Right-wing parties have had good luck in Europe of late. However, this year’s British elections were a relief for the left. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won 411 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons. In the previous election in 2019, the Conservatives had won 365 seats, breaking Labour’s legendary red wall in the North.
Jeremy Corbyn, the former left-wing leader of the Labour Party, is no longer in the party. Under Starmer, the Labour Party has moved decisively to the centre, while the Tories (as British conservatives are called) have imploded in post-Brexit fratricidal bloodshed.
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The United Kingdom has a first-past-the-post parliamentary system. The candidate with the most votes becomes the Member of Parliament (MP) in each constituency. The leader of the party that wins the majority in the House of Commons becomes Prime Minister and governs the UK from 10 Downing Street.
The first-past-the-post system can lead to strange outcomes. For example, the Liberal Democrats won a smaller share of the vote than Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, but the former won many more seats than the latter in this election. However, the Conservatives and Scottish Nationalists were the big losers in 2024, while smaller parties thrived, as the table below demonstrates.
In a rare occurrence for any British government, the new Labour government is led by former civil servants rather than professional politicians. Starmer is a centrist who aims to bring stability back to the UK. Before his political career, Starmer was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service. His new chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, worked at the Bank of England. Both have reputations for being competent and prudent. Like previous prime ministers Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Teresa May and David Cameron, Starmer and Reeves went to Oxford University. However, they did not come from wealthy backgrounds or go to elite schools. They beat the odds to reach the top.
Unlike left-wing leaders in many other parts of the world, Reeves is not promising any increase in public spending. Instead, he advocates a supply-side economy to boost growth. In his first major speech speechReeves has promised to make economic growth his government’s number one priority by boosting private investment, labour force participation and productivity. Both Starmer and Reeves are fiscally prudent, which should lead to the British economy stabilising after eight difficult years following the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Fund managers and business leaders in New York and London say the risk premium on British assets will fall because of the Labour government’s reputation for responsibility. They believe Starmer and Reeves will foster a closer relationship with Europe, reduce frictions in trade between the UK and the EU and boost house building. Unlike most other democracies, this left-wing party has won the blessing of markets and business leaders.
Conservative collapse made Labour victory easier. What now?
As this author predicted in 2016, Brexit turned out to be “a very close affair” and what followed was madness. Prime ministers came and went with alarming frequency; Truss enjoyed less time than a prime minister. lettucePost-Brexit Britain could not decide whether to become a Singapore on the Thames or a revived industrial powerhouse with rejuvenated northern cities. Immigration remained a problem. Shipment The migrants who arrived in Rwanda did not excite the public. Johnson fiestas During the COVID-19 pandemic, public anger against the government’s draconian restrictions turned into open anger. Sunak had the charisma of a dead mouse and demonstrated a flair for fatal political gaffes such as match D-Day celebrations too early for a pointless TV interview. Simply put, the Conservatives made such a grave mistake that a Labour victory was obvious long before the election.
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The Labour Party’s victory is huge, but it is not very wide. Only one in five Britons voted for the party. Importantly, voter turnout fell from 69% in 2019 to 60% in 2024. In 2017, almost 12.9 million people voted for the Labour Party. In 2019, this figure fell to below 10.3 million. This year, just under 9.7 million voters cast their vote for the Labour Party. A chart from Freedom of Information Acta political and geopolitical risk warning, tells an interesting story about voting numbers and parliamentary seats in the last two British elections.
British politics has become extremely dynamic. New trends are worth noting. The significant vote shares of the right-wing, populist Reform Party of the United Kingdom (RPU), which ranks second after the Labour Party in 92 constituencies, and the Green Party (which ranks second after the Labour Party in 41 constituencies) put pressure on the Labour Party to improve immigration and environmental policies, respectively. unrest Across the UK, voters are concerned about the massive influx of migrants. Starmer’s government will have to restrict arrivals. Indeed, immigration was one of the main reasons voters opted for Brexit in 2016.
During the election campaign itself, the Labour Party promised a more effective approach to tackling illegal immigration and Uncovered Labour threatened to stop companies that failed to comply with the rules from sponsoring visas for their overseas employees. On his first full day as prime minister, Starmer canceled The outgoing Conservative government has criticised the plan to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda, saying it is “not prepared to continue with tricks that have no deterrent effect”. Instead, its government aims to curb the crossing of small boats across the English Channel by hiring investigators and using anti-terrorist powers to “dismantle” criminal gangs smuggling people.
On the renewable energy front, Starmer’s government has promised to speed up the development of large projects by assessing them at a national, not local, level, and by ending an effective ban on onshore wind farms. raise The resurgence of the Green Party, as mentioned above, and the resurgence of the Liberal Democrats (the party of the good county Conservatives) will make Starmer’s Labour Party more environmentally friendly than Sunak’s Conservatives. (As an aside, the Lib Dems’ Labour Party victoria In the Conservative Party’s heartlands, they won seats held by five former Conservative prime ministers.)
Most political parties with such a large majority would pursue a far more radical agenda, but Starmer is determined not to. Those close to the prime minister reveal that he is thinking long-term and aims to remain in power for at least two terms. Starmer is determined to restore Labour’s credibility as the party of responsible government after 14 years in opposition and the damage suffered under Corbyn’s leadership.
The country is now run not by alumni of the famous public schools (the quaint British name for expensive private schools), but by leaders who come from the working and middle classes. They are more thoughtful, sensible and rigorous than their Tory counterparts. To put it in the language of the English Civil War, Starmer and Reeves are Roundheads, not Cavaliers. After years of posh public school students from Eton and Winchester calling the shots, sensible plebs are on top.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Fair Observer.
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