Groucho Marxism

The 2017 UK General Election wasn’t that close in terms of seats: the Conservatives won 317 and Labour 262. This result, along a with Labour’s subsequent and even heavier defeat in 2019, has led many to conclude that a socialist party could never realistically win a General Election in the UK, or that Labour was unelectable under Corbyn, or both. However, within a few days of the 2017 election, some on the left were pointing out that Labour had been just a few thousand votes away from potentially being able to form a government. As this does not fit the prevailing narrative it is generally ignored by mainstream commentators, and to the extent that it is discussed at all, it is usually dismissed as misleading or irrelevant. But is it really?

The first thing to note about this is that however much some people may not like it, it is simply a fact that in 2017, Labour were a few thousand votes away from being able to deny the Conservatives a working majority. What would have transpired after this is anyone’s guess, but whatever conjecture you make about that does not alter this basic fact. It is just a feature of our electoral system that a few thousand votes in key constituencies can alter the overall result of an election. The second thing to note is just how small a few thousand votes is: there are around 50 million people of voting age in the UK, and few thousand votes represents around 0.005% of these people. In the context of a UK General Election, a few thousand votes is basically rounding error.

Critics often retort that the claim relies on the smallest number of votes changing in a specific way, and that this is astronomically unlikely to have occurred in practice; but this is a straw man. Whilst it is indeed true that the probability of the votes changing so as to give Labour exactly the minimum votes in exactly the right consituencies is astronomically unlikely, this particular example is used to only to illustrate just how tight the result was. There are many plausible scenarios involving marginal gains to Labour that would have resulted in the outcome swinging in their favour. For example, a 1% increase in the number of people voting Labour distributed roughly evenly across the country would probably have been sufficient to alter the result in those key constituencies.

Something else critics like to point out is that based on the same logic, the Conservatives needed only a few hundred additional votes for a majority, and that this scenario is more likely to have occurred. Again though, whilst it is true that the Conservatives were within a few hundred votes of a majority, this does not alter the fact that Labour were also within a few thousand votes of being able to deny them a working majority. All this demonstrates is that the 2017 election was on a knife-edge, which is precisely the point. It doesn’t make any sense to argue that a reconfiguration of votes resulting in an advantage to Labour was astronomically unlikely, whereas a similar reconfiguration in favour of the Conservatives was possible or even likely.

The final argument critics like to make is that had the polls been closer in the period prior to the General Election, it would probably never have been called in the first place. This seems a fair assumption, as we may recall that the reason the  Conservatives called the election was that they assumed they would win comfortably against a Labour party led by the supposedly hapless Jeremy Corbyn. The problem with this argument is that if we accept the possibility that the polls could have been closer in the lead-up, to the extent that the Conservatives would not have been convinced of their victory and would therefore not have called the election, then we must accept the possibility that Labour could have won the election,  which then contradicts the whole ‘socialism is unpopular’ / ‘Corbyn was unelectable’ narrative.

Listening to political pundits talking about the 2017 election is a bit like listening to a football fan who just watched his team draw a cup game 3-3 after extra time, then win on penalties, with a referee who was obvious biased in his team’s favour, going around telling everyone that the other team was always going to lose and that the result was never in doubt. Any football fan making such a ridiculous claim would be laughed out of the pub, and rightly so. Nobody would accept such shoddy analysis in the world of sport – so why do people accept it when it comes to politics?