GB: Tories in Shreds, Labour in Landslide

For months, opinion polls gave a Labour victory by a margin of more than 20 percent. So, the results of the elections in Great Britain could not have surprised anyone, not even the conservatives who suffered their most serious defeat ever.

That the conservatives, who had triumphed in 2019, deserved their defeat is widely accepted. Even the Financial Times (and the right-wing popular daily The Sun) declared that the country needed a fresh start: Labour. The succession of prime ministers (five in fourteen years) in a country accustomed to stable leadership did not help: David Cameron was followed by Theresa May, followed by Boris Johnson, followed by the 45-day Liz Truss, followed by Rishi Sunak. Each made mistakes and did not change things for the better. Cameron’s referendum on Brexit, won by a few points by the Brexiteers, is now regarded as a serious miscalculation even by some former Brexiteers. Boris Johnson’s clowning around could be thought of as entertaining but having champagne parties during the Covid epidemics while telling everyone to stay at home could not endear him to anyone. Then there was the spiraling cost of living; food prices are about 25% higher than two years ago. Real household disposable income per person has not increased since the 2019 election, compared with 2% annual growth in previous decades. The UK economy was the hardest hit of the top economies in the year of Covid when real GDP fell by 9.9%.

Then there was the profound crisis affecting the National Health Service with too many having to wait months for a major operation or weeks to see a doctor (the waiting list is now well over seven million). Public anger escalated as sewage spilled in running water particularly in prosperous southern constituencies, where conservative voters prevail. Hundreds of households were told last month not to drink tap water following a leak of petrol into water pipes owned by Thames Water. The privatized water companies were slow to react, but not slow to pay huge sums to their shareholders. Then there is the shocking state of prisons, massively overcrowded – even police chiefs have warned that this cannot go on. The promise to control immigration was not fulfilled and, in any case, controlling immigration should not be a priority: the National Health Service would collapse immediately if it were not for foreign nurses and doctors. The country, like most European countries, is getting old, and people live longer, so the health service is facing major problems. Universities are facing serious financial issues while charging enormous fees to British students: well over £9000 a year, foreigners pay more. The financial pressures loaded on today’s 25-year-olds – spending a huge chunk of their income on rent, many without a hope of ever getting on the housing ladder, and repaying an average of £47,000 of university fee debt – could look quite minor compared with those facing the 25-year-olds of 2050, who will also have to pay a good deal more tax to ensure anything like current levels of health, care and state pension provision. It is more difficult politically to redistribute resources in a society where living standards are declining. Intragenerational inequality is also likely to get worse.

Neither Labour nor the Tories know how to tackle the situation. Starmer promised not to increase borrowing. He promised not to increase taxes. He promised not to cut public spending. But you cannot increase public spending without borrowing more and/or increasing taxes. Neither party had much to say about the climate crisis, or about Ukraine since they all agree that it was all Putin’s fault, or about Gaza except to say that it is a tragedy, but that Israel will go on being supplied with weapons (most, anyway, come from the USA, not from the UK).

Keir Starmer has been lucky: his conservative opponents have long been dysfunctional; he purged the Left with unfounded accusations of antisemitism without causing much internal disruption (members left in disgust or were expelled); the Scottish National Party, which once had taken so many seats from Labour, was in disarray after two years of policy failures and scandals (as well as three leaders) and lost 37 seats to Labour. All Starmer needed to do was move towards the centre, those on the Left had no choice but to vote for him since the Greens are still far too weak (though they made some gains) – this might explain Starmer’s decision to slash the party’s much publicized Green Plan. Sunak had a far more difficult job. Faced with the threat from the Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform Party, he could not move too much to the right because, in so doing, he would lose voters to the Liberals and Labour.

The results have also shown more than ever how absurd is the British electoral system. When you had two parties with a third one whose main function was to provide a focus for those who liked neither, stability is the price to pay for a lack of real representation. Now it is nothing short of ridiculous. Labour obtained two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons with one-third of the vote (only a little more than the much-criticized Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 and 6.2 points below what Corbyn obtained in 2017). In fact, Labour lost votes. In 2017, Labour had 12.8m votes, 10.2m in 2919, and 9.6m this year. Its share of the national vote increased only slightly since 2019 and was 6.2 points below the party’s performance in 2017 when, led by Corbyn, it failed to obtain a majority.

In his own constituency, Starmer dropped 17% against an independent pro-Palestinian candidate. Four pro-Palestinians defeated Labour candidates elsewhere. No political party in Europe has ever won such a big majority with so few votes. The disproportion was blatant when we note that the Liberal Party obtained 71 seats with fewer votes than Farage’s Reform Party which only got 5 seats. In fact, right now Farage’s Reform is the third popular party in the country.

Notably, turnout is well down compared to recent elections: just under 60%. This is the second lowest turnout ever in a UK election since 1885. Opinion polls shows that public dissatisfaction with mainstream politics is as its highest (as is the case in the rest of Europe – wide disenchantment). Unsurprisingly, 50% have a more favorable opinion of England’s football manager Gareth Southgate, more of any UK politician. This was not a Labour’s victory. It was a massive Conservative defeat.