Morgan McSweeney & electoral myths
The extract below is from a Guardian article assessing the electoral impact of Morgan McSweeney.
The 174 seat landslide in July 2024 was indeed welcome in the sense that the Tories were ejected from office. But as Prof Rob Ford quoted in the article notes the victory was on 33% of the vote. Marginal seats were indeed won but left leaning Labour seats were neglected with polling impacts that can be seen clearly in February 2026.
Labour got more votes in 2015 and 2019 than it did in 2024. Of course under a FTP electoral system its seats that matter more than aggregate votes..
This paragraph has already been called out by Prof David Edgerton (Kings). The ‘unelectable’ hard left in fact deprived Theresa May of a majority in 2017. The authors of the article seem unaware that at the December 2019 Election Farage’s Brexit Party stood down its candidates in all 317 Tory held seats after a deal with Boris Johnson. No such decision was made by Farage in 2024.
Shortly before Christmas 2019, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour had suffered its worst election defeat since 1935. Voters in swathes of the party’s industrial heartlands in the north and the Midlands – from retired coalminers in County Durham to steelworkers in Scunthorpe – had battled the December elements to vote Tory for the first time. Labour seemed lost to the unelectable hard left and some predicted it would never win another general election.
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