By-election triumph for Labour – but Starmer still has a mountain to climb

On the face of it, Labour’s performance in the Stretford and Urmston by-election was nothing short of magnificent. The party achieved its highest share of the vote since the constituency was formed for the 1997 election. The Tories, on a 15.9 per cent share, slumped to far below the consistent 27 per cent or so usually recorded by the party in the seat. Labour’s vote went up by almost as much as the Tory vote went down, suggesting substantial direct switching to Labour. If the Tories were hoping that the low turnout – only 25.8 per cent – might help them, because their voters are more likely to make the effort to go to the polls, they will have been disappointed.

The small Liberal Democrat vote might have been squeezed by a little tactical voting for Labour, though this doesn’t seem to have been the case with the slightly bigger Green vote. Reform UK didn’t advance from the modest showing by its predecessor Brexit Party in 2019, but it probably nibbled a little bit more from the Tories than the other parties. In a seat such as Stretford and Urmston, that obviously isn’t going to change the outcome, but in more marginal seats it might be enough to prevent a Conservative MP from enjoying a further parliamentary term.

So we have a big swing to Labour, at about 11 per cent; the Tories doing broadly as badly as they have been doing lately in comparable seats (Chester saw a slightly bigger swing to Labour a few weeks ago); some traces of anti-Conservative tactical and protest voting; and a certain loss of power for the Tories if the Stretford result were to be replicated in a general election.

However, it still might not deliver Keir Starmer a landslide win – or even much of a parliamentary majority at all. The mountain Labour has had to climb since the 2019 election is of historic proportions. Such was the scale of Labour’s loss under Jeremy Corbyn, and such is the way in which the Conservative vote is more efficiently distributed around parliamentary seats, even a performance as strong as in Stretford wouldn’t necessarily make for a strong and stable Labour government. In the British first-past-the-post system, it doesn’t matter if huge majorities are built up in safe Labour seats like Stretford and Urmston, where a majority of 53.2 per cent merely makes it an ultra-safe seat rather than a very safe seat (with a Labour majority of 32.8 per cent).

If Labour and the Lib Dems benefited from some tactical voting, and if Labour staged a modest comeback in Scotland at the expense of the SNP, Starmer might be prime minister with a majority of, say, 10 or so. That would make him vulnerable to the remaining Corbynite left MPs in his party, and correspondingly more reliant on the Liberal Democrats, SDLP and Alliance MPs from Northern Ireland – and, more awkwardly for all concerned, the SNP Westminster contingent. After a reasonable pause, Starmer might go back to the country seeking a more effective majority, if the polls looked good for him. In any case, it’s a long way away.

For the Tories, almost certain defeat is looming, along with a renewed bout of civil war, creating an opportunity for Starmer to extend his lead in a second general election. The coalition that formed in 2019, of ex-Labour Leave voters in the North and traditional Tories in the South, will be decisively fractured as a result of the government’s performance, the loss of Boris Johnson as a campaigner, and the fading of Brexit as a dividing line in politics. Indeed, the 2019 election already looks sui generis, and the pre-Brexit pattern of British general elections failing to deliver strong majorities for either party looks set to be resumed. The chaos and confusion we’ve seen in recent years might ease, but it won’t disappear entirely.