As the results started coming in from the British general election last night, the Scottish Labour politician Jim Murphy made a telling remark. Murphy, who led the Labour Party to a crushing defeat in Scotland back in 2015, was delighted to see the Scottish National Party (SNP) perform so badly this time: “Not only have they lost votes to Labour directly, but they lost votes to nonvoters. And in politics, it’s much harder to reenergize people who have left and gone to be nonvoters.”

Murphy could hardly conceal his excitement at the thought of people disengaging from electoral politics altogether. His party has now been carried to the heights of power on a tidal wave of apathy. At 60 percent, turnout was down by more than 7 percent from the last election, in 2019. It’s one of the lowest figures on record since Britain adopted universal suffrage.

The absolute number of votes cast for Labour was lower than it was in 2019. If we take account of the fall in turnout, Keir Starmer added less than 2 percent to the party’s 2019 vote share. Labour’s final score, 33.7 percent, was well below the average vote share for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, let alone the 40 percent it took in 2017. Yet Starmer has won a landslide majority of seats in the House of Commons, thanks to a Conservative meltdown and Britain’s winner-takes-all electoral system.