Labour has officially won the 2024 general election after reaching the required 326 seats.
Speaking in central London, the next prime minister Keir Starmer says “change begins now”.
“It feels good, I have to be honest,” he tells a cheering crowd.
My area was Conservative hold, with a reform surge.
I walk among morons.
Largely the same, but with a small LD bump at least.
I despair at people.
Same but there was also an equally sized labour surge that kept the SNP out.
Labour absolutely need to accept that this was a vote against the Tories and that they’ll really need to make some positive changes that the average person can feel if they want to win the next election.
The Tories will not be chasing the labour electorate, they will be chasing reform’s. If they can mop up the right vote they will be straight back in to power.
The age old Labour strategy still work, making the party palatable for business, for when the Tories drown in their own shit .
The risk I see, is that they won’t do anything anyone will notice, and they will be vulnerable to Right wing looneys next time - either in the form of Conservative Party who move to so far right as squash reform, possibly under Braverman . Imagine that.
That doesn’t say much for Clacton does it?
Its a fascinating election when you look at the stats. Labour vote share barely changed, Tories collapsed and Reform took most of their votes. In many of the conservative constituencies lost the Tory + Reform vote combined would have won.
Of course the Tories will make the mistake of trying to be more like Reform or even merge with them. That will be a huge mistake and they will probably turn off their remaining core vote.
This is really just another example of how broken the first past the post system is. I’m glad labour won but they’re kidding themselves that they somehow broke through to the public - they benefited from a split rightwing vote, just as Boris Johnson benefited from a split remain voter base when he won his big majority with just 43.6% of the votes in 2019.
Labour won a huge majority with just 33.7% of the vote! Only 1.6% higher voter share than in 2019 and way off the 43% Blair got in his landslide election in 1997.
Yes, exactly.
I think if we reran the election today after these results…
- Labour vote would remain the same
- LD vote would remain the same
- Reform voters would see how ineffective their vote was, and swing back to some degree.
…and we’d be in hung parliament land very easily.
The Tories merging with Reform would be a terrible move for them. Any of their voters who would normally have voted for Reform would obviously continue to vote for the new amalgamated party, but all of the people who would previously stuck by the Conservatives, and have obviously rejected Reform as an option, would have nowhere to go.
Being better than the Tories is the lowest bar to clear ever. Let’s see how it goes.
I’m not holding out a lot of success initially, but there is the possibility that things like the unions and the more progressives within the Labour party will start to make enough noise that they well able to achieve something in a few years.
The same way that the likes of Ress Mog managed to pull the conservatives over to the right.
