A Labour landslide, what now?

The ballots counted, the battle lost and won. It was a night of joy and heartache across the UK as constituency by constituency, a landslide majority was won. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party were the long-anticipated winners of this contest, and polling proved to have at least got that part right.

With 35% of votes in this election cast in favour of Labour candidates, the party has secured at least 412/650 seats in the Commons. Having won many seats from the Conservatives in England, and the majority of the SNP’s seats in Scotland, Keir Starmer has the biggest mandate to lead the United Kingdom since Tony Blair’s victory in 1997.

However, this is a peculiar position for a leader like Starmer to be in; his party proving popular on polling day despite record low popularity for himself personally. According to polling company Ipsos, Starmer is as popular as Ed Miliband was in 2015 with the general public – the lowest they’ve ever recorded for an opposition leader whose party was so far ahead in the polls.

That said, polling also tells us that Starmer enjoys greater levels of trust from the general public than his immediate predecessor, the outgoing prime minster Rishi Sunak. Trust is always important in politics, but perhaps more so this time, following a recent period of scandal overshadowing the now-previous Conservative government.

So it’s fair to say Starmer and his Cabinet have a job of work to do to keep the momentum of support they enjoyed on 4 July with them, and they haven’t got time to delay. Their campaign indicated they intend for the Commons to return for a few weeks in July to kickstart a legislative agenda, before breaking for a short summer recess.

Many have criticised Labour’s manifesto for not being ambitious enough; positioning themselves in opposition to many policies of the Conservative government, but not going so far as to commit to reversing them. For further reading, see: the two child benefit cap.

There has been speculation as to whether Rachel Reeves (momentously, the UK’s first ever female chancellor) would bring forward an emergency budget, to really set the agenda for a newly-elected Labour government. However, much of the signalling coming from the Labour campaign seemed to dampen expectations on that, with suggestions that Labour ministers would want to assess the detail on public finances in office before making budget decisions.

This seems sensible enough, but does sound as if the new government is trying to limit expectations of what they can actually deliver (and doesn’t make too much sense, considering all of the information needed is readily available in the public domain). The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) criticised Labour’s fiscal pledges for essentially boxing itself in on tax and spending plans while at the same time promising to improve public services. A significant example of this is in Labour’s promise to cut waiting lists for operations by delivering 40,000 more procedures per week in England – the IFS points out there is no identified additional health spend attached to this pledge.

The IFS has also said Labour’s spending commitments would see a 2.6% cut in public sector investment (building new things) and a 3% cut in day-to-day spending on unprotected departments. To avoid this, the UK government would have to raise an extra £18 billion and £20 billion respectively, with no announced plans on how they would do so. Another fiscal circle for Reeves to square.

Labour have a short window to prove themselves in government, or they may find they’ve had the biggest wedding they could’ve dreamed of, followed by the shortest honeymoon they could’ve feared when it comes to public opinion. One thing is absolutely certain, voters in the UK are volatile – less than five years ago, they delivered Labour their worst ever electoral defeat, now they’ve given them their biggest win in nearly three decades. Failure to deliver could well see a swing back to whatever iteration of the Conservatives emerges in the months and years ahead – or perhaps to a completely new party altogether.

The 2024 General Election was very much was a ‘change election’. Labour’s central message was summed up by the word ‘change’ being their campaign slogan, and it’s certainly change the UK electorate voted for.

But is it change that Labour will deliver in government? Only time will tell.

Lee Robb.

Policy + public affairs strategist.

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