A historical perspective on Labour's electoral performance

Having looked at the electoral experience of some of our near neighbours in order to begin to think about the reasons for our election defeat last Thursday, I also thought I should try to get a bit of recent historical perspective.

The evidence is easy to access from an authoritative source.

Our vote share fell very sharply, from 40% in 2017 to just over 32.1% in 2019 (and that comparison causes me to reflect that any explanation of the latter result which is to be persuasive needs also to be able to explain the former).

This was the largest fall in our share of the vote since 1983 (when we gained just 27.6% of the vote, compared to 36.9% in 1979). The factors accounting for the recent decline in our support are of similar magnitude (in terms of their impact) to the factors which produced that historic decline – but of course that does not mean that they are the same factors, or even that they have any great similarity.

Our 2019 result gave us our least number of MPs since 1935, but the vagaries of the electoral system means that yardstick somewhat exaggerates the scale of our defeat, since our vote share held up better not only than in our defeat of 1983 under Michael Foot (27.6%) but also than in 2010 under Gordon Brown (29.0%) or in 2015 under Ed Miliband (30.4%).

The 2019 result was bad, it was a defeat – and we face up to five years of a horrendously reactionary Tory Government because of it. However, the scale of our defeat in 2019 is marked very much by the contrast with the comparatively good result of 2017. If that had never happened, we would now be remarking that, under Corbyn’s leadership we had added 1.7% to our 2015 vote share, just as in 2015, under Ed Miliband, we had added 1.4% to our 2010 vote share.

Looking back at a number of election results in this way it becomes clear that any useful explanation of the 2019 election result needs also to explain other recent results – and also that we need to account for the performance of other parties as well as Labour. Under Boris Johnson, and pressing for the hardest of hard Brexits, the Tory Party gained their biggest share of the vote (43.6%) since 1979.

Very little of the instant punditry which abounds online as well as in the “mainstream media” seems to be making any attempt at such a useful explanation.