The Labour Party have swept to power with an overwhelming parliamentary majority in the British General Election held on 4 July 2024. Yet despite their 403 seats (an absolute majority of 167 seats), anti-Labour sentiment is running at an all-time high across all parts of the population. This antipathy will only grow during the term of the next Labour administration. The real take-home messages of the 4 July General election were far more worrying than the headline result might appear to indicate. These include:
1. One of the lowest participation rates since WW2. A crisis of confidence in our political system. Starmer’s ‘2024 Landslide victory’ had fewer supporters that Corbyn’s ‘2019 abysmal failure’. The combined national vote for the Labour and Conservative parties in July 2024 sits at 57.6%. The lowest since 1918, at the end of the First World War when, incidentally, universal male suffrage was first introduced. Starmer won just 33.9% of the vote on a very low turnout of under 60%. There are 46.5m registered voters in Britain, with a 50m voting age adult population in a population of 65m. 20.1% of the electorate backed Labour. [Starmer’s Labour polled just 9,660,081 votes, as compared to Corbyn’s Labour which polled 12.9M in 2017 (40% of votes cast!) and lost; even in 2019 Labour under Corbyn – much undermined by his own Party’s fake anti-semitism allegations against him and his supporters – managed to garner 10.3M, though of course he still lost].
2. Starmer’s Labour ‘landslide’ in seats, comparable to Blair’s in 2007, came on a much reduced vote. It was an anti-Tory; not a pro-Labour vote. This was the desired outcome of the British ruling class: a smooth handover from Tory to Labour, before the full scale of anger could organise itself into serious electoral opposition. The ruling-class sacrificed the Tories to nip the rising anger of the masses and minimise the protest vote against their entire system. But that is growing.
3. Ongoing political instability will continue. Possibilities for growth of working-class politics are accelerating.
4. Despite heavy promotion of the right wing party, Reform, it remains a marginal force.
5. Despite heavy suppression of the Gaza independents, exclusion of Workers’ Party from mention, and targeting of their strongest campaigns, a strong voice of pro-Palestine, anti-NATO, anti-War voice of British workers was heard.
6. There was very strong institutional (media, council, government, political, state) sabotage of the viable and vibrant Workers’ Party campaigns who stood on an anti-NATO (and therefore anti proxy war on Russia), pro-Palestine ticket. In particular, the candidates Jodi McIntyre, George Galloway, Craig Murray and Chris Williamson’s campaigns.
Halima Nyomi Khan was a very strong anti-Labour candidate in Stratford and Bow, being a young dynamic British Bengali woman and moreover a former prominent Labour Party member and activist of the Corbyn movement, who, having seen that the Labour Party machine and right-wing Labour leadership was actively collaborating with the state to bring down Corbyn (see the CPGB-ML pamphlet The rise and fall off the Corbyn Project), became a prominent ‘Labour Leaks’ whistle-blower, appearing on Al Jazeera’s Labour Files documentary.
She ultimately announced her candidature on the Workers’ Party ticket also and was so strongly sabotaged that no fewer than four ‘independent’ candidates (besides the Greens and Reform) were put up against her – including RMT union leader Steve Hedley who explicitly campaigned against the Workers’ Party as well as a pop-up revolutionary in the shape of the RCP’s Fiona Lali who was parachuted in with full state media backing. This divided the opposition vote neatly, ensuring a Labour win.
7. It is clear that Starmer’s carefully engineered ‘landslide’, will not prevent the anger of the masses – in essence a righteous and anti-capitalist anger – from growing and assuming more cohesive and organised forms. For us, the take-home message of the 2024 British general election was that a strong voice of pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide and anti-NATO resistance was loudly heard. Bourgeois elections are no more than a measure of the maturity of the working class. And by any measure, that maturity is rising.
The anti-communist ‘communists’ of the RCP played their small part in the Labour victory. They loudly proclaimed their “total opposition to the system”, the need for a “revolutionary change” and that such a “revolution” and even a much-needed planned economy but insisted it would “have absolutely nothing to do with Stalinism”, and “absolutely nothing to do with the Soviet Union”, on various GB News Murdoch interviews with Fiona Lali (young dynamic spokeswoman), and Fred Weston (old hand elder from the Trotskyite RCP/International Militant Tendency).
First days of Starmer’s Labour administration
It is noteworthy that in the first fortnight of the ‘new’ Labour administration, Sir Keir Starmer’s first actions were to go cap in hand to see the senile and ageing President Joe Biden, then journey to a NATO summit at which that same Joe Biden made a speech in which he introduced President Zelensky (his Ukrainian fascist puppet) as ‘President Putin’ – and clapped like a seal. Starmer reiterated his intention to reintegrate Britain into the EU (undermine any hint of Brexit and fully reintegrate with the imperialist project), and hugged Zelensky, stating in his first prime ministerial address that his “first priority is defence”, by which he means of course supporting the fascist Ukrainian regime and the ongoing drive to world war with Russia and China. Meanwhile, his new Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, ‘Labour’ MP for Tottenham, David Lammy, was packed off to shake the hand of the genocidal butcher Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, and reaffirm the Labour government’s commitment to the settler colonial state’s abhorrent expansionist Zionist ideology and criminal actions – of course on behalf of Anglo-American imperialism – in the Middle East and reassure him that Britain under Starmer and Lammy’s Labour would oppose any action being taken by the ICC against Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir, prominent leaders of Israel’s genocidal regime.
Meanwhile we have been informed that in the October budget, we can look forward to substantial as yet unspecified tax increases, as well as the introduction of means testing for the winter fuel payment to the elderly. Mostly the tax increases are expected to be borne by better-off sections of the working class, exactly that stratum that most supports the Labour Party. All in all, at the next general election, whenever that might be, we can assume Labour has already lost.
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