Stop pretending you won a landslide victory
Dear Labour Party,
I keep hearing Labour Party supporters lamenting the current state of the party. "I can't believe it's come to this," they say, "only two years after our historic landslide!"
If you carry on pretending you won a landslide victory, things are only going to get worse. Propaganda can be a useful tool in the political game (political messages are, after all, always gross simplifications) - but believing your own propaganda only leads to disaster. If you want to succeed, you have to live in the real world.
Okay, it was a landslide victory at the most simplistic level: Labour won with 411 seats, the Conservatives only managed 121, while the Liberal Democrats succeeded with 72. But, in every meaningful sense, Labour only won because of the state of the other parties: many people didn't vote for Labour, they voted against the Conservatives and Reform.
Labour does not have a 'mandate to govern', except in a technical sense: you only received 33.7% of the vote across the UK, on a 59.74% turnout - just 20.13% of the electorate voted for you. And tactical voting means that some of them didn't actually want to vote for you anyway. You received a lower share of the vote than any majority government since the war. That's hardly something to celebrate.
A 'landslide victory' implies that the people support you. They don't - that is, they didn't at the time of the election, and they support you even less now. You don't have popular support, you have a grudging admission that - at the time of the election - you were probably the best of a bad lot.
The people have not turned against you: they never turned to you in the first place. It is a quirk of our first-past-the-post electoral system operating in a multi-party environment that a large majority in Parliament does not imply any meaningful support in the country.
To govern successfully, you have to take the country with you. You have to sell your policies and decisions - which is an uphill struggle when 4 out of 5 voters in the country either voted against you, or couldn't be bothered to vote at all.
You didn't win the last election - you lost it, but are being allowed to govern anyway. If you want to receive a meaningful mandate in the future, you need to allow the people to express their preferences in their votes, and introduce some form of proportional voting system. No system is perfect, but running the country when 2 out of every 3 votes cast were against you - it is always going to be an uphill struggle.
You were never going to be able to 'stop the boats', but you can make the case that immigration brings massive benefits to the country in many ways, and you can stop harming the country by reducing the number of foreign students who come to study here, and by welcoming the seasonal workers who are needed by several rural industries. You will never beat Reform by pandering to their prejudices, so you need to start explaining more clearly why they are wrong.
You are making life more difficult for yourselves if you think that the electorate has turned against you: most of them were always against you. Your job now is to do your best for the country, tackle the priorities which are most important for achieving the things that you want to get done; accept that some people will never agree with you, and work to sell your policies to those who are willing to be convinced.
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