The 2024 General Election has been described by the polling expert Sir John Curtise as “the most disproportionate electoral out turn in British history.” The media have tended to report Labour's victory as a landslide. It is clearly in terms of the number of seats that they have won with over 400 and the biggest majority since Tony Blair's victory in 1997 but it is in no way a landslide in terms of the electoral vote. Labour only received under 34 cent share of the electoral vote with just 9.7 million voters voting for them, half a million less than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour one in 2019. With more votes he only got half the number of seats. The turn out was the lowest in recent history with only 60% so Labour's approximately third share of that means that only 20% of the electorate have voted for them and 80% have not. It is therefore impossible for them to claim as they do that they have a mandate to carry out a variety of policies. They clearly have the electoral majority in parliament to be able to do so but they don't have the popular support to do that. What is clear in this General Election is it is not so much about people voting for Labour. As I've explained fewer did than in the previous election but it is about people not wanting to see the Conservatives continue in power after a very mixed record over 14 years with a number of scandals and scrapes that weren't so much to do with policy but to do with behaviour.

The sheer number of parties represented in this election is unprecedented in my memory and there's no question that the introduction of Reform under the leadership of Nigel Farage prevented the Conservatives from competing equally for the leadership. If you combine the Conservatives’ share of the vote at 24% with Reform’s share of the vote at 14% you get more than Labour's share of the vote but Reform’s 14% share was only rewarded with five seats whereas Liberal Democrats with a smaller share of the vote managed to win 71 seats. I think this is not to do with politics but with electoral strategy. Reform is a new organisation with little experience of General Elections and quite clearly had national appeal which they found  more difficult to translate into local victories whereas the Lib Dems were extremely clever in the way they targeted particular seats largely defended by Conservatives and even the one I live in, historically always Conservative, returned a Liberal Democrat candidate who at the local level made a lot of noise but very little intelligent impression.

My own view is that for the good of the country I wish Labour well but I think they're going to find it very difficult. As I've explained they don't really have popular support. To win fewer votes than the extreme left-wing Jeremy Corbyn managed in his two previous campaigns in 2017 and 2019 indicates they have not really won popular support and I suspect most people who voted Labour did so out of tradition without really understanding what their manifesto was all about. If we take some of the key areas of responsibility which with one or two exceptions are now run by Labour MPs who have no previous experience of serving in the cabinet:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is undoubtedly a very challenging agenda and would be for any party coming into government at this time. It is undoubtedly true that the Conservatives have not made the best of the 14 years they have been in power, but I am very concerned about a party having as large a parliamentary majority as Labour has now got. It  can be  considered almost like a single party state that can do whatever it likes but I think it will find that actually it can't and if it doesn't start to deliver quite quickly on the few promises that it has already made it will come under enormous public pressure, not so much from the political parties sitting opposite in parliament, but from highly dissatisfied members of the public some of whom are starting to protest in ways that don't fit with the conventional style of British politics.