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Date: 18/07/24
Counting Out Time
Having been delayed more than somewhat by an irritating formatting problem with my spreadsheet, I am finally able to put together some sort of analysis of the election results.
This isn't - at least not in its starting intent - a survey of the political scene looking ahead to the next five years, although I will give that a go later on; rather, as someone who has been interested in Westminster election numbers since at least 1979, it is an examination of the figures, trends and other such marginalia to be found on the morning of July 5th 2024 (or the morning of July 6th if you live in one particular Scottish constituency).
(And it's a pity that that word 'constituency' has inevitably to crop up numerous times in such a piece, given that I find it an absolute sod to type correctly first - or even second - time. I could use 'seat', of course, but I have a long-standing aversion to repeating a word too many times, so I'm a bit stuck).
So, what can be said about the Westminster Carnival of 2024? Having studied these things for nearly half a century, I think I am well enough qualified - unpaid work though it may be - to state that, in terms of its outcomes in both a general and specific sense, this was the most astonishing result of any of its precursors.
I'll start with the number of marginal constituencies, often a good measure of how tight the contest was, and to what extent the final tallies could have been different with just a small shuffle in either direction.
(Firstly, a definition: the standard psephological use of the term 'marginal' describes a seat where the winner finished with a majority of ten per cent or less over the second-placed candidiate.)
For comparison, the 2019 vote-fest ended with 143 marginals (this being 22% of the total number of constituencies). This time, that number rocketed to 223 (over 34 per cent). Breaking it down further, a quarter of Labour seats were marginals, and 63.6 per cent of Tory and exactly 60 per cent of Reform seats held or gained were within that ten per cent margin.
Moreover, the previous election had only three three-way marginals (that is, where the third-placed candidate was within 10% of the winner as well): Sheffield Hallam, Ynys Môn and East Lothian. This time, there were as many as twenty-four, mostly for reasons which I'll come to shortly. There were no four-way marginals however; these aren't entirely unknown, but the last ones I remember were in a couple of Scottish seats in, if memory serves, either 1987 or 1992.
(A caveat needs to be entered at this point, of course, namely that most of the constituencies this time round have different boundaries from 2019 - or are entirely new creations - following the gerrymandering initiated by the outgoing régime. So like-for-like comparisons are potentially misleading in some cases and outright impossible in others.)
The number of seats where the winning margin was less than 1 per cent of the valid votes cast increased by more than half (from 12 to 19), and the number of areas where the majority was over 50 per cent plummeted from 37 to just five (four of them on Merseyside, plus Unspeakable Hoyle not far up the road in Chorley).
The number of candidates who gained more than 50% of the votes cast also dropped sharply, from 421 to just 98, which figure includes Hoyle (the outgoing speaker in 2019 - John Bercow - didn't defend his seat at that election).
The number of second-placed finishes were as follows:
- Conservative - 297
- Labour - 104
- Reform - 95
- SNP - 48
- Green - 40
- Liberal Democrats - 27
- Independents - 14
- DUP - 6
- Alliance - 5
- Plaid Cymru - 4
- Sinn Féin - 3
- Workers' Party of GB - 3
- SDLP - 2
- People Before Profit
- UUP - 1
Before going on to attempt some sort of general analysis of the Whichness of the Why, let's look at the outcomes for each party:
- Conservatives: this was not only the predicted disaster, it was nothing short of cataclysm. When you lose a full two-thirds of your seats, and get punted from first to third (or even fourth) in some constituencies you've held since Joe Biden was a lad, you know you are - to use a technical psephological term - fucked. The collapse from the vaulting and vaunting triumph of 2019 to being little more than a mere rump is without parallel since the introduction of universal suffrage nearly a century ago. If 2019 was a landslide, 2024 is like the sudden shift of an entire tectonic plate.
The main reason was, of course, the intervention of the latest scam by the Wetherspoons Mussolini himself. My researches indicate that ReformUK plc's involvement cost the Tories no fewer than 105 seats (based on the reasonable assumption that sixty per cent of those who voted for the latest iteration of the Dear Man Of The People's vehicle would normally have voted Conservative). That's over forty per cent of their total losses of 252. More on this later.
- Labour: such an 'insurgency' was, of course, mostly to their advantage, and meant consequently that they won seats in areas which had never been other than blue (or occasionally yellow-orange) since time out of mind. I mean, Aldershot? Rural East Anglia (and no-one's descent from power into political irrelevance can ever have been as swift and as complete as that of Liz Truss)? Congleton? It was not merely reminiscent of landslides past (1983 and 1997 inevitably come to mind), it was an augmentation of those years with added brass and tympani. And, I fear, like with those elections, there are an awful lot of the resulting new intake who never really expected to be elected and will prove themselves to be either inadequate or - because many of them may be just sharp enough to realise that they may not be there for very long - constantly desperate for media coverage as incorrigible rent-a-gobs for the scum press. I think back to 1983, and how many of the new Tory intake at that time fell into one or both of those categories for the same reasons. Peter Bruinvels and David Evans, anyone?
- Liberal Democrats: the same caveat should probably be applied in spades to Mister Ed's eager little boys and girls, except that they won't actually hold any power and so can do comparatively little harm; indeed, they may act as a form of conscience for those comparatively few on the Labour back benches who still retain some consciousness of what their party is supposed to be about. In their case, however, only eleven of their sixty-four gains may reasonably be attributed to ReformUK plc's involvement, and they gained most in rural southern and south-western England where they, rather than Labour, had long been seen as the viable alternative to the Conservatives. It is a measure of how deeply pissed off the electorate in those areas felt with the Tories that substantial numbers of them felt able - or, indeed, morally obliged - to make the switch.
- ReformUK plc: now, of course, we come to the Faragergriftspartei, that natural repository for the hopes (but mostly fears) of white middle-aged and elderly men and women with serious anger-management issues and a belief that the Hun - perhaps even Old Boney - is permanently at the gates.
That they were going to have some impact was a given, and we duly saw the culmination not only of a decade and a half of froth-lipped posturing and feral rhetoric, but also of its mainstreaming over that whole period by the news media (particularly the BBC, because Dear One-Of-Us Nige is 'such good TV'), and therefore turned an organisation on the periphery of the hard right into a national phenomenon. Add to that the polling which suggested they were neck-and-neck with Rich's Sunk régime, and the ground had been laid for a successful campaign.
(A brief digression on polls is necessary here, in order to remind You, The Reader that - contrary to the standard assumption - the polls are not there to reflect public opinion, they exist to direct it in certain ways, and the presentation of them can be - and often is - used to create a bandwagon effect in either one direction or the other, to boost a position preferred by those who hold power, or to torpedo any perceived threat to that same sector of our fissured society. Get the snowball rolling, and watch it gather pace and mass and ultimately form itself into an avalanche which sweeps away several villages.)
This is what happened here; once the polls showed that Labour was heading for a swamping majority and that NigeCo™ had some sort of chance of dislodging the Conservatives as the main party of the Right, the impetus gathered.
The result was the taking of five parliamentary seats, and second places in another ninety-five (albeit many of them distant seconds; in only five constituencies were RUKplc within ten per cent of the victor). Four of the five seats gained were where one would expect them to be on past performance; along the east coast of England (although the ever-repellant Lee Anderson held his Nottinghamshire seat and - much, I'm sure to his unclean amusement - pushed his former party down into fourth).
ReformUK plc's biggest contribution to the gaiety of nations, however, was their effect from second, third or even fourth place, in that they took enough votes off the Tories in enough constituencies to flip those seats - mostly to Labour - and if the Starmerclique owes its enormous majority to anyone, then the Faragistas deserve far more credit than anything which was in Labour's timid and unenthusing manifesto.
The claims - which were only reported by our generally risible correspondents when it was too late to make any difference - that many of the plc's candidates may not have actually existed were surely well founded, for all that Farage and Tice may fulminate against them. One only has to look at the names of some of them: I mean, 'Harry Palmer', 'John Crispin-Bailey', 'Mark Belch', 'Grant St Clair-Armstrong'; these are clearly made-up names, created either by rifling through the short fiction sections of John Bull magazine circa 1938, or else by using one of those algorithms that e-mail scammers deploy.
- SNP: oh, dearie dearie me...
It was as much a given that the SNP would lose quite a lot of seats as it was for the Tories, but - as with the Sunak Caused Fallacy - the actual extent of the defeat turned out to be about 8.5 on the Flodden Scale. The party was completely wiped out in the central belt, with not a single representative to be found between the Isle of Arran and Dunbar, or betwixt Girvan and Callander. The SNP was pushed back into its 'traditional' strongholds of the mid Highlands and north-east. Labour was, of course, the primary beneficiary, claiming all bar three of the Nationalists' central and western seats (plus the Western Isles, whose SNP winner in 2019, Angus Brendan McNeil, had been forced out of the party and stood as an independent). The LibDems grabbed the rest, along with two seats in the far north of the mainland. The majorities against the SNP in those lost constituencies were quite eye-watering, too: only a dozen results were close, whereas two of the LibDem gains were achieved with more than 50 per cent of the votes cast.
Why should this have happened to a party which had bestrode Scottish politics like a colossus for nearly two decades? Well, in common with its London equivalent, the SNP government in Scotland had grown indolent with power, had all but turned its back on its stated raison d'être of independence, and had allowed itself to be taken over by a bunch of ideological cranks (or, as they're otherwise known, the Scottish Greens). Despite having the most propitious sequence of circumstances to further its country's liberation, it had dithered, diverted and distracted its voters with a series of carrots which, dangle though they might, did not move the dial on that central issue one single decimal point. There's only so much patronising arrogance people will take, and the likelihood that many independence supporters stayed at home rather than reward such behaviour is the likeliest explanation for the catastrophe.
- Green Party: this was by a long way the Greens' best performance at a Westminster election. Not only did they win four seats, they finished second in no fewer than forty more. Whilst it was not particularly surprising that they held on to Brighton Pavilion despite the departure of Caroline Lucas, the other gains were astonishing. Although they had had a strong showing in Bristol West in 2019, the fact that they took its replacement constituency of Bristol Central by a mile with over half of the votes cast (and with no obvious 'Gaza Effect' impacting on the Labour vote by drawing its support away to an independent) was quite an eyebrow-raiser. The other gains were in rather unlikely places, one would think, namely in rural East Anglia and North Herefordshire. Most of their second places were in urban areas; not just Bristol, but London, Manchester and Sheffield. A caveat has to be entered at this point to the effect that nearly all of these were very distant seconds behind the (mostly Labour) winning candidates.
- Plaid Cymru: Officially a net gain of two seats, but Caerfyrddin was a likely win anyway and the two constituencies on the western mainland were always going to be shoo-ins. Regaining Ynys Môn would have been a relief to the party, but it was a near thing, and the probable cause of the victory there was a combination of Reform eating into the Tory vote and some tactical voting by Labour supporters.
Beyond that, the outcomes were mixed. Plaid finished second in only four seats, with the supposedly left-leaning and communitarian voters in those fabled Valleys choosing instead to vote strongly for a bunch of BritNat neo-Fascists. Chains in the mind...
- Independents: Apart from one seat in Northern Ireland, here's where the Gaza Factor really kicked in. Five constituencies rebelled against the Labour Party's knock-kneed stance on the genocide and removed or prevented the election of the Starmer candidates. The location of these seats has, of course, enabled the state-corporate media to portray the results as evidence of 'tribalism' on the part of the Muslim populations of those areas, as if only Muslims could possibly be so unreasonable as to be horrified by the complicity of the Labour Party with mass murder in Palestine. Seeing Jeremy Corbyn beating the official Starmerite candidate in Islington North was a rare satifying moment on the Friday morning.
- Others: Having won Rochdale in a by-election only four months before, it was bye-bye to Gorgeous George Galloway once again, narrowly beaten by a corporate hack. Beyond that, the Workers' Party of Great Britain did have another two second-place finishes, both of them by slim margins in Birmingham and both of them undoubtedly another manifestation of the Palestine issue.
- Northern Ireland: Sinn Féin cemented their place as the largest party, but it was a disastrous night for the Democratic Unionists, who lost three seats, one each to the UUP, Alliance and Traditional Unionist Voice (Q: What is 'Traditional Unionist Voice'? A: 'Traditional Unionist Voice' is SHUYTING VERY LUYDLY!). Three of the seats that the Duppies did manage to hang on to were by very slim margins. The reign of the House of Paisley appears to be coming to an uncharacteristically quiet end.
So after the dust has settled, the pundits have punned and the bribes have been subtly redirected, where are we now and what is the prospect ahead of us?
In simple terms, we have an affront to democracy. The ludicrous and completely disproportional voting system - one only deployed elsewhere in Europe in that beacon of openness that is Belarus - has led to Labour holding 411 seats - and hence a majority of 174 - on the basis of a fraction over one-third of the votes cast; the most disproportionate result in the history of the Greater English state, and one which caused even the Guardian to claim a "...crisis of electoral legitimacy".
In any case, the Starmerite obsession with abandoning any last remaining social-democratic principles to appeal to Tory voters could hardly be said to have paid off; a survey found that only eight per cent of 2019 Tory voters switched to Labour this time, which is dwarfed by the ten per cent of them who had died in the interim. So it wasn't worth it, was it, Keith?
Consider:
- Labour won over 63 per cent of the seats on less than 34 per cent of the vote
- The Conservatives took less than 19 per cent on just under 24 per cent
- ReformUK plc had over 14 per cent of the vote but gained only five seats (0.7% of the total)
- Only - appropriately enough, given their long-term campaign for a change of system - the LibDems had a sense of proportionality by getting 11 per cent of constituencies on 12 per cent of the ballots cast.
This is now a clear and absolute failure of the system to deliver a fair and just result, and what legitimacy the Starmerites might claim for themselves is utterly undermined by that failure.
Not, of course, that the spuriousness of the outcome will make any difference to how they will go about governing; and it certainly won't hold them back from doing whatever they choose to do and screw the rest of us. The signs are already there: the 'King's Speech' on Wednesday last contained proposals: to set up something called 'Great British Energy' which - for all the hoop-la about it before the election - won't actually produce or distribute any energy, but merely be a means for vulture capitalists to tap into public money for their own advantage; the non-privatisation of the water supply biz, shit and all; the removal of virtually all locally-accountable control over planning, which will mean that the Men From The Ministry (encouraged by donations from the land-bankers and speculators, natch) will have total power over what gets built and where; the establishment of a creature called 'Great British Railways' (can you spot a theme here, boys and girls?); a bill to criminalise the effective and safe treatment of gender dysphoria in young people...
Where the proposed measures are not surrounded by the by now de rigeur flag-shagging (strangely missing out the measure to take over the treatment of sewage via the Great British Pissoff), much of it is performative, but that which isn't is a wish-list to satisfy the authoritarian instincts which Starmer and his clique have imposed ruthlessly and brutally upon their own party during the past four and a half years. First they came for Corbyn and any Israel-critical figure (even if Jewish), now they may be coming for you, as many of us warned. There are already signs that the word has gone out to the police to be even more repressive towards pro-Palestine protestors, for example.
All this will be nodded eagerly through a House of Commons well over half of which will be the tame, bovinely docile playthings of those very same authoritarians. It will be like 1983-87 all over again. Whatever resistence there may be will, perforce, have to come from the streets, and it is at this point that it may become clear to more people why the Tories' measures effectively to curtail the right of even the most peaceful protest were not opposed by the Starmerites; they knew that their time in power was coming soon, and that they would need those laws to protect their own position from any form of active public dissent.
And all from a government for which there is no upswell of enthusiasm, which holds office due entirely to a combination of desperation to get rid of their predecessors and widespread - and understandble - apathy, evidenced by the lowest turnout in 140 years.
We may be heading for a period of elected dictatorship worse than the one old Hogg warned us about all those years ago, because in a majoritarian system like this, large parliamentary majorities are a threat to democracy itself regardless of the particular circumstances; perhaps we will even see an elected tyranny towards any and all dissent, especially in a state devoid of a constitution, where the safeguarding of the rights and freedoms of the citizen-consumer has always depended upon the notion - now surely long since disproven - that those who rule are generally 'jolly good chaps'.
And dissent there most certainly will be and must be, given that none of the parties which can ever be in a position to form a government under this upcocked electoral system is offering anything other than the continuation of the neo-liberal economics and neo-conservative foreign policies which have brought our lands to where they stand (or rather, crouch) today.
Stay on your guard.
