It was no surprise that Labour won the snap election on 4 July. Sunak was already "drowned and out" the day he stood in the rain outside Downing Street to make his snap announcement.

    However, it was surprising that Labour's share of the vote was only 34% - which nevertheless gave it 63% (412) of the Commons' seats. It's a smaller vote-share than it got in 2017, when with 40%, it won only 262 seats - and lost the election!

    Yes, such is the absurdity of this electoral system! In fact in 2019 Labour's vote share was just 1.9% less than today, yet apparently, this was its "worst result since 1935"

Actually, abstention won

A more interesting piece of electoral arithmetic, is that 80% of the electorate didn't vote for this Labour government, which nevertheless is firmly ensconced in Westminster. Or to put it another way, only 1 in 5 voted for it. This takes abstentions into account, of course, but that's necessary given that so many working class people made a conscious decision not to vote. Turn-out was the second lowest in a British general election since 1885!

    So, it was "Abstention" which actually "won". But for now at least, there's no party to represent working class "abstention". Shouldn't there be one? We will come back to this point!

    Anyway, a Labour government isn't in power today because the electorate thought it was offering "change". The majority of the electorate just wanted rid of Sunak's government, including quite a few Tories, who voted for Nigel Farage's Reform party, splitting the Conservative vote in a number of constituencies and allowing Labour in... Labour won by default, even if it's not behaving that way.

    Yes, newly-appointed ministers like Chancellor Rachel Reeves, claim they have been "given a mandate". In her case to "grow the economy", but responsibly, of course as the "party of business". And Starmer claims he has a mandate from "all 4 British nations". Except it was Sinn Fein which won the majority in Northern Ireland and it's certainly not affiliated to Labour!

They all govern for the capitalist class

And then, whichever party wins, its leaders claim they will rule "for all of the people" Even the newly-elected president of brutally autocratic Iran, said that's what he'd be doing!

    But how does this "ruling for all" work, in a capitalist system made up, by definition, of two main social classes whose interests are diametrically opposed? Indeed it's a built-in class struggle at the heart of the system! The capitalists only remain in power through deception and force in fact. As Lenin said: the state is "armed bodies of men".

    So no, whether it's Starmer here in Britain, Mélenchon or Macron in France, Biden or Trump in the USA, all of them rule for the bosses, big and small. And for themselves too, maybe.

    It's true that in times of plenty there might be a few crumbs to throw at the working class to keep it quiet. But these times are over; capitalism with its inbuilt tendency to crisis, thanks to the finite nature of the world's resources and the system's competitive basis, is now in permanent recession. There are hardly any crumbs left.

    And this brings us back to the workers in our ranks who already see that there's no point in voting for parties which don't represent their interests... Because what's clearly needed is a party to organise those who see through the system and who are ready to change it. And not via a ballot box, but through action in the workplace and in the street; that is, through social revolution.