Glyn Ford on why Burnham needs to move beyond the tired and feeble fables of Labour’s right
The Labour Right – in particular the Labour Together cult now hiding behind the ThinkLabour rebadging – continue to sell the lie of a Labour landslide in the July 2024 General Election. For them, this is a vital weapon in the internal Labour battle we will be having in the run-up to Party Conference and beyond, determining the future political trajectory for Andy Burnham and the Party. He needs to take back control and revive a Party in the throes of compulsory euthanasia, a consequence of the actions of Wes Streeting and his playmates. A gang capable of stealing 70,000 Party members in scarcely twelve months. Yet there is still a constant drone of self-congratulation about how between 2019 and 2025 they saved the Party from oblivion and engineered that Labour landslide. It’s all Neo-con fairy tales from Morgan McSweeney.
For them, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. Nothing can be changed; everything is fixed, as Labour’s landslide was predicated on a strict adherence to its manifesto’s commandments that promised little and delivered less. The main offers were to do nothing: a triple lock on raising resources with neither tax rises, nor increases in national insurance, nor VAT. There were promises on housing and energy that were diluted down, and pathetic commitments to set a retirement age for Britain’s peers, about as useful in improving democratic accountability as a chocolate teapot in the kitchen. But every proposal that will help ease the cost-of-living burden or improve public services, support manufacturing or protect sites of scientific excellence like Jodrell Bank from closure is waved away by invoking that empty manifesto and its supposed electoral endorsement.
Back in 2024, any imaginable – and some unimaginable – Labour leaders could have beaten the Tories. Fourteen years of rising incompetence, corruption and in-fighting had long made them unelectable, let alone their collusion in a liars” Brexit, while the squalid Tory-Liberal coalition of 2010-2015, that saw Nick Clegg sell his principles for preferment, successfully inoculated voters from venturing there again. The real question is not why Labour triumphed, but why Labour did so badly. The number of Labour MPs elected was truly impressive, many traumatised by victory, but on any other measure than seats won, the result was deeply troubling. In the numbers was a warning not heeded by the Party’s new masters, who gloried in their win and decided to take government out for a spin. They crashed the car into the Winter fuel allowance, Mandelson’s preferment, Starmer’s spectacles and glasses, all made flesh with their negative charisma – the more the voters saw, the less they liked them. They birthed Reform as a threat. Impossible Tories coupled with a newly hated Starmer left voters in search of a third way. In Scotland, Wales and England they found the nationalists. Unfortunately, the last, unlike Plaid and the SNP, have no redeeming qualities. In May, Labour reaped the whirlwind, which hopefully carried away with it the remnants of that cult.
In its history, Labour has had three electoral “landslides”: 1945, 1997 and 2024. Attlee’s avalanche was the best by a mile in terms of percentage vote and turnout. Blair had a bigger majority on a significantly lower percentage vote, while Starmer’s was nothing more or less than an electoral fluke, as you can see in the table. Barely a third of the vote and one in five of the electorate, happenstance gave him a majority of 172. The electorate as a whole gave Starmer 20.1% of their support. In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn – the man Labour Together and Keir Starmer apparently saved the Labour Party from – had 27.5% and even in 2019 beat Starmer’s score with 21.6%. Starmer in 2024 lost more than one in four Corbyn voters in 2017.
Labour’s worst election result since 1931 (30.7%) was in 1983 (27.6%) when Michael Foot was crushed by Margaret Thatcher, with a landslide majority of 144, aided and abetted by the treacherous “Gang of Four”. With no help from the turncoats of 1983, who this time were in the tent, Starmer barely matched Foot’s 1983 support. They were as bad as each other. It was a pathetic tie. Burnham must shake off the burden of the mythical landslide of 2024 and use his serendipitous majority to start afresh on a blank slate. A radical agenda to follow would be the triad of Roosevelt’s New Deal – Relief, Recovery, Reform!