What does the success of pro-Gaza independents say about Labour’s victory?

It is the morning after the night before, and the United Kingdom has a new government. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has won the general election in a landslide, securing nearly as many seats and as massive a majority as Tony Blair did with his “New Labour” in 1997.

However, Starmer’s Labour finally gaining power after 14 years of long and overwhelmingly catastrophic Tory rule is not the full story here. As ever, the small print maters and requires close examination.

It seems, Labour owes much of its landslide victory not to the electorate’s embrace of Starmerism, but its complete rejection of the Tories.

Last night, the Conservatives were wiped out – people refused to vote for them, even in some of the seats long considered to be their safest, including the seats once held by former Prime Ministers Theresa May, Boris Johnson,  David Cameron and the shortest-serving prime minister in British political history, Liz Truss.

With Tories losing a shocking 250 seats, many leading Tory figures, including Jacob Reece Mogg, Penny Mordaunt and Grant Shapps have found themselves unemployed this morning. A record 11 former Tory cabinet members have lost their parliamentary seats. It was a total Tory wipeout.

Labour have won a landslide victory, but only about one-third of voters – 35 percent – cast their votes for the party. Their share of the vote in this election is up just 1.4 percentage points, largely thanks to gains against SNP in Scotland, on 2019 and a whole five percentage points lower than what they got under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017.

If the British public rejected the Conservatives in 2017 or 2019 in the same way they did yesterday, Corbyn’s Labour would have secured a victory as big as the one we are witnessing today.

This, of course, is a consequence of the UK’s archaic first-past-the-post electoral system, which helps maintain a two-party duopoly in Westminster and often delivers results not in line with the will of the people.

Despite this broken system, however, voters still sent a clear message to Labour by electing independents.