Houses of Parliament Original image by Maurice published under Creative Commons License

Election – threats from the right, big new chances for the left

The General Election highlights the gradual decay of mainstream parliamentary politics. Farage is seeking chances for the far right to build – but there are successes and opportunities for the left here too. Colin Wilson provides an analysis, including the unreported detail of successes for a new kind of left.

One thing commentators are saying about the election is actually true – that this was a catastrophe for the Tories. They have won their smallest number of seats on record. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss is no longer an MP – and neither are Jacob Rees-Mogg, Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt and over 200 more Tories. Partygate, the fifty-day Truss premiership, seven million people on hospital waiting lists and years of incompetence, corruption and contempt for workers have seen them humiliated. With right-winger Kemi Badenoch the bookies’ favourite to replace Sunak, they seem set to continue with the same politics that have brought them disaster.

The second thing we’re told about the election is that Keir Starmer has brought about a miracle in rescuing the Labour Party after the disaster that was Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, Labour have won the election with 9.7 million votes, fewer than the 10.3 million it won under Corbyn five years ago. Labour’s share of the vote rose by only 1.6 percentage points on a low turnout of under 60 percent, the second lowest ever – the Tories’ undemocratic voter ID rules adding to widespread disillusion at the choices on offer. Labour didn’t win the election so much as the Tories lost it, the right-wing vote split between them and Reform. As YouGov reported the day before the election, the overwhelming reason people gave for voting Labour was to get the Tories out – only one person in 20 said they did so because they agreed with the party’s policies.

The real story of the election is one of increasing instability and polarisation, with opportunities for both right and left. The Tories, traditionally the party supported by big business and state institutions, have lost that support – business paper the Financial Times called for a Labour vote, while the Tories increasingly represent an aggrieved layer of the “petty bourgeoisie” such as small business owners. Labour was founded as the political voice of trade union leaders. But now election campaign donations from unions such as £1.5 million from UNISON are outweighed by support from business people. Lord Sainsbury gave £2.5 million. Gary Lubner, a supporter of Israel with links to a family firm which profited from apartheid in South Africa, donated £900,000. Hedge fund manager Martin Taylor donated £700,000.

Both parties are drifting away from the support bases that have sustained them for a hundred years or so. You see that if you look at the share of the total vote won by the three main parties – in 1997, it was over 90 percent. This year it was just under 70 percent. New political forces are moving into the gap that creates, from both the left and the right.

On the right, there’s Nigel Farage’s Reform. They won 14.3% of the votes, more than the LibDems. In many Labour seats they came second or third. Purely in terms of numbers, this is not that big an advance compared with Farage’s last real national campaign, with UKIP in 2015, when the far right also beat the LibDems with 12.6% of the vote. But the fact that Reform now have five MPs, and the far right are on the advance from France, Germany and Italy to the US, mean that they will by regarded by the media as a serious and credible party.

Farage – a skilled and intelligent operator – will seek to legitimise an increasing level of racism, transphobia and other hard right ideas. The Tories will go along with them, and we’ve seen during the election how little Labour will push back to defend migration or trans rights. If Labour disappoint voters – and analysts agree that the economic growth on which their plans depend may not appear – Farage is betting that people will turn to him in desperation. The volatility at the polls which gave Johnson an 80-seat majority in 2019 only for the Tories to collapse in 2024, Farage hopes, will raise him up in 2029 to become Leader of the Opposition or even Prime Minister. We have to be clear that’s a possibility. After all, in both Italy and France, we’ve seen disappointment with centrist, technocratic governments lead to the growth of the far right – the same can happen here.

But the instability of parliamentary politics opens up chances for other political forces as well, including the LibDems, Greens and the left. The Tory collapse has boosted the LibDems, despite their election campaign centring on photo opportunities of their leader rather than their actual policies. The Greens have had a major success – their vote has doubled in England and Wales, and tripled in Scotland – and they now have four MPs instead of one. In Bristol Central they unseated shadow cabinet minister Thangam Debbonaire, and they came second in forty seats, typically in urban areas where Labour won. Many people on the left will have voted Green, appalled by Starmer and drawn to Green positions such as calls to suspend arms sales to Israel, tax the rich to fund the NHS and to support trans people. In my own constituency, Croydon West, the Green candidate was non-binary. In Birkenhead, the Green candidate was Jo Bird, previously on the left of Labour and expelled after she criticised Israel.

But the Greens aren’t consistently left-wing. In rural areas where they needed to beat the Tories to win, the Greens stressed quite different issues – if you watch Adrian Ramsey’s message to his new constituents after he was elected MP for Waveney Valley, there’s no mention of Gaza or trans people. If the Greens are to be a genuinely left-wing force, they need to raise the same issues everywhere – if they aren’t to become green-tinged versions of the opportunist LibDems, who talk left or right depending on what gets them elected.

In Scotland – the electoral map appears to have reverted to the pre 2014 referendum status quo, with Labour dominating the central belt from Glasgow to Edinburgh. But Labour’s new strength has shaky foundations. Their increased vote reflects disillusion with the SNP and a desire to get rid of the Tories rather than positive support. In North East Scotland, where Labour wasn’t going to win, the SNP did relatively well. Overall, much of the Tory vote went to Reform even though they barely had any campaign on the ground. The successful Labour candidates are heavily skewed to the right and those elected include figures prominent in the ‘Better Together’ campaign from 2014. Independence will remain a faultline in Scottish politics.

In Wales, the Tories lost all their seats, and Plaid Cymru, campaigning to the left of Labour, did better than expected with four seats.

Crucially in England, the election has seen a breakthrough for candidates left of Labour. Jeremy Corbyn scored a comfortable victory in Islington North, winning 49 percent of the vote against 29 percent for the Labour candidate – who has made millions from running private healthcare companies. Four other independent MPs have been elected on platforms which include support for Gaza but which, typically, also reflect disillusion with Labour’s record on public services. Shockat Adam, for example, unseated Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester after campaigning around Gaza but also the NHS and opposition to the two-child benefit cap. A recurring theme is that Labour are vulnerable if they assume left voters have nowhere to go and dodge hustings and press interviews.

As well as these victories, left-of-Labour candidates who had local roots and ran real campaigns often mounted credible challenges to Labour and came second – something we’ve never seen before on this scale. Anti-austerity, pro-Gaza candidate Andrew Feinstein came second in Starmer’s constituency with 19% of the vote on a programme including rent controls, an end to NHS privatisation and divesting from fossil fuels. Widely loathed Labour right-winger Wes Streeting – now Health Minister – saw his majority in Ilford North reduced from over 5,000 in 2019 to just 528 by Leanne Mohamad, who campaigned around Gaza, the NHS and education.

In West Ham, Sophia Naqvi – an anti-war candidate, formerly local Labour women’s officer, who resigned from the party over Starmer’s stance on Gaza – came second with 20 percent of the vote. Former Labour member Tahir Mirza came second in East Ham after campaigning on issues including the NHS and housing costs, with 18 percent. Noor Begum was runner-up in Ilford South with 23 percent, her campaign also focussing on the NHS and affordable housing as well as Gaza.

Longstanding left activist Salma Yaqoob comments that “there had been a revolt in Birmingham”, citing four local constituencies where Labour came under threat as well as one where they actually lost. Left candidate Michael Lavalette came second in Preston with 22%.

This is historically unprecedented – it’s worth bearing in mind that, so far this century, only one left-of-Labour MP had been elected, George Galloway for Respect in 2005. Now left-of-Labour politics are on a much bigger scale. We’ll need to push for this to be recognised – the pro-Gaza, anti-austerity MPs plus the left Greens actually outnumber Reform, but it’s Farage whose voice will be heard on the media as representing something new and interesting. It will be crucial to push back against the right-wing claim that what we’re seeing is “communalism”, Muslims voting along religious lines. It’s true that for many Muslim voters Gaza was a tipping point. But Gaza is by no means a Muslim-only issue, and it came on top of concerns like housing and the NHS that most working class people share. What’s more, left candidates did well in constituencies from Holborn to Preston which don’t have big Muslim populations.

This is not to say that there aren’t issues to discuss, or to say that a new left can emerge without problems or contradictions. The new anti-war MP for Birmingham Perry Bar, Ayoub Khan, was a LibDem councillor for several decades. Several candidates who did well in Birmingham – including in Yardley, where Labour’s Jess Phillips came within 700 votes of losing her seat – were candidates for the Workers Party, which is good on Palestine but reactionary on many other issues.

But the politics of these new political forces are overwhelmingly to the left. This is a movement which represents millions of people who have marched for Palestine, who supported the pay strikes and want action on the NHS. They can be won to adding climate and support for trans people to that agenda. There is potential for this to be the start of something very much bigger. With the far right also on the rise, we must ensure it’s only the beginning.