Groucho Marxism

In June last year the Labour Party won a 174-seat majority in the UK general election, the third-best showing in the party’s history and its best since 2001. Fast forward to a little over a year later and the party is in disarray. Recent polling suggests that less than 25% of voters would vote for Labour if an election was held now, down from 34% at the general election. And it gets worse: polls that include the new Corbyn/Sultana party have Labour on just 15%, tied with this still as-yet-unnamed party. If Labour’s vote share carries on decreasing at this rate literally nobody will vote for them at the next general election. On top of this dreadfull polling, the party leadership recently had to face a massive and embrrassing backbench rebellion on its propsed welfare ‘reforms’ (read: cuts). So what’s gone wrong?

It’s important to note first of all that Labour’s victory in the 2024 election was nowhere near as decisive as the large majority might lead you to believe. As has been pointed out many times (although not in in the mainstream media of course), Labour won with fewer votes than it received in 2019 and with significantly fewer than it received in 2017, despite the fact that it lost both of these elections. In interpreting these results it must be remembered that Labour was led into the 2017 and 2019 elections by the supposedly unelectable Jeremy Corbyn and both times was subjected to a malevolent smear campaign from the media-political establishment. Starmer’s Labour was given the easiest of rides in comparison, yet still received fewer votes.

In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the Conservatives lost the 2024 election than that Labour won it. Whereas the number of people who voted Labour was roughly the same in 2024 as it was in 2019 (although slightly lower in 2024), the number of people who voted Conservative halved. The Conservative vote basically collapsed, largely as a result of a loss of confidence following the Truss/Kwarteng debacle. Furthermore, desperation to get the Tories out led to a wave of wishful thinking about Starmer’s Labour by some on the left, who seemed to be under the illusion that Labour would veer left once in government despite there being no evidence to suggest this, leading to an artificial inflation of Labour’s vote.

Anyone paying attention to any of this in the run-up to the 2024 election would have realized that Labour’s position was quite precarious and would have expected their support to diminish at some point. However, I don’t think many were expecting it to implode quite so quickly and spectacularly. It is tempting to blame the utter hopelessness of Starmer and his cronies for such a rapid implosion. And let’s be clear, they are hopeless. Starmer is a man who seems to have zero political instincts, which perhaps isn’t surprising given that he is actually a lawyer who has only been a politician for a few years. On top of that, he and his chancellor Rachel Reeves seem to have no understanding of basic economic theory. You wonder what they actually get taught on these Oxbridge PPE degrees.

But to blame Starmer and his cadre for Labour’s plight would be to fall for for the ‘great man fallacy’ (or perhaps the ‘incompetent man fallacy’ would be more appropriate). To really understand why Labour’s support is collapsing we need to look at the international context. Support for centre-left parties has been declining across Europe and other Western countries since global financial crisis of 2008. This is often referred to as ‘Pasokification’, after the Greek party PASOK, which saw a declining share of the vote in national elections throughout the 2010s. In fact, the UK Labour Party did relatively well during this period compared to its international peers, mainly because it became a genuine left-wing party, as opposed to a centre-left party, during the period 2015-2019.

Contrary to what the mainstream media would have you believe, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership actually arrested the decline of the UK Labour Party. This decline had started to become apparent in the 2015 general election when Labour unexpectedly (to mainstream commentators anyway) lost ground to the Conservatives. This led to the party reforming the rules around leadership elections, which ultimately led to Corbyn being elected as the party leader and to the party massively increasing its vote share in 2017. What we’re seeing now is the reversion of the UK Labour Party to the level of support that it would have had if Corbyn had not taken leadership of the party in 2015. Note that I am not giving Corbyn all the credit here: the key thing was the move away from centre-left politics.

It is not difficult to see why centre-left parties have become so unpopular over the last 15 years or so. These parties have generally supported austerity in the period following the 2008 financial crisis, and austerity makes ordinary people less well-off and worsens their material conditions. Why these parties support such a pointlessly destructive policy is a much more difficult question to answer – particularly as it is inimical to their own electoral interests. You get the distinct impression that centre-left parties are more concerned with piling misery on their fellow citizens than with getting re-elected or affecting change. Is it any wonder people dislike them? The surprising thing is that anyone still votes for them at all.