The Irish Times view on the UK election: Keir Starmer’s historic victory

Keir Starmer’s remarkable 238-seat Commons majority for Labour, achieved on just over a third of the vote (34 per cent), marks an historic turning point for the United Kingdom after 14 years of increasingly chaotic and unpopular Conservative rule.

The scale of Labour’s victory owes as much to the peculiarities of the electoral system as to any huge groundswell of support. The election has produced the most distorted result in recent history in terms of the mismatch between the share of the vote and seats won.

The lottery that is the first-past-the-post system allocates MPs in an egregiously disproportionate manner. While its seats more than doubled from 201 to 412, a little less than the 419 seats it won in 1997, Labour’s share of the national vote barely increased at all. Its seat surge was almost entirely the product of the erosion of the Tory vote by Reform, the insurgent former Brexit Party. In truth ,the election was lost by the Tories, the electorate determined to see their back.

In over 170 of the lost Conservative seats, the Reform vote was greater than the margin of the Tories’ defeat. Just as it is good to see the back of the Conservatives after a decade which has set Britain back in so many ways, the strong Reform vote carries some warning signs. The electorate is volatile, unsure who it can trust. British politics has been damaged in recent years, and while Starmer makes the right noises about regaining trust, achieving this will not be easy.

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A real change in the political landscape and its dynamics, despite its modest Commons presence, is Reform’s success in passing out the Tories in many constituencies. The party will now be Labour’s main challenger in many seats, and its success may pull the disoriented Tories further to the right. In Scotland, Labour’s effective demolition of the SNP is likely to push back any further talk of independence.

Starmer’s challenge now in undoing the damage done by the Tories will not be helped by a campaign whose limited ambition was framed by a determination to cast the party as economically responsible and its acceptance of spending and fiscal limits set by the outgoing government. Desperate to manage expectations while vaguely promising “change”, the new prime minister will take office with his hands tied behind his back.

His position is not as strong as it looks, facing a volatile and fed-up electorate. To confront Britain’s problems he must be prepared to take difficult decisions, while having the political craft to take voters with him.

Labour may gain for now simply by not being the Conservative Party. The chaos of recent years will be no more. But this will not be enough. The honeymoon will be short. Starmer must work quickly to deliver real improvements in areas that affect people’s lives.