Starmer knows at next election Labour could suffer the same calamity as the Tories
Nigel Farage transformed the election, and he'll do the same to the next one, says Fergus Kelly
Yes, I know I predicted in my final column before our recent holiday that Nigel Farage wouldn’t win his Clacton seat. I might also have erred in suggesting the result would not be as calamitous for the Conservatives as was being predicted.
But despite claims to the contrary, an earlier assertion of mine, made back in March – that a vote for Reform would be anything but a wasted vote – has proved correct.
The political landscape is being reset, but not because of Labour’s landslide. That’s not to say the scale of its victory isn’t remarkable, especially when you consider where we were five years ago. Then, I wrote that the prospect of Labour ever being elected under Keir Starmer was laughable (I really should avoid this prediction lark) yet as recently as three years ago, Starmer himself reportedly considered stepping down after the Tories took Hartlepool from Labour – on a 16 per cent swing.
What has changed since is that those who lent the Tories their votes in 2019 have felt entirely betrayed, and if you seriously believe that’s because the party is insufficiently “centrist”, then you’ve really not been paying attention.
I suspect Starmer, to his credit, knows that next time Labour could face the same fate just suffered by the Conservatives at the hands of Reform, so shallow is his party’s support despite the first-past-the-post voting system’s distortions.
Labour’s vote share was the smallest for a governing party since 1923, lower than when it was led by Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, and even Starmer’s vote in his own constituency fell.
I’d also like to point out that in my last pre-holiday column, I did at least correctly predict the voter turnout would “drop to around 60 per cent – or even lower”. It came in at 59.7 per cent. That’s an awful lot of people too indifferent – or infuriated by the choice on offer – to vote.
I don’t agree with Farage on numerous issues, from PR to Putin (though I can accept his opinion without needing to moronically brand him a fascist), but he transformed the election just gone. And all the signs are he’ll do the same to the next one.
