Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Noam Chomsky (James Speakman/Yui Mok/PA)

The Conservative Party won the 2017 General Election

By Joseph Draper, PA
19:32 - April 26, 2023

Left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky has claimed that Jeremy Corbyn won an “enormous victory” in the 2017 election during an interview with Times Radio presenter Matt Chorley. 

He claimed: “Jeremy Corbyn won an enormous victory in 2017 – the biggest victory that Labour had won in generations.”

He added: “(In) 2017 there was the biggest Labour party swing in history.”

Evaluation: False

Whether you look at the number of parliamentary seats won by Labour in 2017 (262) or their share of the vote (40%), the Opposition party lost by a fair margin.

While it is true that they performed better than in the 2015 election, when they won 30.4% of the vote and 232 seats, they still fell far short of the Conservative Party, which won far more seats (317) and the largest vote of any parliamentary party (42.3%).

The facts

2017 General Election results

The suggestion that Labour “won” in 2017 is false when you look at both seats and the percentage of the vote, as set out in this House of Commons briefing paper.

It is true that Labour performed far better than some pundits predicted, leading to a hung parliament in which then-Tory leader Theresa May had to form a coalition government with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

However, with the Tories ahead by over two percentage points, this was ultimately still a defeat.

Did the 2017 election see ‘the biggest Labour party swing in history’?

The second claim – that Labour saw the “largest swing in its history” – is more complicated.

Corbyn’s Labour did perform far better than the party under Ed Miliband two years earlier, increasing its vote share by around 10% and gaining a further 30 seats.

But it struggled to turn those votes into seats. This is crucial, as Britain runs on a first past the post system in which each constituency holds its own separate election.

For example, the party actually won a similar vote share in 2017 (40%) to New Labour during its heyday under Tony Blair in 2001 (41.4%), yet converted those votes into 150 fewer seats.

If you look solely at the change in voting numbers between UK general elections, then Labour did experience a large swing in 2017, increasing its share of the vote by 9.6 percentage points compared to 2015, (up to 40% in 2017 from 30.4%).

But it was not “the biggest Labour party swing in history”. Between 1935 and 1945, for example, Labour saw a 10 percentage point jump in its vote share from 38.5% to 48.5%, ushering in a landslide victory for Labour’s Clement Attlee over Sir Winston Churchill’s Tory party.

Links

Noam Chomsky interview in The Guardian (archived)

Times Radio interview (archived tweet and video)

House of Commons briefing paper, General Election 2017 (archived)

BBC News report on the 2017 General Election result (archived)

Britain’s “first past the post” voting system (archived)

House of Commons research paper, General Election 2001 (see table 1b, p12, for Labour’s vote share (archived)

House of Commons research paper, UK Election Statistics: 1918-2022, A Long Century of Elections (archived)

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