Crunching the Numbers Behind Keir Starmer's "Landslide" Victory

Those even minimally attentive to the news are likely to be aware that on the Fourth of July Britain had its General Election. They are also likely to have heard that the Keir Starmer-led Labour Party won the election by "a landslide." "Landslide," "landslide," "landslide," they say, the din of the word's repetition ceaseless (landslidelandslidelandslide)--and a reminder that to go by the available evidence the generality of those who work in news rooms have no more regard for the implications of the words they use in their headlines than they do for fact, logic, truth and the intelligence of that audience which reads past those headlines in the hopes of gaining an understanding of the events lying behind the factoids with which that news media so cynically barrages the public through every minute of the 24-hour cycle.

After all, one would come away from the talk of a "landslide" thinking that Labour enjoyed some crushing victory over its rivals, when this is not even close to being the case. Granted, Labour did manage to get almost 3 million more votes than the Conservatives, who have not received such a low number of votes (6.8 million) since 1923--which is to say, never in British history since Labour displaced the Liberals as the country's "second" party (1924). However, these were not the only two parties locked in serious contention for votes and seats in that election, and one has to take the others into account in any proper appraisal of the situation, at which point Labour's share starts looking less impressive, and frankly rather paltry--Labour getting just 34 percent of the votes cast in the entire election, two out of three of the votes cast going to its rivals.

This reflects the fact that Britons voted for third parties in record numbers.* In all the elections the Labour Party's historic displacement of the Liberals and 2019 Britain's "third parties" never mustered more than 35 percent of the vote between the lot of them (in 2010), while the typical figure has tended to be far lower (a mere 24 percent of the vote in 2019, in 2017 not quite 18 percent.) By contrast third parties picked up some 42 percent of the vote this time around. Of these one-third went to the Conservatives' challenger from the right, the Nigel Farage-led Reform UK. Had the Conservatives got even three-quarters of the 4 million votes that went to Reform UK they could ordinarily have expected they would have beat the vote for Starmer, the Tories would have remained in power, and Rishi Sunak would have followed the election by celebrating rather than shamefacedly resigning.

One may argue that Britons voted for third parties as much as they did because this seemed a "boring" election whose conclusion was so foregone that rather than letting themselves be dragooned into voting for one of the two principal parties in spite of their real preferences because of the need to "beat the other guy" (and the disincentives to third-party voting presented by the "first-past-the-post" system), they went ahead and voted their real choice, or as close to it as the options on the ballot offer, maybe with an eye to the next round in which they hoped that those alternatives will be yet more viable choices (as many on the right hope will be the case with Reform UK). However, there is yet another exceptional feature of this election, namely its extremely low turnout. A mere 60 percent of the electorate voted in last week's election--as against 65-69 percent in the last four elections (2010, 2015, 2017, 2019)--with the one point of comparison in the past hundred years the election of 2001. The combination of low turnout with the extraordinary share of the vote claimed by the third parties is strongly suggestive of the more anecdotally reported extreme disgust of much of the electorate with the two major parties, an impression affirmed by a comparison of the vote for Labour against what the party got in past elections.

Those elections in which Labour unseated a longstanding Conservative-led government seem particularly relevant, and the comparison with them at once makes the difference clear. Back in 1997 the Tony Blair-led Labour Party picked up 43 percent of the vote with 71 percent of those eligible casting a ballot, while Labour did better still in the two really comparable prior elections, sometimes considerably better. In 1964 Labour, led by Harold Wilson, got 44 percent of the votes of the 77 percent who turned out. And in that election Starmer so loves to reference, that of 1945, Clement Attlee's Labour got 48 percent of the votes of the 73 percent who turned out.

The party's performance in 2024 even compares unfavorably with Labour's performance in many an election it lost. Setting aside such relatively distant elections as that of 1951 (which saw Labour win an even bigger share of the vote than they did in 1945 but still lose the election to the Conservatives in spite of their having fewer votes), and focusing on more recent elections, one sees that the Corbyn-led Labour Party that Starmer and his supporters have treated with such complete disdain, and entirely expelled from the Party, got a considerably higher proportion of the vote in the 2017 election (40 percent of a 69 percent turnout), and a higher number of absolute votes in both the 2017 and 2019 elections (12.9 million and 10.3 million, respectively, as against the 9.7 million votes which have just seen Starmer into office). Indeed, even the Michael Foot-led Labour Party of 1983, whose Manifesto Labour left-bashers so gleefully deride at every opportunity as "the longest suicide note in history," did only a little less well than Starmer in that year's election, getting the votes of 28 percent of the 73 percent of the eligible voters who cast a ballot (which worked out to 8.5 million votes from a rather smaller electorate than Britain now has).

The result is that where Clement Attlee was elected by 35 percent of the British electorate, Wilson by 34 percent, Blair by 31 percent--and even the defeated Corbyn got 28 percent of the vote of that electorate in 2017, and 22 percent in 2019--Starmer received a mere 20 percent. Looked at another way, it was just 75 percent of the popular vote with which Corbyn lost in 2017, and even less than he lost with again in the less fortuitous election of 2019.

If one insists on using the word "landslide" one would be sounder in using it to refer to the Conservatives losing by a landslide rather than Labour winning by one, because this election was lost by the Conservatives rather than won by Labour, in large part because of the splitting of the right's vote was split between its traditional favored party and the newcomer Reform UK. One should also acknowledge that this demonstrates the extreme unpopularity of Labour as well as of the Conservatives, a function of dislike of Starmer, the direction in which he has led the party, and the way in which he has gone about taking it in that direction. Posing as a socialist with a social democratic platform to win the leadership contest, afterward he cast all that aside with brazenness exceptional even by the standards of politics to assume the centrist-neoliberal-neoconservative "Blairite" posture Labour's base has long despised, rather treacherously turned on the more popular Corbyn he displaced through these maneuvers, and ever since, if sprinkling his remarks with superficial hints of Old Labour-respecting leftishness, otherwise consistently treated his party's left with contempt as, even while speaking of "change," he promised business as usual (all quite evident in the fundamental vision and more specific details of the Manifesto he released to the public three weeks before the election).

Thus did so few vote Starmer--while it seems plausible that many of those who did cast their ballot for him did so "while holding their noses," with all that implies for any rhetoric Starmer offers about having a "mandate" for his program (such as it is). Indeed, if commentators like centrist-neoconservative Anne Applebaum are exulting in Starmer's victory as some crushing "triumph of anti-populism," I would say that Starmer's troubles are just beginning. Indeed, it may well be that for all of Starmer's promises of "stability" in the Manifesto in government the Labour Party will prove no more stable than the Conservatives they have just defeated.

* For my figures regarding all British elections prior to the one just held I relied on the comprehensive compilation of the relevant statistics in the handy House of Commons Library's Research Briefing UK Election Statistics: 1918-2023: A Century of Elections.