Tory collapse and Reform party dividing right-wing vote gifted Starmer a landslide but fawning media are spinning fall in popularity as master tactics
The fawning ‘mainstream’ media have been spinning Keir Starmer’s landslide win in last night’s general election vote as a masterclass in strategy, claiming that he and his team ‘spread the vote’ across the seats they needed to win.
This spin seems to be a means of dismissing, or usually ignoring entirely, the fact that Starmer’s ‘triumph’ involved the party receiving 600,000 fewer votes than Labour received in 2019, which the media at that time claimed – falsely – was ‘the worst Labour performance since 1939’.
In reality, Starmer was gifted the win by the Reform party standing in seats where the fascist party either beat the Tories, in four seats, or more commonly split the Tory vote and allowed an unpopular Labour candidate to come through on the inside. If you were, say, a security state boss looking to engineer a victory for an unpopular but pliant placeman, this would have been how to do it.
The left, meanwhile, saw a number of notable victories over Starmer’s colluders – four right-wing Labour MPs lost their seats to candidates standing against Starmer’s complicity in Israel’s genocide and other war crimes in Gaza. The Greens, now well to the left of Starmer’s authoritarian and racist project, had their best ever general election performance and now have four seats compared to their previous one, including a stunning victory for Carla Denyer over the awful Thangam Debbonaire. The LibDems, disgraced for their collusion in the first Cameron government – including their betrayal on tuition fees and their boasting of agreeing to draconian Tory benefit cuts in return for a tax on plastic shopping bags – still managed to defeat the Tories in enough seats to increase their MP count to a predicted seventy-one, in many cases also aided by Reform.
Corbyn’s huge victory over his Labour health privatiser opponent and the massive collapse in Starmer’s vote count in Holborn and St Pancras – again spun away or ignored entirely by the ‘msm’ – are a cause for hope and renewed determination by the left to unify and organise against the fascists and fascist enablers celebrating this morning, as it has done this month in France. Starmer’s woeful personal popularity ratings – despite the softest of media treatment since he conned his way into the Labour leadership – are only going to fall as people see the reality of his love for even greater austerity, NHS privatisation and war, and his addiction to breaking promises.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.