THE ECONOMIST: How shallow was Sir Keir Starmer and Labour’s victory in UK election?

The labour party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, scored a resounding victory in Britain’s general election on July 4th.

Its majority is the largest won by any government since 1997.

The party flipped seats in all corners of Britain, defeating Conservative candidates in constituencies that had been blue since the 19th century.

Yet this was not a popular triumph. In absolute numbers, the party attracted fewer ballots than it did under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.

Labour’s share of the vote, at 34 power cent, is the lowest level for a governing party since at least the First World War.

Instead of inspiring the masses, Sir Keir spearheaded a fearsomely efficient election-winning machine: It won 42 seats in Parliament for every 1m ballots cast, higher than any other major party in the past century.

As a result, some argue that this was a shallow victory, even a hollow one. That goes too far.

It is true that Labour’s victory was as much the Conservatives’ defeat.

The Conservative vote collapsed by 20 percentage points, the largest decline by any governing party in British political history.

Voters abandoned the party in all directions—not just for Labour but for the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK and the Green Party.

(Plenty also stayed at home: fewer than three-fifths of eligible voters turned out to vote, the second-lowest turnout in the past century).

Yet the implication of voting for other parties—ie, a victory for Sir Keir—was clear before the election.

The Conservatives themselves hammered home the message that a vote for Reform UK or the Liberal Democrats would result in a Labour “supermajority”. Voters plainly thought this was no bad thing.

The Conservatives lived by first past the post, now they had to die by it.

The Liberal Democrats, led by Sir Ed Davey, took 60 seats held (notionally, since electoral boundaries had been redrawn) by the Conservatives.

The party increased its representation in the House of Commons from 11 seats in 2019 to 72, its largest haul since 1923.

Seats in which the LibDems were competing against the Conservatives saw substantial tactical voting to oust the governing party.

In these seats the Tories’ vote share fell by an average of 24 percentage points, while that of the Lib Dems increased by 12.

The Conservatives only managed to cling on to 20 of the 79 seats where the Lib Dems were their principal opponents.

Reform UK, a Eurosceptic and anti-immigration party led by Nigel Farage, was the biggest beneficiary of the Conservative collapse in terms of vote share.

Reform UK achieved 14 per cent of the vote nationwide, up by 12 points compared with the Brexit Party, as Mr Farage’s vehicle used to be known, in 2019.

That was a greater share of the vote than the Lib Dems (on 12 per cent), though it translated into 67 fewer seats than Sir Ed’s party.

The Green Party attracted nearly 7 per cent of the vote nationwide and won all four of the seats it was targeting; quadrupling its representation in Parliament by taking one seat from Labour and two from the Conservatives.

The party must now tie together a disparate base of voters from progressive constituencies in Brighton and Bristol with the green-wellied former Tories in Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire.

The election did not go entirely to plan for Labour.

The party lost seven seats in total, including two seats held by members of its prospective cabinet.

There was a sizeable backlash among Muslims over Labour’s stance on Gaza.

The party lost one percentage point from its vote share in constituencies that it held (notionally) for every 500 or so Muslim constituents.

Four seats were lost to pro-Gaza independents, while a fifth was lost to Mr Corbyn, a veteran campaigner on the Palestinian issue who was running as an independent in his north London constituency.

Labour also performed poorly in seats with large Hindu populations, which may reflect the one-off effect of Rishi Sunak’s premiership or longer-term shifts in Hindu voting patterns.

The Conservatives’ sole gain in the election was in Leicester East, the constituency with the highest proportion of Hindus in the country.

Taken together, the results show the fragmentation of the British party system.

After this election, the electoral map will be less dominated by Labour-v-Conservative races.

In 92 of the country’s 650 constituencies, Labour and Reform UK were the two largest parties; in 84 the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives came first and second; in 41 Labour and Green; and in 41 Labour and the Scottish National Party.

For both of the larger parties this poses a challenge.

The Conservatives will face the temptation to try and colonise the Reform UK vote rather than the harder task of converting Labour voters over to their corner.

Already, the “lego brick” analysis has surfaced: if the Conservatives only stick the Reform UK vote on top of their own, they can win again.

That would be an improbable feat, given how much Reform UK voters dislike the Tories. It would also risk further eroding their position among moderate voters.

Even if the Conservatives win every Reform UK voter back, they would be facing a bloc of voters that outnumber them and have shown their willingness to vote tactically.

As for the new Labour Government, political opponents from both the left and the right will be trying to score points against it.

Jittery Labour MPs will fear challenges from the Green Party, Reform UK or independents in the mould of Mr Corbyn.

Here, Labour should learn the lesson of its victory and of Conservative defeat: that nothing matters more than competence.

The best way to unite a diverse electoral coalition is to govern well.