Boring Labour Party strolled to easy win
JILL BURDALL
UTTERLY bizarre! What a curious election result.
Labour loses over three million votes from its high watermark in 2017 and ends up with a record-breaking landslide victory. Seven years
ago, Corbyn’s Labour polled 12,477,916 votes – a 40% share.
Starmer-led Labour picked up well under ten million, with two thirds of those voting selecting alternative candidates.
This is, without doubt, the weakest popular mandate achieved by a winning party in my lifetime. But, you might ask, hadn’t the pollsters prepared us for this?
Not really ... none predicted such a low vote share for Labour.
Most put the party at over 40% with an outlier or two predicting slightly less. In the event, they weren’t even close, being out by a factor of several million.
And several aspects of the
Lib Dem performance were record breaking. With 72 seats, describing it as a record result for the party is well justified.
But Ed Davey’s reported remarks about his party sweeping to victory in seats from Land’s End to John O’groats is only part of the story.
In post-industrial, left-behind constituencies, the Lib Dems were virtually wiped out, losing a record-breaking number of deposits. Standing as a candidate for the party can be an expensive business, but while they are stacking up votes in the leafy shires I shouldn’t think they are particularly bothered.
Another Lib Dem record: since the Second World War, in terms of vote share, they invariably came third in every general election. Now, for the first time, they were only fourth, polling several hundred thousand less than Reform UK, such has been the unusual nature of our general election. Labour played a boring, defensive game and strolled to an easy win. As they say ... the herd moves in mysterious ways!