or small party MPs. Do you even know their names yet? Did they get any mentions from the BBC etc before or during the election night programmes?
The most successful of those indies was Jeremy Corbyn. I’m told the first disparaging comment about Corbyn came a mere 15 mins into the BBC’s election night special, but outside the mainstream star chamber, his campaign snowballed until his constituency was overrun by enthusiastic volunteers from all over the country, and Islington North positively rang with his election message – but then Corbyn had the advantage of being a tried and trusted MP who was already nationally well known.
It’s not absolutely impossible to break through without those advantages – Leanne Mohamad, who was a mere 500 votes short of ousting Wes Streeting very nearly worked that magic but the fate of Faiza Shaheen and many other very popular (when known) candidates was by far the most common fate of candidates who are not a part of ‘the political class’ (those with the money, the data and the professional teams at their fingertips).
The foregone conclusion
Thanks to systemic bias and well paid, professional teams with access to Labour Party data, Keir Starmer won a ‘landslide’ with less votes than Corbyn got in 2019 – which resulted in a defeat. This wasn’t an aberration, it’s what the system is set up to do. It delivers Tory, Tory, Tory, Labour; Tory, Tory, Tory Labour.
Tories as a rule do not have any political or administrative skills. They don’t need them. That’s why, if they’re in power too long, they fall into disarray and public disgrace. That’s why Labour are there, to take over for a while and look a bit like an alternative, when the Tories need to clean up and re-group.
Don’t analyse the results, analyse the media
Those who think they are informed because they watch telly and read newspapers were raising an eyebrow and commenting in recent months about BBC reporters suddenly holding Tories to account, about newspapers coming out for Starmer – as though this was some hopeful turning of the tide. It was not. It was the point where they were confident Labour was back in ‘safe’ hands, and the Tories needed a curtains-down period to sort themselves out. Labour will do what Labour does, now – give people a few sops to give the impression of ‘better times’, and keep the profiteers’ wheels turning.
Experience and political education
You’ve got to vote Labour to get the Tories out. A vast proportion of the public picked up that message from the media. Most people don’t like Starmer. Most people were vaguely aware of other possibilities in their constituencies but that only worried them, because ‘you’ve got to vote Labour to get the Tories out’.
The Tories beat the Tories. The hapless criminals serving under Sunak were not even skilled criminals. They failed repeatedly to hide their crimes. They had to be ushered off stage, and the traditional Tory voters did that job themselves. The Tory left voted Lib Dem and the Tory right voted Reform, and a fair few of the less determined Tory vote just stayed home. The rest of us could have voted with our hearts and actually got something done – but most of us didn’t know that, because most of us had been listening to the mainstream media, so we thought you’ve got to vote Labour to get the Tories out.
We need a lot more people to get a lot more political experience and education, so they are free to have ideas of their own at election time. It’s not difficult, and it’s interesting. There are many ways of doing it.
It was too little and too late to have much effect on the election, but we in Hastings decided to have a public assembly during the election campaign, to give as many people as possible a chance to think and talk together. You can read about that here – or here – or even here. You see, lots of people liked the idea, and it’s part of a growing movement, and so they helped to spread the word.
Tanushka Morah, one of those intrepid independent candidates in that election, made what I thought was the most pertinent comment in the whole (alternative) election night coverage (of course she didn’t get any overage in the BBC one). She said she hadn’t expected to win, but she’d had a fantastic experience, and gathered a superb team of activists around her in her town, and that those weeks she’d spent, knocking on doors and talking to people in the street had been an education.
Bear that in mind for your town. None of those people who worked with Tanushka and had that experience are just going to believe what the BBC says, or what the winning politicians say, the next time around. They are going to be out there again, talking to everyone, finding out what people really want and need, and discussing how to achieve those things.
Here’s a campaigner talking about the experience of ‘door knocking’ with a candidate in Sheffield, Alison Teal, whose lead policy was not one professional politicians want to talk about…
And here’s me scribbling notes in a lecture on the motivations and consequences of the Balfour Declaration – it’s where I learned how we got where we are now with the Gaza situation.
Getting informed means going to events and lectures, getting into conversations, listening, and finding out stuff…
What to do now
Don’t waste brain cells assessing mainstream political analysis – it just leads you to think the professional, political class are all there is. Instead, get talking with the people around you, go to events by people with real-world experience, and get in touch with those amazing independent campaign teams who’ve been at work around the country in this election. They are inspired and fired up now. They aren’t going to just go away, they are going to be at work, building a politics that is actually for the people.
Perhaps there was a time when that establishment Tory, Tory, Tory, Labour trundle was good enough but now, in the face of looming, global scale wars and climate crisis, as ‘austerity’ reaches a stage where none of us can pay our bills and our NHS disappears, allowing the trundle to continue is miserable for us, and sheer damnation to our grandchildren so we need to drop the futile mainstream analysis, and take action together.
Have a look around right now – what’s going on in your town? What events and rallies are there? Who could you go talk to, or listen to, to get something started?
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Dear Reader,
Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.
Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 