The official narrative about the UK’s general election 2024, as summed up by outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak during his initial concession of defeat, was that “power will change hands in a peaceful and orderly manner, with good will on all sides”.
We here in Britain hold civilised elections, don’t you know. ‘The people have spoken’ and we respect what they have ‘told us’ with their votes. Our country is stable, elections are won by worthy organisations and people, and those who are elected desire nothing more than to become selfless public servants, acting always under the instructions of the electorate and for the greater good.
That this fairy tale of bourgeois democracy is no longer believed by the overwhelming majority of the British people has long been clear. Not for nothing are politicians and journalists, once among the most respected of professionals in Britain, now the most reviled.
The steady undermining of the system’s credibility in the eyes of the public, as each of its main pillars has come under the spotlight and been found wanting (bourgeois parliamentary democracy, mainstream corporate media, police and judiciary, armed forces and secret services, academia and the scientific establishment … up to and including trade union leaders and the TUC) is a process that has been ongoing for several decades.
The engine that has been driving this train has been the deepening global overproduction crisis, which has impelled the imperialists to unpick the social-democratic peace agreements that were made with workers in the west after the second world war. And the engine was further stoked by such events as the Afghan and Iraq wars, the bank bailout of 2008, harsh austerity, Brexit chicanery, mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic, the inflation (cost of living) crisis and the Ukraine war – all of which have been punctuated by corruption scandals and revelations of lies and criminality of all kinds.
Time and again, ‘our’ politicians and other state officials have been shown to be profiting at the people’s expense and lining their own pockets while serving the interests not of those who elected them but of Britain’s monopolists and financiers.
Today, most British workers view the entire electoral process and all the main participating bourgeois parties with overwhelming cynicism. Even the serious establishment media have been forced to acknowledge this. In article after article, commentators have bemoaned the low turnout on 4 July and worried over the fact that Labour’s ‘landslide’ was achieved with a shockingly low number of actual votes.
Indeed, fewer people voted for Keir Starmer’s Labour party in 2024 (9.69 million) than voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in 2019 (10.27 million) or Neil Kinnock’s Labour in 1992 (11.56 million) – the last two being results that were universally described as ‘devastating wipe-outs’ for the Labour party.
Diminishing engagement – a tale of two elections
When we look not at registered electors but at potential electors, the level of electoral disengagement is even more starkly revealed. According to the Office for National Statistics, there are 53.65 million adults over the age of 18 in the UK today, only 48.82 million of whom are on the electoral register. That means that five million people (nine percent of potential electors) have simply disappeared from official election figures – their lack of participation is thus left out of all discussion of what the polling data might signify.
Officially, the turnout for this election was 59.8 percent, dropping in some constituencies to as low as 40 percent of registered electors. But taking the entire potential electorate, only 54 percent of UK adults engaged with this electoral process – that is, not much more than half. And while Labour gained under 34 percent of the votes cast, it was voted for by less than 20 percent of the registered electorate and just 18 percent of all UK adults. (General election turnout was ‘lowest since 1945’ by Katie Boyden, Metro, 5 July 2024)
This is so far from being a ringing endorsement of either the British electoral system or the Labour party that even the establishment commentariat is showing signs of unease. Indeed, ruling class anxiety can be said to have ruled decision-making throughout this electoral process.
It began with the calling of a snap election by Rishi Sunak, at a moment that was entirely unpropitious for his own party. In a clear sign that the ruling class’s agenda will always trump the charade of party politics, Sunak was responding to ruling-class worries over the rising tide of the Palestine movement, many of whose members have been rapidly educated during the course of the war in Gaza: educated about the reality of the Israeli occupation; educated about the true history and purpose of zionism; educated about the role of British imperialism in the middle east; and educated about the relationship between the Labour party and Anglo-American imperialism and its zionist proxies.
Nervous about the rising demand for independent antiwar, anti-genocide, anti-Labour candidates to vote for in the general election, and already thrown off balance by the success of George Galloway’s campaign in the Rochdale by-election on just such a platform, the ruling class was keen to stop the election of a whole group of similar antiwar MPs to Parliament. As toothless as that institution really is, there is no doubt that the presence of a few sincere antiwar activists could serve to further highlight the corruption and complicity of the mass of parliamentarians and their parties, thus deepening the political crisis still further.
Resuscitating Reform to ensure a Tory defeat
Calling the election sooner rather than later was obviously against the electoral interests of the Tories, who had just received a drubbing in the local elections. But it was especially harmful to the Workers party and independent campaigns, of which there would have been far more (and many more successes) if time had been allowed to them to get organised.
Bearing in mind the fact that Conservative unpopularity was not transforming itself automatically into Labour popularity, with Keir Starmer’s personal popularity not much higher than Rishi Sunak’s, the ruling class also leant on Reform leader Nigel Farage to come back into the ring.
The man known as the ‘leader of Brexit’ was for many years associated with the anti-European Union and anti-immigration UK Independence party (Ukip). In early 2019, he became the leader of the new Brexit party, which achieved a huge protest vote during the EU elections in May that year, then stood aside to allow the Conservative party to defeat Corbyn’s ‘second EU referendum’ Labour in December 2019 (on the somewhat misleading slogan of ‘Getting Brexit done’ via Boris Johnson).
The Brexit party then renamed itself ‘Reform’, and while Farage continued to be associated with the party, he consistently declined to be its official leader or to stand as its candidate in elections.
Without his high-profile presence, however, the party’s mishmash of populist slogans demanding a government that will “stand up for British culture, identity and values, freeze immigration, stop the boats, restore law and order, repair broken public services, cut taxes, end government waste, slash energy bills, take back control over Britain’s borders, money and laws” in order to “secure Britain’s future as a free, proud and rich nation” did not really cut through into the popular consciousness.
Considering the consistent support for Reform’s anti-immigration rhetoric in all mainstream media and via all mainstream parties, as well as the regular inclusion of Reform in media discussions about party politics in Britain; considering the huge mass of angry workers without any constructive avenue for their frustrations and without any decent leadership to explain the real causes of their misery, it is interesting to see how little traction Reform candidates were able to get within the present electoral set-up, regularly polling around low single-digit figures.
With Labour and Starmer deeply unpopular, and with antiwar candidates likely to take a good chunk of Labour votes in many constituencies, the ruling class needed to make sure that the Tories lost as many votes as possible. And so, at the last minute, Farage was persuaded to put his hat in the ring and stand as a parliamentary candidate for Reform in the run-down seaside resort of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex.
The result was an electoral breakthrough for his party, which saw five MPs elected to Parliament for the first time (Ukip famously never won any seats despite winning considerable numbers of votes during some elections). Reform’s overall share of the national vote was 14.3 percent (4.09 million votes).
Indeed, Farage’s party came a strong second in 98 constituencies. Eighty-nine of these were held by Labour, with Reform thus beating the Tories into at least third place.
Electoral politics increasingly distrusted
Considering the huge non-stop campaign that encourages workers to blame all the ills of society on immigrants and immigration, however, this vote share is not nearly as high as might have been expected, given the rapidly sinking standard of living and rapidly rising costs of living that are impoverishing swathes of the British population.
It seems that a lot of poor working-class people simply don’t believe that any kind of a vote in a parliamentary election is going to lead to real change in their conditions of life, and continue to stay away from the polls. The complete lack of engagement in the election in many poor areas of the country was palpable.
Their cynicism is hardly unmerited. Indeed, the skewed nature of the electoral system was starkly underlined by Reform’s own performance. With 14 percent of the votes, they received just four seats (0.6 percent of the total), while the LibDems were awarded 71 seats (19 percent of the total) in return for a considerably lower total vote share of 12.2 percent.
The high proportion of LibDem seats illustrates not the popularity of that party, but the way voters in the first-past-the-post system have been trained to vote against their most hated candidate. In many constituencies, LibDems were voted for not as the preferred candidate but as the most likely to defeat the hated Tories in that particular area (eg, in many rural seats).
As the Times coverage pointed out, Reform lost out because its larger vote was more evenly spread across the country, while votes for the LibDems were concentrated in seats where voters thought they could oust the Tories.
With a decidedly underwhelming 33.8 percent of the vote share, on the other hand, Labour gained an extraordinary 412 seats (63 percent of the total), while the second-place Tories, with 23.7 percent of the votes (ten percent less than the Labour vote), gained just 121 seats (18 percent of the total) – their lowest number in 200 years.
It is worth noting that the combined national vote for the two most despised parties in Britain, Labour and Conservative, which have been alternating between the position of His Majesty’s loyal government and His Majesty’s loyal opposition since 1924, stood at just 57.6 percent – the lowest ebb since the end of the four-year slaughter that all the bourgeois parties (including Labour) championed in WW1.
Sabotage of Workers party and independent anti-genocide candidates
Besides intervening to ensure that a good portion of Tory votes were attracted by Reform, the ruling class also acted in a concerted way to minimise the number of Labour votes that could be taken by the anti-genocide, anti-Labour candidates on the left. The unprecedented demand for such candidates – and the many votes they received – were entirely the result of the militant Palestine solidarity movement that has been marching on Britain’s streets (and occupying university campuses) since October last year, and which shows no sign of dying away any time soon.
As a result of the national media’s assiduous promotion of the Green party as an acceptable and supposedly ‘left-wing’, ‘anti-genocide’ alternative (an entirely undeserved reputation for this pro-Nato, pro-zionist party), and of the almost blanket ban on mentioning the existence of independent and WPB candidates standing on the Palestine movement’s platform, a considerable portion of better-off ex-Labour voters turned to the Green party, which also achieved an electoral breakthrough of four seats (up from one) on 6.8 percent of the national vote.
The Workers party, although unable to stand the number of candidates it might have done later in the year, and unable to meaningfully support the campaigns of most of those who stood, still managed to put up 152 candidates (out of 650 constituencies), who received between them 210,194 votes, some 0.7 percent of the national vote.
This apparently low figure hides the fact that in 11 constituencies, the WPB polled over 10 percent of the vote. In 17 more constituencies, Workers party candidates received respectable votes of between 5 and 10 percent, enabling them to keep their deposits. It is also worth noting that rival (ie, spoiler) ‘independent muslims’ were put up in almost all of the constituencies where the WPB stood.
In several key constituencies, the narrowness of Labour’s victory margin over a WPB or independent candidate (bearing in mind the dirty tricks indulged in by strongly entrenched Labour bureaucratic machineries, which control the ballot counting process) calls into serious question the veracity of the result.
Given the popular nature of the campaigns for Jody McIntyre in Birmingham Yardley (who came 700 votes away from unseating Labour’s despised Jess Phillips) and George Galloway in Rochdale (1,500 votes off from an apparently resurgent Labour), it is not unreasonable to consider that some ballot stuffing may have been engaged in.
The same goes for young independent candidate Leanne Mohamad in Ilford North, who conducted a vibrant and popular campaign against the totally invisible (and arch-zionist) shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, and missed victory by just 500 votes.
Well-known antiwar activist, journalist and former ambassador Craig Murray, meanwhile, who ran on a WPB ticket, was beaten into third place in Blackburn by the vote-splitting activities of a rival ‘anti-genocide muslim independent’ candidate. Adnan Hussain’s appearance on the ballot, and his refusal to agree a method for settling on a single pro-Palestine candidate, bore all the hallmarks of backroom manoeuvrings by the local Labour-aligned establishment, aimed specifically at sabotaging another vibrant and popular campaign in an area where the anti-Labour vote was huge.
Clearly, the prospect of this world-renowned, articulate, knowledgeable and fearless antiwar campaigner in Parliament was not one the establishment relished.
Election 2024 take-home messages
With all the above taken into account, many critical observers have come to the same conclusion: this was not an election that Labour won, so much as one that the Tories lost. This message was underlined by a politics professor quoted in the Metro’s coverage:
“There ‘really is no precedent’ for a party to win such a large number of seats on such a small share of the vote, a politics professor has claimed. Stuart Wilks-Reed, professor of politics at Liverpool University, says Labour’s vote share is more akin to Tony Blair’s third term as prime minister rather than their barnstorming 1997 win.”
He continued: “In constituency after constituency, turnout has fallen, and in some cases dramatically.
“There is nothing in these results to suggest a popular wave of support for the new government. The pendulum has swung to Labour, but almost by default …
“Labour’s victory has not been built on a surge of support for the party compared to the previous election. It has secured its landslide from the damage that Reform has done to the Conservatives.
“Labour’s landslide also comes with signs of trouble in its own backyard. Labour managed to displace George Galloway in Rochdale, but it was a close-run thing.
“Anger over Labour’s stance on Gaza almost certainly explains its defeats in Leicester East and Leicester South.” (Our emphasis)
The ruling class, having pulled out all the stops to ensure a stable majority for the incoming Labour regime may be heaving a sign of relief. They may feel that there are now no complicating parliamentary obstacles to the execution of their programme of increased austerity and repression at home and ever-wider war abroad.
But the real take-home message for workers is that the establishment’s political crisis is deepening by the day. Labour’s majority rests of a set of conditions that may not be easy to replicate. Both major parties of government are deeply unpopular and becoming more so.
Those who have studied Marxism, and especially those who have understood the lessons condensed into VI Lenin’s seminal pamphlet The State and Revolution (1917), already know that elections within the framework of capitalist dictatorship cannot possibly lead to meaningful social change, since they do nothing to remove the real apparatus of bourgeois rule or dismantle the basis of capitalist exploitation (and therefore of rampant social inequality, poverty, crisis etc).
The parliamentary circus is just one pillar of the capitalists’ state machinery, alongside the police and courts, the media and education system, the armed forces and secret services, the civil service and thinktanks, etc. Not to mention, of course, the boardrooms and social clubs where the directors of banks and monopolies meet and do the real decision-making.
These decisions are then handed down to the loyal servants of British imperialism who run all the institutions of the state listed above. Monopoly capital thus secures its dictatorship, and the processes of managing the state in accordance with the will of the financiers continues uninterrupted, no matter who takes up temporary residence at No 10 Downing Street.
But even for those who are not yet aware of the above truths, it is increasingly apparent that the whole electoral process is extremely undemocratic from start to finish – and not only because Britain’s first-past-the-post system renders huge numbers of votes absolutely meaningless.
To start with, the barriers put in the way of working-class candidates are extremely high: a £500 deposit is required for every seat contested, a sum that is totally out of reach of Britain’s poorer workers and which is lost if the candidate fails to poll at least five percent. Then there are the technical barriers and high costs involved in creating literature to be delivered to constituents, and the difficulty in building a machinery of volunteers ready and able to knock on doors for face-to-face canvassing.
Even when these barriers are overcome, during a national election, the narrative is dominated by the national media. And the absolute monopoly of these outlets by the ruling class, combined with the algorithmic controls and shadow-banning implemented by social media platforms, all make it a simple matter for our rulers to suppress information and/or disseminate lies about non-establishment-approved candidates and parties.
And, of course, the ruling class has virtually unlimited funding for putting up spoiler candidates to confuse the electorate and split any potentially unifying anti-establishment vote. A practice it routinely engages in to great effect.
It is hardly surprising that ‘choosing’ between those approved representatives of capital whose funding and party machinery make it possible for them to participate fully in elections makes no difference to the trajectory of government policy. Truly is it said about bourgeois elections that whoever is voted in or out, the ruling class remains in power.
The last 40 years have taught this bitter lesson to the workers of Britain in no uncertain terms, which is exactly why so many have simply disengaged from the process.
Stoking racism to misdirect workers’ anger
As we go to press, a wave of anti-immigrant riots on Britain’s streets is being deliberately stoked up. Social media presenting Britain as being riven by a ‘race war’ is being everywhere promoted and Elon Musk himself waded in, to pour oil on the flames.
Decades of xenophobic rhetoric blaming immigrants for every failing of the capitalist system have played their part in priming the mindset of the goons presently rampaging in towns across Britain. Twenty years of islamophobic hysteria that has accompanied and tried to justify British imperialism’s vicious wars in the middle east have strengthened the hold of this narrative on the minds of the most backward strata of the working class, whose anger at their accelerating slide into poverty has been used to manipulate them into acting as the stupid dupes of the ruling class’s divide-and-rule agenda.
If we look closely, we see two things. The first is that a wider war is being provoked in the middle east at this very moment. If the imperialists and their zionist attack dogs are successful in provoking the suicidal escalation they appear to crave, the ramifications will be global, and the ruling class will have to work hard to sell its narrative of the ‘civilised west’ v the ‘unredeemable other’ if it is to mobilise any part of the home population in its support.
The second, and intimately connected, issue is that Keir Starmer’s government has inherited the problem of a militant pro-Palestine (anti-genocide and therefore essentially anti-zionist and anti-imperialist) movement on the streets of Britain. As has been seen in the case of our own party, attempts to silence anti-zionist speech and criminalise anti-zionist protest using the current legal framework have been entirely unsuccessful using the present legal framework.
The Labour government has clearly been given the task of retooling the British legal system to enable dissent in speech and on the streets to be more effectively criminalised. And it would seem that excuse of ‘fighting racism’ has been chosen as the cover under which to do this – precisely for the reason that most of the British working class is not racist and has no sympathy with the thugs attacking asylum centres and setting fire to mosques.
Keir Starmer’s militant speeches about ‘zero tolerance for racism’ are simply so much dust in our eyes: his real aim is to criminalise the Palestine movement and beat it off the streets.
How well he is able to succeed in this remains to be seen. Four independent anti-genocide candidates were elected to Parliament this July: Adnan Hussain in Blackburn, Iqbal Mohamed in Dewsbury & Batley, Shockat Adam in Leicester South and Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr. None of those elected are known quantities politically and all are former Labour party supporters.
Their number increases to five if we include the re-election of former long-time ‘left’ Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, that mealy-mouthed ‘leader’ of left social democracy and self-identifying ‘friend of Palestine’ who presided over a huge purge of anti-zionist members when he was leader of the Labour party.
While it remains to be seen what use these pro-Palestine MPs can make of their parliamentary platform without a party machinery or a clear political programme, the real significance of their election is that it reflects a significant shift in the political thinking of large numbers of British workers.
On the one hand, the huge rate of abstention (46 percent of UK adults ignored the whole circus) shows that the crisis of legitimacy for Britain’s ruling class and the system over which it presides is growing by the day. On the other hand, amongst those who do still vote, the tradition – amounting almost to a religion – of voting Labour is being broken in section after section of the working class.
Britain’s muslim communities had been some of the few cohesive working-class groups that could be relied on to continue voting Labour en masse, no matter what. That link has now been broken, and there is no reason to think it can be re-forged.
So while attempts to create a racist populist alternative to act as a pressure valve and misdirect the anger of workers have not so far been as successful as might have been hoped, the tide of progressive anti-imperialist sentiment is rising.
Indeed, as the drive towards wider war in the middle east gathers pace, and the British government continues to combine support for war against Palestinians, Yemenis, Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians et al with rampant islamophobia at home, the likelihood is that many more British people – and not only muslims – will join the ranks of those who have already broken away from their generations-deep allegiance to Labour.
How exactly this is expressed in the first instance is not the most important thing. This must be seen not as the end of their political journey, but as its beginning. Whether alienated and disenfranchised workers abstain from voting, vote independent or WPB, or even in many cases vote Reform, what they are showing is their desire for an alternative to Labour that might genuinely represent their needs and interests.
The conditions in which genuine working-class (ie, communist) politics can begin to gain traction in the working class are rapidly developing.
