After 14 years of failed neoliberal government under a nominal Conservative government, anti-Conservative sentiment has bolstered left-wing parties, giving Labour a landslide victory in Thursday’s general election, giving it a Tony Blair-style majority.
While most of Europe is moving to the right, Britain is moving to the left. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will meet King Charles at Buckingham Palace today, where the monarch is expected to appoint the leader of the left-wing Labour Party as the next prime minister with a majority of around 170 seats.
With 648 of the 650 seats confirmed, the BBC Projected Labour won 33.7% of the vote, the Conservatives 23.7%, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK 14.3%, the Liberal Democrats 12.2% and the Green Party 6.8%.
Although the Conservative Party’s vote share was the lowest in its history, dropping the party to 121 seats, it was still expected to win at least 412 seats in Parliament, the second-largest majority of any Labour government outside Tony Blair’s government in 1997. However, Labour’s performance actually underperformed compared to pre-vote opinion polls. Many polls had predicted that Labour would beat the Conservatives by 20 percentage points or more, but the actual vote saw Labour only beat the so-called Conservatives by around 10 percentage points.
Labour also barely edged out Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in the 2019 general election, when the party was led by septuagenarian socialist Jeremy Corbyn, winning 32% of the vote but losing badly to the Conservatives. Even more embarrassing, Starmer appears to have received fewer votes overall than Corbyn did in 2019. This means that while Labour will have full control of Parliament, it has won a “loveless” victory based on divisions on the right, rather than passion for its policies.
Professor John Curtice lays out some brutal facts to help make sense of Labour’s landslide victory:
— Labour’s vote share in England has remained unchanged since the last election
— Most of the Conservative Party’s losses were due to former Conservative voters choosing reform.
— Keir Starmer has won… pic.twitter.com/T5nTKLeCOr
— Freddie Sayers (@freddiesayers) July 5, 2024
Demonstrating just how little support a Labour government has, a YouGov poll released before the vote found that 61% of voters intended to support Labour “to get the Conservatives out” or because “the country needs change”, while only 5% said they would support the party mainly for its policies.
Given that the Conservative party that has led the country for the past 14 years has shifted heavily to the left, and that many in the country see Labour and the Conservatives as just two sides of the same Westminster coin, a transition of power may not make much difference.
But others, especially Conservative political commentator Peter Hitchens has warned that Sir Keir Starmer is deliberately positioning himself as a boring managerial technocrat to hide his true radical nature and his plans to continue the Blairite agenda of dismantling British institutions.
Brexit Reversal: Tony Blair urges Labour to ‘reset’ UK-EU relations after general electionhttps://t.co/BXmIrOg7yh
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During Blair’s tenure as prime minister, the UK underwent far-reaching constitutional reforms that continue to affect the country to this day, including the creation of a Supreme Court, the creation of devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales, giving the Bank of England the power to set interest rates without government approval, the introduction of a minimum wage, and the expanded criminalisation of so-called hate speech.
Like Blair, Starmer has tried to portray himself as a moderate and downplay his history as a radical Trotskyist socialist, claiming to have been a moderate since his days as a newspaper editor. An Alternative to Socialismis a magazine promoting Pabloite communism that seeks to blend socialist economic theory with environmental protection policies.
Just four years ago, Starmer admitted to holding many of the same views as he did as a younger man. trot, tell of New Statesman“I don’t think there are any major issues that have changed my mind.
“The big question we were grappling with at the time was how the Labour Party, or the left in general, could bring together the broader movement and its equality elements – feminist politics, environmental politics, LGBT. I thought that was really exciting and really important.”
As a “green-red” Pablo, it’s no wonder that climate extremist policies are likely to dominate his government. The party has vowed to achieve “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2030, but this plan would fundamentally change the UK economy, likely raising the cost of living for millions, destroying domestic industries and making the UK even more dependent on foreign powers to meet its energy needs.
This will be a major area of attack against Labour for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, Starmer’s main challenger in many working-class areas. Reform wants to scrap the “net zero” target altogether, arguing that the target will only impoverish Britain and do little to reduce emissions given that British industry is simply relocating to countries like China. Farage’s party also wants to open up fracking of natural gas and invest in next-generation nuclear power plants.
Labour will set up ‘net zero office’ to drive green policies: reporthttps://t.co/L7aWy9PNX1
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Immigration will be a hotbed of political battle between Labour and the Reform Party. Ahead of the election, Starmer vowed that mass immigration would be reduced under a Labour government but refused to commit to a specific annual cap, meaning net immigration is likely to remain at a few hundred thousand per year for the time being. On illegal immigration, Labour has pledged to reverse plans to send migrants by boat to refugee processing centres in Rwanda, while making vague promises to crack down on smuggling gangs who smuggle migrants across the English Channel.
Meanwhile, Farage has called for “net zero” legal immigration, while urging the deployment of the Royal Navy to immediately return boat migrants to French shores. Reformists are also calling for an immediate withdrawal from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which controversially intervened in UK domestic politics to block migrant return flights to Rwanda in the summer of 2022. Conversely, Starmer has stated his intention to accept EU migrant quotas and work more closely with the EU to secure a return deal with the EU.
As well as likely facing off against Reform UK in working-class constituencies on immigration, the resulting multicultural environment in Britain is likely to pose a challenge for the new government. Labour has pledged to recognise Palestine as a state but still faces significant opposition in Muslim-majority areas, and Jonathan Ashworth, who was widely expected to be part of Starmer’s government, lost his seat on Thursday to an independent candidate who ran on a pro-Palestinian platform.
In a bid to solidify support from the Muslim community, Starmer has pledged to enforce a “zero tolerance approach” to so-called Islamophobia and promised a “tougher crackdown” on online speech to police what many say will amount to a de facto blasphemy law in the UK.
JK Rowling says left-wing Labour party has ‘failed women’https://t.co/hvOHz73rDD
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) June 22, 2024
Gender is also likely to be a contentious issue for Labour – even Sir Keir Starmer has seemed conflicted on the issue in recent years – and Thursday’s return of Red Wall seats to Labour could pit the party’s self-conscious metropolitan elite against more socially conservative MPs from working-class constituencies.
After much debate on the issue, Labour is reportedly planning to “modernise” the legal process for gender change, scrapping requirements for gender recognition certificates to be signed by multiple doctors and for patients to prove they have lived as the opposite gender for at least two years. The party will also reportedly repeal school guidelines that mean teachers must teach children that there are only two biological sexes.
Starmer has personally struggled to maintain a consistent message on transgenderism, initially declaring that “99.9 per cent” of women cannot have penises, and later acknowledging the biological reality that women are “adult females”. Starmer, a long-time Labour supporter and prominent feminist, has Harry potter Author J.K. Rowling has accused the party of “abandoning” women in pursuit of a gender-conscious ideology.
Perhaps the most radical proposal Labour has put forward so far would be to allow 16-year-olds to vote in national elections. Given that less-informed young voters tend to support left-wing parties, this could create a political system that guarantees Labour rule in many future elections. However, with Nigel Farage’s popularity soaring on youth platforms like TikTok, the Reform Party may try to harness an increasingly conservative Gen Z demographic to bolster its hold as it builds a coalition to defeat Labour in the 2029 general election.
“This Labour government is going to be in trouble very soon. We are going after the Labour vote. We are going after the Labour party, there’s no doubt about that,” Farage vowed on Friday morning after winning his seat.
Beachhead wins: Nigel Farage wins his first seat in the UK Parliamenthttps://t.co/uRGmkvFzkL
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) July 5, 2024
