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Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has a thumping election win

The Conservatives’ election campaign had all the drama of a funeral on Eastenders

This is a historic moment in British politics. It’s a huge win for Labour. It’s a historic loss for the Conservatives. It also seems to have been the product of one of the lowest turnouts in history.

Disaffection is rife. There is a strong sense that this was a vote against the Conservatives more than a vote for Labour.

But for the Labour Party, a win is win, as they say. Labour will end up with 410 of the 650 seats in the new parliament, with the Tories predicted to claim less than 120.

Dull defeats disastrous

In the short term, this campaign made little difference.

Labour’s election campaign was the equivalent of watching a 0-0 draw that qualified your soccer team for the finals: cautious, safe, got the job done, but failed to excite.

The Conservatives’ election campaign had all the drama of a funeral on Eastenders: you knew it would go off the rails at some stage, but weren’t quite sure when or how often that would be. (And it did.)

The parties that had the best campaigns were the radical-right Reform UK led by Nigel Farage and the centrist Liberal Democrats. This hurt the Conservatives in two ways: the right-wing vote split, and moderate conservative voters moved to the centre. Labour lost some support but that barely touched this sides of its consistent 20-point poll lead.

In the medium term, the Conservatives effectively lost the election back in 2022. This was due to Boris Johnson’s lack of integrity and Liz Truss’s experiment in think-tank-inspired, retro-Thatcherite economics. The Conservatives lost the already wavering trust of the electorate at that point.

In the long term, demographic change has done its bit, as seats that analysts used to assume were “Labour” or “Conservative” now aren’t. The scale of the majority suggests graduates, home owners and the poor have joined what may prove to be a broad and unstable electoral coalition that Starmer will need to manage.

cyprusmail

 

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