The rise of the far right and the blow to the Conservative Party have thrust Britain into new political territory. Britain’s centrists have won less of a victory than a reprieve, and how long it lasts will depend on how well they use it.
The Conservatives deserved the blame. They had been in power for 14 years and achieved little apart from the damage caused by Brexit. Since their landslide victory in 2019, the party has swung from the irresponsible populism of Boris Johnson to the reckless libertarianism of Liz Truss for 49 days to the uninspired technocracy of Rishi Sunak, and has had three prime ministers.
After suffering a crushing defeat in the 2019 election, the Labour Party embarked on a transformation. Starmer succeeded Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran of the party’s left wing who is a critic of liberal economics, free markets, Israel and an ardent opponent of the US-led world order, and has pledged the party to cut public spending and reduce the debt, no income tax increases and support for President Biden’s stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict. Corbyn, who was expelled from the party in 2020, was barred from standing as the Labour candidate in this election.
Squint and you see these results almost as a modest landslide victory. But there are two things to keep in mind about Labour’s victory. First, British voters didn’t know much about Labour’s policies, in part because Labour was leading the polls so far before the election, and in part because it was determined to avoid self-destruction, it offered voters very little. Second, the UK’s “single-member constituency system,” like that of the US, gives seats to the candidates who get the most votes in each constituency, favoring parties with concentrated voter bases. With 33.8% of the popular vote, Labour won 412 seats, while the far-right Reform Party, with a thinly spread base across the country, won four seats and about 14% of the vote.
For at least the last decade, the world seems to have tilted from democracy to autocracy, from free trade to protectionism, from intervention to isolation. The liberal world order is in retreat. While the US and European response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was initially impressive, the last decade is better defined by failure in Syria, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the conflict in Israel and Gaza, and nine military coups in Africa since 2020.
