Some thoughts on the UK General Election 2024

Late last week in my current Hove & Portslade constituency the Labour MP (and now cabinet minister) Peter Kyle was elected with a reduced majority, and the Tories were pushed into third place behind the Green Party, whose vote tripled. In the constituency I hope to move to soon - Hastings & Rye - the Tories lost their majority to Labour.

There is more than one reason for the Labour victory, and the size of the Tory defeat. Firstly the Tory government moved politically from a centre-right coalition with the LibDems in 2010 to a right-wing fiasco under May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak, losing some of its centre-right supporters.

Secondly — and this is important, and will likely be a feature of the next ten years or longer — tactical voting by the left and centre-left (and some centrists) for the left or centre-left candidate most likely to beat the Tories in each constituency, which necessitated a lot of people holding their noses to vote for a party they might not support because the alternative under the current UK electoral system was far worse.

And thirdly, of course, is the rise of the extreme far-right Reform UK party which primarily took votes from the Tories’ right wing, however much the Tories tried to lurch even further to the right to head that off.

I’m not particularly excited by the policies of the new centre-left Labour government, but in my opinion it’s by far the better of the two realistically possible outcomes of this election. I’ve heard various theories that Starmer might shift slightly more to the left now he’s succeeded in getting elected, but I’m not holding my breath as I suspect this is probably just wishful thinking.

That said, the initial indications just a few days in are generally positive: the junking of the Tories’ Rwanda policy on day one, the appointments of James Timpson as Prisons Minister and Patrick Vallance as Science Minister, and the removal of the de facto ban on new onshore wind projects.

The big tests will be on the NHS, Gaza, a nationalised green energy company, climate change, a nationalised train company, housing, and the cost-of-living crisis - but I realise these can’t be simply solved with announcements in week one.

I’m glad the Green Party are gaining support and MPs, providing a progressive left-wing opposition, albeit still small, to any attempt by the new government to veer to the right. This is especially important because of the rise of the extreme far-right Reform UK party, whose racism we will now hear even more frequently. I’m interested to see whether the LibDems have completely discarded their 2010 policy of cosying up to the Tories, — a policy which eventually led to the rapid succession of increasingly right-wing Tory Prime Ministers — and instead will support the more progressive policies of the Labour government, and oppose any authoritarian or non-progressive ones.

Across the English Channel this morning it sounds like the people of France have banded together to force their extreme far-right party into third place in their parliamentary elections, with the left-wing New Popular Front alliance coming first, followed by Macron’s centrist Together alliance.

The defeat of the right in these elections in the UK and France does create a small spark of hope, that thing we’ve been missing for so long, but I suspect it’s just an early win in a much longer war. But hope is an important thing that needs to be nurtured, because hope removes the defeatism that leads to inaction and it allows us to start imagining better futures.

Looking back at the history of the far-right in Germany it was the period from 1924 to 1933 where slowly, over the course of ten years, the fascists rose to power after a series of both political victories and defeats. Now, exactly one hundred years later, we’re faced with a similar scenario.

One thing’s for certain: accomodation and appeasement of the extreme far-right didn’t work a hundred years ago in Germany, and it won’t work in the UK or France (or anywhere else) now.