https://anotherangryvoice.substack.com/p/not-truimph-starmerism-tory-implosion
Keir Starmer won an astonishing 3.2 million fewer votes than Corbyn did in 2017, yet the collapse of the Tory party and our deeply disproportional voting system delivered him an enormous majority.
Another Angry Voice
Jul 05, 2024

If anyone was under the illusion that the general election represents an ideological triumph for Starmerism, rather than an unprecedented disintegration of the Tory party, the numbers make it absolutely clear what's actually happened, and what a stupidly unrepresentative voting system we're lumbered with.

Labour won an absolutely massive parliamentary majority (412 MPs so far) with 9.7 million votes. That's 600,000 votes fewer than the 10.3 million Jeremy Corbyn got in the 2019 rout (202 MPs), and an astonishing 3.2 million fewer than Labour won in 2017 (262 MPs).

To put it another way, Keir Starmer attracted 3.9 million fewer voters than Theresa May did in 2017. He’s just won an unprecedentedly large majority over the Tories, while May ended up losing the Tory parliamentary majority!

Labour's vote has collapsed by over 3 million since 2017, and the only explanation for this falling popularity handing them a huge majority is the astonishing collapse of the Tory party.

The Tories cratered from 14 million votes in 2019 to just 6.8 in 2024, meaning over half of the people who endorsed Boris Johnson and his shambolic Brexit bodge in 2019 decided not to bother voting Tory in 2024.

Labour were not the only beneficiaries of this astounding Tory collapse under our wildly unrepresentative voting system. The Lib-Dem vote fell by about 100,000 from the 3.6 million Jo Swinson achieved in 2019, yet their MP count soared from just 11 back then, to 71!

To be fair to the Lib-Dems 71 out of 650 seats is much closer to a fair and proportional representation of their share of the vote than 11 was, but it's taken the unprecedented implosion of the Tory party for this proportionality to happen.

The Green Party doubled their expected seats in the exit poll to get four, while Reform's 4 is well short of the 14 predicted by the exit poll.

Both parties have a strong case that the disproportionality of the voting system has worked against them.

The disproportional voting system seriously harmed the Greens election campaign because millions of potential Green voters had to hold their noses and vote for pro-austerity, pro-privatisation parties like Starmer's Labour or the Lib-Dem to oppose the Tories, because a Green vote in most constituencies amounts to little more than a protest vote.

If we had a system in which all votes matter, far more people would have supported them (especially a lot of the 3.2 million who have abandoned Labour since 2017, and those who decided to hold their noses to endorse Starmer's hard-right version of the Labour Party as the "lesser of two evils").

Apparently Reform got 4 million votes, which is several hundred thousand more than the Lib-Dems, yet they get 4 seats, while the Lib-Dems got 71.

Many would argue that it's a good thing that Farage's mob didn't get dozens of seats, but it's a dangerous attitude to cheer for an absurdly disproportional voting system when it delivers unfair results that you like, when there's the obvious danger that next time it could deliver unfair results that you really hate, especially if the capitalist media propaganda hacks begin pushing Farage as hard as they can for the next five years, and/or Farage and the Tories cook up an extreme-right electoral alliance at the next election.

Whatever your feelings on the general election result, two things are absolutely beyond doubt:

Starmer won his massive majority not because of the popularity of his more of the same" agenda, but because the Tory vote spectacularly imploded.

Britain’s electoral system is absurdly disproportional, and desperately in need of modernisation.