Andrew Murray
I don’t think the miracle of 2015 can be repeated in time, if at all. We just had an opinion poll that shows that Labour is now in third place, behind not only the Tories, but also behind Reform UK. Tories and Reform UK, both of them under hard-right leadership, have now got 50 percent of the vote. Of course, it’s four and a half years to the general election, but we’re moving toward a tipping point where Reform UK is going to suddenly become very credible. It will probably be the Welsh elections in 2026 — if it’s not earlier — where they might win a lot of Labour seats, and that will then constitute a sort of breakthrough in credibility.
The situation is so dire for Labour that I’m wondering whether Corbynism was actually Labourism’s last gasp. Corbyn did create a mass enthusiasm around the Labour Party, and in 2017 he got 40 percent of the vote. Since 1970, Labour has got 40 percent or more only three times: twice under Blair and once under Corbyn. That was a huge achievement, it breathed new life into the Labour Party. Starmer has devoted his whole leadership to squeezing that life out of the party again.
Labour is now hollowed out politically. It got elected with a pitiful vote. No British government has ever been elected on a smaller vote share. At the start of the election campaign, I wrote that I bet anyone that Labour would get fewer votes under Starmer than Corbyn got in 2017. But I never thought it would get even fewer votes than Corbyn got in 2019. The vote share was slightly higher, but only because of Scotland where different dynamics applied.
Labour is now having to fight on so many different fronts. There are eighty-nine seats where Reform UK is the runner-up to Labour and sixty where either a Green or an independent candidate of the sort you referred to is the runner-up. In Scotland, it’s the Scottish…
Auteur: Andrew Murray
