First, some facts: 

• Two-thirds of voters voted against Labour.
• 80% of the total electorate did not vote for Labour.
• Labour’s vote share (34%) was far below the 40% they achieved under Corbyn in 2017. 
• Labour got 600,000 fewer votes than in 2019, but this resulted in a 1.6% higher vote SHARE due to the dramatic drop in turnout. This increase in vote share since 2019 was entirely due to their 17% increase in Scotland. Labour’s vote share flatlined in England and dropped 4% in Wales. 
• Labour’s vote share as a proportion of TOTAL electorate (ie as a proportion of everyone ELIGIBLE to vote, even if they didn’t actually do so) is the lowest it has been in the last three elections: 
  • 2017 = 26.5%
  • 2019 = 21.6%
  • 2024 = 20.2%
• The combined Tory-Labour vote share (58%) is likely the lowest ever. 
• In all 171 seats lost by the Tories, the combined Tory-Reform UK vote share was higher than Labour’s vote share 
• Five independents were elected, the most since 1950 
• George Galloway’s Worker’s Party failed to win a single seat (although they secured over 210,000 votes, more than the DUP (who got five seats) and roughly equal to Sinn Fein (who got seven seats)). 
• Turnout (60%) was the second lowest in modern history.

And four thoughts: 

1. There is no future for the Conservative Party without Nigel Farage 

If the Tories want to win again they need to get those Reform votes back. Johnson showed this could be done without Farage. But those were in very special times, with Corbyn and Brexit. Those times are not coming back. Now Reform UK are winning seats, the dam has broken. Reform UK now have the power to offer a deal to the Tories to form a coalition and eventually, one way or another, the Tories will have to take it. This means the Tory party will have moved permanently to an overtly far-right migrant-baiting party. Their only other option is to take Farage out tbh. 

2. The far right have a strategy and play a long game which the radical left seem incapable of 

It was always clear that Reform UK was going to split the Tory vote and deliver a big win to Labour. Various Tory papers warned of this and that’s exactly what happened. But Reform’s leaders don’t care about that. Their long game is precisely to facilitate this outcome (Tories losing to Labour) in order to use that as leverage to take over the Tories (as outlined in point 1 above!). They are loyal to their politics (of migrant-baiting white nationalism) rather than to the Tory party as an organisation.

The Corbynite left, however, are loyal, not to their proclaimed politics of liberation and empowerment, but rather to the Labour party, in whatever guise. Corbyn stayed loyal to Labour throughout the years of genocidal warmongerer Tony Blair, and had to be dragged out of Labour kicking and screaming even after the party had done a hatchet job on him personally. He could have initiated a new grassroots party after the 2019 election (or indeed long before) but the accusations of ‘splitting the vote’ and ‘letting the Tories in’ would never allow him to do that. The result is a total capitulation to the warmongering-austerity-privatisation Labour right and a landslide victory for the politics Corbyn claims to oppose. 

3. British citizens (of all political and demographic backgrounds) generally do not care about genocide 

With the exception of Corbyn’s Islington North, all the seats won by pro-Palestine independents were in constituencies where more than 10% of the voters are Muslim. In those constituencies, Labour’s vote share dropped by an average of 11%. In other words, with a very tiny handful of exceptions, it is only Muslims who care enough about genocide to actually vote against it en masse. This once again demonstrates the overwhelming commitment to colonial politics of white voters across the political spectrum. In times of crisis, this commitment to colonial politics means commitment to overt genocide and fascism. 

I should add here that even the majority of Muslims with British citizenship privilege do not care about genocide enough to vote against it – 60% of British Muslims voted Labour (down from 80% in 2019) 

4. The electorate increasingly don’t care about which tweedledee-tweedledum party is in power 

That 42% of voters voted for third parties (or independents) in a two-horse race is, in a way, quite incredible. Combined with the fact that 40% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote at all, that means a huge majority of the electorate (two-thirds in fact) are not willing to take part in the charade of voting for the so-called ‘lesser of two evils.’ The system is in a deepening crisis of legitimacy, where two-thirds of the electorate are refusing to use their democratic right to choose between a Labour and a Conservative government. However, due to the basic colonial structure of the British economy, and the colonial culture of British politics, it will be, as we have seen, the far right who pick up the pieces of this fallout far more than the radical left.  

(There is arguably a contradiction between my points 3 and 4 above – which is that, two-thirds of the electorate DIDN’T vote for either of the two explicitly pro-genocide parties. However, neither were they, in the main, willing to vote for explicitly ANTI-genocide parties or candidates. The fate of the Worker’s Party, under the leadership of the most well-known and articulate anti-war politician of modern times, is particularly revealing).