Taken as red: how the election was won and lost
Anushka Asthana, HarperCollins, £22
    
THIS is a very well-written and pacey account of the run-up to the 2024 general election. The author, the deputy political editor at ITV News, shows how Keir Starmer and his supporters turned Labour into a party that could win an election. She also shows how the Conservatives — Johnson, Truss and Sunak — threw away the 80-seat majority won in the 2019 “Get Brexit Done” election. She then examines the two parties’ election preparations and campaigns.

There was a huge loss of belief in the Tories’ competence, after decades of austerity, of Johnson’s bragging, Truss’s mini-budget, and Sunak’s austerity. There was also a huge loss of trust because of Partygate. By late 2023, an Ipsos survey found that only 9 per cent of people trusted politicians to tell the truth, the lowest figure in the 40 years that this question has been asked.

As Ms Asthana points out, voters’ primary — and legitimate — concerns included both illegal and legal migration. The Conservative governments claimed they would address this matter, but they failed to reduce the numbers of either mode of immigration. Sunak promised to “stop the boats” in a speech asking people to “judge us on the efforts we put in and the results we achieve.” He failed. Johnson’s points-based system resulted in immigration numbers soaring.

The election’s 60 per cent turnout was the second lowest in any UK election since 1885. 40 per cent did not believe in social democracy. Only the 2001 election had a lower turnout. The two main parties got their lowest ever share of the votes. 

The Labour Party got the votes of just 31 per cent of the electorate. With only a third of the votes cast (33.7 per cent), it took two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons. The Lib Dems, Reform and the Greens all won more seats, as people voted for anything to get the Tories out. 

Except in Scotland, where people didn’t vote for the SNP. Labour gained 36 seats from the SNP, which lost 39 seats in all. The pro-separation Greens put up 44 candidates, who all lost. Nicola Sturgeon had earlier claimed that the 2024 general election would be a de facto referendum on independence. In fact it was, wasn’t it?

Labour’s voter coalition is far more fragile than its majority suggests. Election expert Rob Ford called Labour’s 2024 strategy a “masterpiece of electoral Jenga” in which Labour withdrew the blocks from its safer seats close to the base in order to throw everything at the marginal constituencies to build up the height of the tower.

In office, the Starmer government moved at once to reassure finance capital that it was safe with Labour. In January this year Starmer and Reeves told the World Economic Forum in Davos that the “lifeblood of economic growth is private-sector investment.”

This book shows how Starmer turned the Labour Party into a machine that could win the 2024 election. But he did not turn it into a party that would necessarily win the next election, or a party that could win popular support, and certainly not a party that could possibly start a transition to socialism. The parliamentary road has led, once again, only to capitalism, as it has now for exactly 100 years.