The UK Votes

Failing systems with silver linings

The UK voted this week for a new Parliament, its first general election since 2019, and a disastrous 5 years for the country that the Covid-19 pandemic at least performed the mercy of making feel slightly shorter by accelerating-cum-stealing two of those years.

The nature of the two elections, however, couldn't have been further apart: 2019 the transformative manifesto of a Jeremy Corbyn-led party befitting the word “labour”; 2024 a changing-of-establishment-guards, with Keir Starmer doing deals across the Murdoch media and billionaire class to reassure those who wrecked the UK that nothing much will change on his watch. Starmer's earnest commitment to the Tory-era spending pledges that first shredded UK social fabric and economic productivity suggests that even in the unlikely event he personally wanted to change anything, he has promised to recuse the Labour Party from any capacity to actually do so.

But none of this is news. Starmer's first service to state power was as Director of Public Prosecutions, where he made sure the Metropolitan Police were excused their execution of Brazilian electrician and Londoner Jean Charles de Menezes. More recent years of opposition saw him whip Labour MPs to abstain in a vote prohibiting Met officers having clandestine relationships with climate protesters, a role in which some officers had - in what were presumed consensual relationships - committed rape against female protesters across the course of many years. Even before he more recently said the Israelis had the right to cut-off water and electricity, and carry out their genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, we knew exactly who Keir Starmer was.

The genocide general election

It is that genocide that set the emotional tone of the election. Gaza now has the largest cohort of child amputees. The UK air force, using UK military bases on the island of Cyprus, is complicit in the bombing itself, while a UK Government has refused to review weapons export licenses to the Israeli entity in Palestine (as they did over the 2014 Israeli attack on Palestinians in Gaza). It may have been a Tory government that led the UK-Israeli onslaught in this regard, but a Starmer opposition offered support rather than confrontation to such illegal and immoral policy, despite a UK public overwhelmingly in favour of a ceasefire, and largely and increasingly pro-Palestinian rather than Zionist.

Such conditions are not incidental to the election that just took place; they represent a failure of the democratic mechanism and its rejection-betrayal by the two major parties. This is as true and important to state as it may be obvious, but it is one of the key failings of pseudo-intellect vanity to refrain from stating the obvious when often that is all that needs to be said. Both the Labour & Tory parties have moreover in their evil made the British public wholly complicit ‐ however unwitting but via our taxes and our military - in a genocide by the Israelis in Palestine. We may not be the infamous ‘only following orders' of Nazi Germany, but we are - however much we may loathe them - only following leaders.

Although the moral implications of this hang hauntingly over the country, they are not what I write about here, which is more a summary of where the election leaves UK politics.

Defiant hope

Despite this background horror, the election results are not without cause for optimism. The Green Party, having adopted a position staunchly in favour of international law and so Palestine, reaped electoral rewards from this and steadfast climate policy, registering a 400% increase in MPs from 1 to 4. Across the UK, in young, universitied and cosmopolitan cities - Bristol to East London, Sheffield to Brighton - the Greens made serious inroads to claim votes that the Labour Party of Starmer has abandoned, while importantly shattering psychological presumptions that Greens can't really win seats. This is quite simply a bedrock for the next election that the Greens could not have imagined gaining and Labour - complacent as they were - did not want to cede.

Equally if not more significant has been the rise of Independent MPs. Alongside the 4 Green MPs are 5 new independents, a number of them Muslim, who ran on platforms specifically outraged by the public betrayal of a morally corrupted Labour Party backing Israeli genocide in Palestine. The ability to mobilise local voting, loyalty to Palestine and public services, and disgust at Labour, has been an astounding success that - much like the Greens - stands only to be built upon. Supposed certainties for top jobs in a Starmer government lost their seats. Others were pushed to within a few hundred votes of defeat and made to look in the eye the loss of cushy careers they'd thought were done deals. Though she narrowly missed out on her seat in Ilford, the standout name is perhaps that of Leanne Mohamad, a 23 year-old British-Palestinian who overturned most of a Labour majority well in the thousands, coming within 500 votes of taking the seat of the now Health Secretary, a known lobbyist for the idea of privatising the NHS and handing it to US sickcare corporations. Similarly, in Keir Starmer's constituency of Holborn & St Pancras, the gently formidable Jewish anti-Zionist, former South African ANC politician, Andrew Feinstein, came in second, taking thousands more votes from the majority of the moral laggard that is Starmer, who in his 2015 election had a majority of 29,000, which has now been cut to 18,000 despite being party leader.

All across the country and such is the pattern; Labour have more seats but everywhere by fewer numbers. The decision of the “Reform" Party to run against the Tories, thus splitting the right-wing vote, is integral to the very superficial victory Starmer has achieved, with little to suggest that he has the moral or intellectual faculties to realise as much.

Perhaps the most important victory of the night went to Jeremy Corbyn, who Starmer in his instinctive and cowardly authoritarianism had illegitimately barred from running - as he wished and was entitled to do - as a Labour MP in Islington North. Corbyn marshalled a phenomenal grassroots campaign to hold his constituency comfortably, despite the resources the Labour machine threw at winning it from him. The result once again was clear statement that, however much Zionists and the Israeli lobby may hate the fact, Palestine - as it also is in the US and EU - is a UK electoral issue. People simply cannot be expected to turn away from a genocide and - in a shift that should worry the Israeli lobby - it is further so that people are coming to associate the violation of their own rights and democracy with the same phenomenon of injustice in Palestine. However different the gravity, it is illustrative that the Israelis wish to annihilate the healthcare system in Gaza while an incoming Labour government looks set to further collapse British access to healthcare.

In some ways the clarity of the moment is in itself a source of strength. However viciously illegitimate the Starmer attack on party democracy and principles of natural justice, the mixture of new Green and independent MPs show that the spirit of people-powered democracy and change that Corbyn's leadership epitomised has found continued political manifestation for itself. It was not in fact snuffed-out as Starmer and his right-wing media friends, and his Zionist aides and donors, had hoped. This is a cause not only for comfort but also some cheer. Moreover, and despite the lobotomy of Labour democracy performed by Starmer, there are many in the party who do not see either politics or power as he does. The authoritarian and right-wing cabal to which Starmer now belongs but - politically unimaginative as he is - has in some ways just simply become captive, are unlikely to perform well at party management as discontent begins to grow.

Underwhelm

And this is in some ways the heart of the matter. Anyone in the UK who has witnessed a decade and a half of Tory austerity (that Starmer continues to back) and almost a decade of Brexit catastrophe (that Starmer continues to back), can see the political disarray, drift and national loss that is now both well-advanced and begging for address. Despite these conditions and associated mood, Starmer's so-called Labour managed only a staggeringly low 1.7% gain in vote share on 2019. The haul of votes is below those totals won by Jeremy Corbyn in both 2019 and particularly 2017. In a symptom of the wholesale and widespread disgust at a UK political duopoly offering no answers, turnout was at its lowest for 20 years. Labour's success is really only a manifestation of the failure-by-design of a First Past The Post electoral system intended to lock-in these very constraints. Only 30% of the electorate voted for Starmer's party and yet it bagged 60% of Parliamentary seats. The representation falls still further if you consider just 20% of eligible voters opted for it. Some of the professional politicos of the Labour Party - a cadre of individual impressive only in their small-mindedness - suggest that turnout is immaterial; the game is to them the game, but it is a colossal arrogance, complacency and harm to presume that a system with no aspiration or expectation of real representation does not at some point break. The vote to leave the EU - widely and probably correctly regarded as a massive act of UK self-harm - was the biggest democratic event in modern UK history, at 72% turnout and coming at the end of a long period of perceived disenfranchisement. Labour have just won on a meagre 59% turnout, and let those who don't believe such systems represent a storing-up of problems enjoy their peace of mind while it lasts. The Liberal Democrats have also benefited handsomely from the system as it stands, taking 70 seats while the “Reform" Party - notionally further-right than either the far-right of Labour and the Tories - picked-up just 4 despite winning more votes than the Lib Dems, who at least to their credit retain an ideological commitment to proportional representation where seats match votes. The Greens too would increasingly benefit from such a system, and the next worthwhile fight in UK politics - against a Tory Party that has lost its ideological or moral compass, and a Labour Party that has shown itself unacceptably susceptible to corporate and lobbyist capture - must without doubt be for proportional representation. That the notionally further-right parties might perform better under such a system is an issue I prefer to trust to the British public to ward against, rather than lock-in far-right politics among the mainstream parties anyway, while creating an aggrieved bloc on the outside of the political establishment that ends up ruling that establishment by its spectre alone.

The results then show something of the road ahead and a way forward. For all that the situation the country was reduced to is dismal, for all that Starmer's Labour fails to grasp or match the scale of the problem, hope does spring eternal, but nor more importantly does it feel unfounded.