Labour’s huge majority gives the appearance of unchallenged power when, in reality, it is built on shifting sands while the political and social vacuum that existed before the election remains significant and threatening.
The election was undoubtedly a phenomenal anti-Tory vote, although the beneficiaries sharing the spoils were many and varied, ranging from the Green Party to the right-wing populist Reform UK as well as Keir Starmer’s party.
Yet Labour’s share of the vote in England remained more or less unchanged, fell back sharply in Wales where the Tories lost all their seats, and only increased in Scotland in the wake of the collapse in support for the Scottish National Party.
Labour’s total vote of 9.7 million is less than a quarter of the total number of registered voters, while turnout at around 59% was one of the lowest since 1945, falling by almost 8% on the 2019 election.
In practice, Reform’s 4 million ballots split the Tory vote, enabling Labour and the Liberal Democrats to capture seats normally out of their reach. Even so, Labour lost five seats to pro-Palestine campaigners and former leader Jeremy Corbyn romped home as an independent, having been barred by Starmer.
One commentator aptly described the result as a “loveless landslide”, while the Observer’s political columnist Andrew Rawnsley described the outcome as a “revenge election”, in which voters expressed their hatred of the Tories “more evidently than they did any love for Labour”.
He added: “So while the victory looks commanding, the mandate feels brittle. Sir Keir sits atop a skyscraper majority, but its foundations are built on clay.”
Such is the distortion within the voting system, that Reform, who achieved 14% of the total vote, only won five seats while the Lib Dems, who polled 600,000 fewer votes, ended up with 72 seats. Labour with a 33.7% share of the vote, walked away with 412. Democracy in action this isn’t.
Opportunistically, Reform is now campaigning for proportional representation in place of the first-past-the-post system. Meanwhile, Farage’s party came second in 103 seats, of which 93 were won by Labour. “We’re coming for Labour,” Farage boasted. You can be sure he wasn’t joking.
The absence of enthusiasm for Labour on July 4 was well founded. Starmer’s party made few pledges, apart from nationalist, pro-capitalist commitments to put “country before party”, “grow the economy” and curb migration.
They couldn’t even bring themselves to abolish the Tory limit of two children when it comes to benefits, which would have an immediate impact on child poverty.
Even their modest offers on the NHS and education are essentially pie in the sky. The funds committed to fixing the “broken” NHS and education are far below what are required, as the Financial Times has explained.
With Labour committed to Tory spending plans, there is no more money in terms of state revenue. Government debt relative to output is at record levels, adding further restraint.
So Labour has already turned to the corporate and financial sector for help – at a price – together with ripping up planning laws, building on the Green Belt and lifting the ban on land-based wind turbines.
The involvement of the private sector in public projects will be unprecedented, the financial website Bloomberg reported in June. It said that Rachel Reeves, now Labour’s chancellor, had been talking to investors for months to “spark their interest” in everything from house building, public transport to green energy.
“The plan involves creating new financial instruments to stimulate demand from institutional investors, as well as considering how the government can take on some of the risk of private investments in key projects,” it was reported.
What will this mean in practice? Daniela Gabor, professor of economics and macrofinance at UWE Bristol, said that Labour has already “done the arithmetic”, adding: “To mobilise £3 of private capital from institutional investors, you need to offer them £1 in public subsidies.” She wrote that the BlackRock private equity outfit – with an astonishing $10 trillion in funds – was standing by.
“But every time you hear Labour announce such an infrastructure partnership, think of the hidden politics. BlackRock will privatise Britain – our housing, education, health, nature and green energy – with our taxpayer money as sweetener.”
Daniela Gabor, Guardian
Labour has been down this road already. Under the Blair-Brown governments, the so-called Private Finance Initiative led to new hospitals and schools, at a price still being paid a quarter of a century later. For example, the NHS was landed with an £80 billion bill for just £13 billion of investment. Most of the debt is still outstanding.
But PFI+ under Starmer will go much further, Gabor explained:
“In this golden age of infrastructure, financiers plan to own our infrastructure outright and transform it into a source of steady revenue. Since buying Global Infrastructure Partners in January 2024, BlackRock holds about $150bn in infrastructure assets, including US renewable energy companies, wastewater services in France and airports in England and Australia. It plans to expand aggressively, just like other private infrastructure funds.”
Daniela Gabor, Guardian
So, as the Tories collapse to their worst performance since 1834, the dawn of modern elections, the prospect of Labour raising living standards and improving public services is down to the whims of capitalist finance. This reinforces our view that the capacity of governments to determine economic policy that benefits ordinary people is extremely limited in the age of neoliberalism. Instead, we will move further towards a corporatocracy in place of democracy.
Starmer embraces this approach because he sees no other choice, which shows that the political and economic system is the problem, not the solution. With the institutions of the UK state intimately connected to the BlackRocks of this world, there is clearly no parliamentary route to salvation, let alone socialism.
The obvious danger is that an emerging far right in the UK will take advantage of a likely Labour failure. With representative democracy failing to represent, and voters desperate for substantial change – as they showed by brutally ousting the Tories – the far right would ultimately bypass existing failing institutions and head for a full-blown dictatorship.
However, there is an alternative, outlined in our manifesto Work Together for System Change. It explains how a transfer of political power into the hands of Popular Assembles would liberate resources from the profit straitjacket and bring people into direct ownership and control.
Assemblies, once built into a powerful network, would challenge the existing state and make plans to becoming the power themselves. They would revitalise the powerless Parliament with representatives from the Assemblies in place of the MPs whose loyalty is to their parties and leaders rather than their communities.
We appeal to other organisations like Extinction Rebellion and social media campaigns, trade unionists and all those who want system changes to come together with us to take this project forward.
The general election 2024 is an historic moment, expressing not just electoral volatility but a society in turmoil. The collapse of the ruling Tory party marks the end of a period of representative politics lasting almost 200 years. What it leads to next is down to us.