The political space available to the new Labour government to manoeuvre is very small. The Party has promised no significant changes to the tax system and, fearing public disapproval, has not advertised any significant changes in industrial reorganisation. Its publicly revealed objectives are to increase economic growth, to improve the national health service, to reduce crime and deliver justice, to promote affordable green energy and to enhance ‘opportunity’. All these objectives will take a long time.

       Following fourteen years of Conservative rule, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party crashed in the General Election of 4 July 2024. The Conservatives won only 121 seats out of a total of 650 – 250 seats fewer than in the current Parliament – the lowest in more than 200 years of Conservative Party history. The Labour Party won an unprecedented 411 seats. The result has euphorically been welcomed as an ‘historic victory’ for revived social-democracy and a divergent path from right wing ‘populist’ politics in Europe. A closer study of the election results, however, shows that such an interpretation is seriously misplaced. While it is clear that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has an unassailable Parliamentary majority, the political reality underlying the people’s choice is considerably different. What the election also shows is the renewal of a dominant political elite, unrepresentative of the electorate and an emerging critical ‘populist’ opposition.

       The Imbalance between Votes and Seats

       The lack of electoral support for the Conservatives Party reflected public aversion to the Conservative government rather than the rise of a radical social-democratic alternative. Labour’s share of the vote was 33.8 per cent (9.7 million votes), only 1.7 per cent higher than in 2019, when it did extremely badly. Jeremy Corbyn, when leader of the Party in 2019, attracted just over 10 million votes on a turnout of 67.3 per cent. The number voting (just under 59.9 per cent) in 2024 was one of the lowest for a hundred years (UK Election Statistics: 1918- 2023, A Long Century of Elections, House of Commons Library). Consequently, the Labour Party received fewer votes than it did when it lost the election under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. More ominous is that opinion polls showed that the evaluation of even Labour voters with a ‘strong like’ for the party was in decline: on a ten point scale, its index had fallen to 7 – lower than even in 2020 (Financial Times Election Study 6 July 2024).

       The desertion from the Conservative Party of large numbers of voters to a new right wing party, Reform UK led by Nigel Farage and formed only in 2018, was the major cause of Labour’s astonishing victory. Reform UK split the Conservative vote. The UK electoral system is divided into 650 constituencies, only the candidate topping the poll in each constituency is elected. The system is devised to eliminate small parties which might have votes scattered over many constituencies. In 2024, Reform received over 4.1 million votes which resulted in only 5 seats. Put another way: Labour received 33.8 per cent of the votes, but 63 per cent of the seats in Parliament: Reform UK received 14.2 per cent of the votes and just under 1 per cent of the seats in Parliament. The anomaly was caused by the wide spread of Reform’s votes, where they came second and third in the constituencies. The total right wing vote (Reform UK and Conservative Party) came to 38 per cent: that is 4.3 per cent greater than the Labour vote. One can safely infer that Labour’s vote did not reflect a significant popular move ‘to the left’ in 2024. Their capture of Conservative seats was due to the defection of Conservative voters to Reform UK and, in Scotland, Labour also took 36 seats from the Scottish Nationalists (SNP) due to dissatisfaction there with the SNP leadership.

       Aversion to the Conservative Party

       Why then did the Conservative Party do so badly? Public dissatisfaction was directed at the Conservative Party leadership and its chaotic policies rather than attraction to social-democracy presenting an alternative political vision. The ‘global Britain’ promised by the Conservatives in the wake of exit from the European Union did not materialise. The Covid pandemic was followed by high levels of inflation and taxation, declining living standards, poor delivery of social services, particularly failings of the National Health Service, uncontrollable levels of unauthorised immigration, the inability to overcome administrative problems caused by Brexit and, to cap it all, unacceptable personal behaviour of leading Conservative Party members who, for example over Covid restrictions, broke their own rules. In other words, it was a protest against the incompetence of the everchanging and divided Conservative political leadership. In this context, Starmer’s Labour party presented a ‘change’ in the sense of a restoration of stability.

       Labour under Keir Starmer

       The political space available to the new Labour government to manoeuvre is very small. The Party has promised no significant changes to the tax system and, fearing public disapproval, has not advertised any significant changes in industrial reorganisation. Its publicly revealed objectives are to increase economic growth, to improve the national health service, to reduce crime and deliver justice, to promote affordable green energy and to enhance ‘opportunity’. All these objectives will take a long time. It is possible that the Starmer leadership may be pushed by Labour’s trade union sponsors to greater state coordination of the water and railway companies; it would be popular to introduce windfall taxes on energy supply companies, to increase capital gains tax and inheritance tax. There are promises to improve workers’ rights, to promote green energy and to increase house building. One can expect a focus on personal integrity by the new political leadership. Keir Starmer is an unimaginative rather wooden political manager rather than a charismatic political innovator. Labour promises not political transformation but return to centrist normality. A more acceptable form of regulated capitalism.

       Labour is united with the Conservative Party policy on foreign affairs. The leadership remains committed to Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the USA and its military appendage, NATO. It proposes to raise spending on defence. To assure the public that it takes seriously national defence, it strongly supports NATO and has made amply clear that it opposes Russia’s role in Ukraine. Assurances of positive support to President Zelensky will be high on Labour’s list of foreign affairs priorities.

       Rise of Opposition Parties

       One important and unexpected consequence of the election will be the presence of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party in Parliament. Small though it is, Farage constituted the only voice heard on the mass media during the election opposing NATO’s role in relation to Ukraine. Nigel Farage is not opposed to NATO, on the contrary. However, he does not support the Ukraine and will press for a peace agreement. One would expect that the Ukraine/NATO war with Russia will be subject to more scrutiny and even Parliamentary debate. But voices against the war in Ukraine are very faint. The propaganda war in favour of Ukraine has been overwhelming. The war in Gaza too, rather than in Ukraine, is likely to be a major focus for opposition to the established political parties.

       Are these developments likely to parallel the movement of politics to the right following the example of France, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany? Certainly not in terms of the Parliamentary political elites which are firmly set in the hands of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal-Democratic Parties. Reasons for the absence of a wider right-wing movement in England include the lack of political leadership, the absence of mass media sympathetic to populist causes, and the electoral system which is designed to make it difficult for new parties to gain a footing. The success of Reform UK will probably shift the Conservative Party to the right, to what on the continent they call ‘populist parties’. The political tendency to move to the right is also present in the UK but to a lesser and less obvious extent. The decline in numbers of people voting and the rise in support for Reform UK and ‘independent’ candidates indicate an underlying social constituency which would support similar causes to the ‘populist’ movements in continental Europe.

       Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.