IN THE early hours of July 5 2024, the scale of Labour’s landslide election victory was clear. The Tories were massacred, returning a mere 121 MPs — their worst-ever result in history. Labour returned to Westminster with a thumping majority on the scale of 1997. Sir Keir Starmer was triumphant and hailed by all and sundry as a political miracle worker.

The story was even more dramatic given the turnaround since 2019. Under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn Labour had crashed to a heavy defeat that year at the hands of Boris Johnson. Comparisons made with the 1931 election, when Labour won only 52 seats following the split in the party and the election of a national government coalition. The 2019 defeat led to Jeremy Corbyn resigning as leader of the party and all the blame was laid at his door.

While the historical parallel was a popular line with the media pundits and right-wing Labour figures at the time it was profoundly misleading. 

Corbyn won 202 seats, down from 262 in 2017 so the scale was nothing like the 1931 collapse. Moreover, he was leading a party in which the majority of its parliamentary representatives had tried to unseat him and whose central apparatus systematically undermined him, as became evident from the Forde Report. The 2019 defeat was inflicted partly from without by Boris Johnson but also from within by a right-wing “fifth column.”

Nevertheless, amid the unbridled joy of millions at getting rid of a decaying, defunct and disastrous Tory government and the euphoria of party activists who have not tasted the fruits of victory since 2005, such historical contexts are deemed irrelevant, at best, and disloyal at worst. How can anyone from the Labour fold question the brilliance of Sir Keir Starmer and his team and their fault-free strategy for bringing about such a resounding victory?

Simple, actually — because the Starmer victory came about thanks to a grotesquely undemocratic voting system in first past the post. And the narrative that paints it as a miracle of “sensible politics” is based on falsehoods and distortions underlining a sad fact. Truth is not only the first casualty of war, but also a casualty of Establishment politics as well.

Starmer’s landslide occurred during the lowest-ever turnout of voters since universal suffrage was introduced. A mere 52 per cent of the electorate bothered to turn out in 2024. In 2017 and 2019 Corbyn lost narrowly in the first and badly in the second on turnouts of over of 67 per cent both times. The landslide in the number of seats won is not a landslide in terms of popular support. It is a product of an electoral system where the votes of most people simply do not count.

These hard facts mean that Starmer’s narrative of how and why he won should not be taken as gospel. Yet the gospel according to Saint Keir started its narrative soon after he won the leadership election in 2020. It began with him determined end the inclusivity that had been present during the Corbyn years. He sacked his rival for the leadership, Rebecca Long Bailey for the crime of sharing a post that denounced the Israeli secret services. Then in October he took the whip off Corbyn himself for the crime of claiming that the charges of anti-semitism against him had been overstated for political purposes.

Under the pretext of rooting out anti-semitism, Starmer — the man who later defended the right of the Israeli state under the despicable leadership of the racist Netanyahu to cut off food and water from besieged Palestinian civilians — set about neutering the left of the parliamentary party to ensure that it could not present any future challenge to his leadership.

The gist of his narrative really took root following the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021. Unimpressed by Starmer’s failure to effectively challenge Boris Johnson’s disastrous and chaotic handling of the Covid pandemic, the voters in this north-east Labour stronghold returned a Tory for the first time ever.

At this point Starmer changed gear. He announced his mission to purge the party not simply of its recalcitrant members but also of its established policies and values. He surrounded himself with many of the apparatchiks who had drawn their salaries from party funds while sabotaging its efforts in the two previous elections. He appointed the dark lord of the right, Peter Mandelson, as his consiglieri. 

The Tory groupie Laura Kuenssberg, then the political editor of the BBC, rightly predicted: “But if anything, expect Starmer’s team to make the case more aggressively that the party needs to change. Don’t be surprised if there is a reshuffle, and a punchier approach to his critics on the left on the other side.”

And so it came to pass. The Starmer gospel became scripture. It states that following the destruction of the Labour Party at the hands of the false prophet, Corbyn, he arrived as its saviour by bringing about a fundamental change. Change was his mantra.

He changed the party’s policies, its personnel and a good few of the candidates for the 2024 election. The left was marginalised, many were purged. Labour was to be a “professional” party bedecked in the Union Jack, patriotic and business-friendly. Right-wing renegades who merrily sabotaged the party’s past efforts to win elections were welcomed back into the fold, despite in some cases having stood against Labour in 2019.

Victory was only possible through “change” and change meant jettisoning past promises, past policies and past people. This is the word of Starmer — praise be to Starmer.

The scale of the parliamentary majority that Starmer won lends this entire narrative credence. But the scale of voter apathy and the less than impressive voting support for Labour mean that any honeymoon is likely to be short-lived. The more that Starmer’s government demonstrates its inability to offer real change, the more its chances of securing a second term diminish.

And even this soon in, that inability — or more accurately unwillingness — to offer immediate change is becoming apparent. The suspension of the whip to seven Labour MPs who voted to abolish the cruel two-child benefit cap, the scrapping of winter fuel allowance payments, the blanket refusal to consider increasing taxes on the rich and the corporations, are pointers.

The less Reeves and Starmer offer, the more they allow the country to suffer. The noises coming from Rachel Reeves and the Treasury sound worryingly similar to those that George Osborne and David Cameron made to justify their ruthless austerity drive. And the more she and Starmer bleat on about adhering to the arbitrary Tory “fiscal rules” the greater the danger that millions will despair.

And despair will feed the growth of the far right. As everyone knows Britain is a broken country — public services cut to the bone and in disarray, the NHS reeling from crisis after crisis, manufacturing output down and declining, minimum-wage jobs the only show in town and benefits and pensions driving more and more people below the poverty line.

In Parliament disappointment in a Labour government’s inability to make real changes to people’s daily lives will be a gift to Reform and help revive the fortunes of a right-wing-led Tory Party in Parliament.

And on the streets disillusion and despair will — as the astute thug Yaxley-Lennon knows full well — swell the ranks of the fascist street gangs, just as it did during the wage-cutting years of the Wilson and Callaghan government in the 1970s. Then it was immigrants who became the scapegoat used to divert people from the real enemy. Today, as the events since the tragic murders of the young girls in Southport demonstrated, Muslims, refugees and asylum-seekers are the target of the hate merchants. 

Neither of these outcomes are inevitable. But to see off the right, in all its forms, the new Labour government needs to carry out real change, acting — as Corbyn rightly said — for the many not the few.

Mick Whitley is former Labour MP for Birkenhead.