The outcome of the general election on 4 July was never in doubt: pre-election polls predicted a Labour landslide, the only doubt was over its scale. Winning 411 seats as against the 121 of the Tories represented the high end of the predictions for Labour, an achievement in significant part due to the defection of millions of Tory voters to the anti-migrant Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage and which ran second in 98 constituencies. Defeat for some of the most obscenely reactionary Tory leaders, among them Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Grant Shapps was very welcome: they had been key figures in a venal, mendacious and incompetent government whose racist cruelty towards migrants and the Palestinian people had been boundless. Not that Labour in government will be any different in terms of its racism or overall brutality however, but the ruling class needs a more competent and unified government to address its deepening political and economic crisis.
The scale of Labour’s majority obscures the fact that it received fewer votes than in 2019 when it won a mere 202 seats: 9.7 million as against 10.3 million last time, and that its share of the vote at 33.7% was only 1.7 percentage points higher. Turnout at 59.7% of registered voters was far below the 67.3% of 2019; it was the lowest since 2001 (59.4%). Taking into account unregistered voters, the overall participation rate of 52% was less than in 2001 when it was 54%. Given the well-established fact that the degree of electoral involvement is directly related to income levels as well as age, probably a majority of the working class abstained.
Reform UK may have ended up with just five MPs, but 4.1 million people supported it, far more than the 3.5 million who voted Lib Dem. However, the latter benefited far more from the ‘first past the post’ system, winning 72 seats with a gain of 64 on 2019. The Tories ended up with just 23.7% of the vote, polling 6.8 million compared to 14 million in 2019. There was a substantial and direct migration of support from Tories to Reform UK, and those voters were mainly elderly with a low income – the section of the working class FRFI identified in 2020 as formed politically in the Thatcher years and which then acquired a material stake in the system through home ownership (see FRFI 274, General election 2019: The legacy of Thatcherism for the detailed argument). Thus, according to a YouGov survey, 53% of those who voted Tory in 2019 stayed with the Tories, but 25% went to Reform UK.
The same survey showed that the better-off voted Labour as it won the support of 36% of those in social grade AB, while 27% voted Tory, and a mere 10% Reform UK. From a slightly different angle, 42% of those with higher education level voted Labour, but only 18% Tory and 8% Reform UK. A third measure, household income, yielded a comparable result: 40% of those earning £50k or more voted Labour while 33% voted either Tory or Reform UK. In terms of age:
- 58% of those aged 65 or more voted Tory (42%) or Reform (16%), but only 22% Labour;
- 53% of those with outright home ownership voted Tory (37%) or Reform (16%) as opposed to 25% Labour.
Elderly voters who own their homes outright but who are income-poor, alongside the reactionary petit bourgeoisie, were the backbone of the Reform UK and residual Tory votes. The notion therefore that the working class kicked the Tories out in some kind of active process is nonsense. The triumphalism expressed by much of the left at the result hides inconvenient facts: that a significant section of the working class which retains a stake in the system supported the Tories and Reform UK, while poorer sections of the working class did not bother to vote. With Labour refusing even the minimal step of abolishing the two-child benefit limit to alleviate the poverty of 1.6 million children, why should they? In the end, the real outcome of the general election was the replacement of one racist, imperialist, anti-working class, genocidal governmental party by another.
Robert Clough
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 301 August/September 2024
