Keir Starmer will win, but he's already on very thin ice

A look into the reasons people say they're voting Labour shows that despite heading for a landslide win, Keir Starmer actually has an extremely weak supporter base.

YouGov has conducted a poll of Labour voters to ascertain their reasons for voting Labour, and the results paint a bleak picture of the British political landscape.

As you can see from the graph there were loads of prompts, but several of them amount to more or less the same thing, so we can group them into three broad categories.

1. Not as bad as the Tories = 68%

2. Actual support for Labour (party/policies/leader) = 23%

3. Other (local issues, dislike of SNP, other, don’t know) = 8%

Apparently over two thirds of Labour voters are lending the party support in order to get the Tories out, which means that despite winning a thumping majority tomorrow, Starmer has absolutely no guarantee of longevity.

If we break down the responses that actually amount to support for Labour, rather than opposition to the Tories, things begin to look even more fragile for the Labour leadership.

4% of respondents said they’re supporting Labour for the NHS, but the Nuffield Trust have warned that Rachel Reeves’ myopic penny-pinching is going to leave the NHS worse off than under tory austerity, and Starmer’s dreadful health minister Wes Streeting is already champing at the bit to carve the NHS open for even more privatisation profiteering.

If Labour follows through on this diabolical agenda, it’s likely a lot of these pro-NHS Labour voters are going to be left feeling severely disappointed and betrayed.

It’s a similar story for those saying they’ll vote Labour for "a fairer society", because they’re pro-working class, or because they’re apparently on the side of ordinary people.

They’re also going to end up feeling angry and betrayed when Starmer and Reeves cook up another round of austerity cuts against ordinary people in order to balance the books, because they absolutely won’t countenance removing the fiscal straight jacket they’ve wilfully tied themselves up in, or clamping down on the greed of corporations, buy-to-let slumlords, and the mega-rich.

Of the small minority of explicitly pro-Labour voters, over half of them seem unaware that Labour’s social and economic agenda has veered dramatically to the right since Starmer lied his way into the party leadership, and that there’s simply not going to be any kind of progressive wealth redistribution strategy, or Tony Blair style re-investment in our neglected infrastructure and public services.

If Labour win this predicted landslide just four and a half years after Johnson romped to victory with the biggest Tory majority in decades, it’ll be further proof that historic party allegiances are fading rapidly, and that big wins are no longer guarantees of longevity.

If the overwhelming majority of people say they’re only lending you their vote because they detest the alternative more, and a sizeable proportion of those who actively support you are doing so under the illusion that you’re going to serve their interests, rather than the interests of capitalist profiteers and well-off property owners, that’s actually an extremely weak support base, even if you win by a landslide.

In a political landscape where people are ever more likely to switch their vote, Starmer’s tepid "more of the same" agenda looks a very risky strategy, especially when personal support for Starmer is virtually non-existent (1%), and most of the small minority of explicitly pro-Labour supporters seem unaware that Starmer’s already ruled out doing most of the things they seem to be expecting from a Labour government.

We only need to look at what’s going on in France to see what can eventually happen after liberal-capitalist "centrists" win massive landslides, and then pursue unpopular right-wing social and economic policies instead of protecting the interests of the people who actually voted them into power.

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