Last Friday, British voters turned sharply against the Tories. Left-wing parties now control the overwhelming majority of Parliament, collectively holding nearly 500 of the 650 seats in Westminster. Labour secured a stunning 421 seats and Keir Starmer is our new prime minister. Meantime, the Tories secured just 121 seats—their worst result since 1761.
But what if I told you all of this represents Britain moving further to the right?
Given the above statistics, you might rightly ask what exactly I’m smoking and where you can get some. But given that the UK has yet to legalise the substances you'd need to smoke to endure what the next five years have in store, I assure you that my conclusion is the product of a very sober reality.
To understand why this is not just copium for the masses bear with me as I explain.
First, the chronology of the last 14 years of Tory governance is best summed up in the words of a now-former Cabinet Minister I spoke to a few months ago. Here’s how he lamented the never-ending stream of challenges that led to this result:
“We were elected in 2010 and we couldn’t do what we wanted because we had to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. We won an outright majority in 2015 and by the following year Brexit happened. We had another election in 2017 and then another in 2019 to sort the mess out. We finally put Brexit to bed with Boris Johnson winning in 2019 and within months Covid happened. We made it through that, just, and the moment we were out of it Putin invaded Ukraine. And now we’re out of time.”
This might sound like excuse making, and on a certain level it is. After all, the Tories failed to deliver on their key election promises like dealing with illegal immigration, cutting legal immigration to the “tens of thousands” (it was 685,000 net in 2023), building more homes and so on. But the minister nonetheless has a point: yanked from event to event, they simply lacked the bandwidth to transform or even improve the country in any meaningful way.
This long-running disaster would explain the popularity of the incoming Labour Party, right? Keir Starmer must now be seen as the exciting alternative poised to take Britain forward into a bright future, right? The British public are surely now lining the streets of London, singing “Things Can Only Get Better” as they did in 1997, the last time the Labour Party threw out the Tories, securing a landslide victory under Tony Blair.
If any of these thoughts entered your head, I’m afraid it is now my turn to ask what you are smoking.
The newly-minted Labour Government is one of the least popular new governments in British history, having secured just 33.7% of the vote on what was the second lowest turnout in a century. Total turnout in this election was 60%. Of the 46.5 million Brits registered to vote, less than 10 million voted for Labour. What's more, Labour actually lost voters from the last election to this one. Yes, you read that right. The Labour Party’s total votes declined by around half a million from 2019 and, remember, they have been in the doldrums for years—their vote share was already extremely low.
In 2017, the Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn lost the election with 40 percent of the vote. So how did Labour secure a stonking majority with just 33.7% of the vote a few days ago? The simple fact is this was not an election they won, it was an election the Conservatives lost. And a big reason why was that millions of the Conservatives’ supporters either did not vote or voted for Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist party. Reform secured a total of five seats, a significant achievement for a new party in Britain’s winner-take-all electoral system.
Farage’s Reform secured 4.1 million votes, the overwhelming majority of which came from the Conservatives. Combined with millions of Conservative voters staying at home, Reform’s strong showing led to the Conservative vote share dropping from 43.6 percent in 2019 to 23.7 percent in 2024.
This modest number of seats conceals a monumental swing away from the Tories, whose voters decided that the center-right party was simply not conservative enough.
How did Reform attract these former Tory voters? By being genuinely right wing. Farage’s Party called for a freeze on non-essential immigration, immediate action on illegal immigration, pro-business policies, tax cuts to get the economy moving, and an end to the suicidal idea we call “net zero” whereby we outsource our carbon emissions to other countries so we can pretend to be green while destroying our manufacturing industries and energy independence.
The country has not moved to the left. Britain now has more of what it has had for over a decade: a government and a parliament that are both significantly to the left of the public. It will now be governed by a milquetoast centrist PM as it was before the election. Sir Keir Starmer is not prime minister because the British people wanted more illegal immigration, crime, and transwomen in women’s prisons. He’s prime minister because that’s exactly what voters got from the Tories—and they wanted to punish them for it.
The country Starmer’s Labour Party has inherited is a mess. We have the highest taxes since World War II; our debt is as big as our GDP; tens of thousands of job-creators are leaving; we have illegal immigration running at tens of thousands of people; and an economic system based on importing hundreds of thousands of low-skilled, badly paid immigrants so we can pretend that our economy is growing. (It’s only growing by 0.7% despite these valiant efforts at cooking the books). Up to forty percent of day-to-day government spending goes on our National Health Service but people are waiting longer and longer to see a doctor. A housing crisis that locks several generations out of ever buying their own home, starting a family or outrunning inflation. Infrastructure that is completely inadequate for our rapidly growing population and crumbling as we speak: I write this from a train that was delayed by an hour due to “sheep on the tracks.” Seriously. “It was a cow yesterday,” the conductor informs me with an unapologetic laugh.
So things are not good. But they can get worse—and they will.
The Labour Party are about to discover that many of the most pressing problems Britain faces are structural in nature. We have an ageing population which not only puts huge pressure on our healthcare system, but also creates the lethal combination of an economy entirely dependent on immigrant labour and a population fed up with mass migration. We’ve got a civil service that refuses to implement the orders of elected ministers (as recent TRIGGERnometry episodes with Steve Hilton, Liz Truss and Rory Stewart have shown). We’ve got ourselves in an economic straightjacket, in which investment in infrastructure, house-building and public services is essential but both taxes and debt are already too high. This is precisely why Starmer followed the “Ming vase” strategy during the course of the election: he said little and promised even less.
It may be that British voters will continue to switch from one ineffectual centrist party to another for decades as they oversee our country’s decline. Or maybe the conservatives will get the message and move rightwards to win back the voters they lost to Reform.
But there is another possibility. If my predictions are correct and Starmer fails to turn the Titanic around in the next five years, this would present one last chance for Reform. Why “last” chance?
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