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Shaeda Ramblings's avatar

I'm not sure. The Tories just did an awful job combined with Reform taking a huge chunk. He got less than Corbyn '17 '19. His majority in Holborn and St Pancras was halved and he's lost two members of the SC. It's one of the lowest winning shares at ~33 per cent. 10 lower than the Tories 5y ago. I'm not even politically-savvy, just that these are all circulating online.

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Mark Worgan's avatar

That's because there are a lot of quite silly people who have a lot invested in saying 'Keir Starmer is rubbish because I don't like him'.

It's fairly simple. You don't win elections on overall vote share you win it by having the highest vote share in the most seats, and there's a subtle difference in the requirements. Think of it like an American election whereby it's really daft to do things that might maximise your vote share in states you know are safe if there's even a chance they might alienate those in swing states. Starmer and his team's gambit was that it was worth doing (or not doing) certain things that they knew would upset ultra-progressive voters clustered in seats they tend to win by a street, if they made people more comfortable voting for them or the Lib Dems in less progressive parts of Britain. So they sacrificed, say, big ticket items in their manifesto that would've created more enthusiasm but made people more likely to have been frightened into voting Tory.

Obviously they would have been happier if Gaza hadn't emerged as a rallying issue for voters who were in the Corbyn camp and they'd largely grudgingly stuck with Labour. But the overall strategy is sound and was executed perfectly as they had more than enough breathing space for there to be a substantial rebellion on the left and cruise to a huge majority. It doesn't happen by accident.

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