A sensible prime minister in a chaotic landscape: what you need to know about the British election result
Where were you when Labour won? Were you drinking yourself into the new political reality? Laughing at Liz Truss losing her seat? Were you in bed early, finally able to get an ideologically sound night’s rest? Were you dad-dancing like Ed Davey? Did you herald the gallant knight Sir Keir Starmer’s descent upon Whitehall?
Or did you miss the memo?
There are lots of important elections this year. It would be understandable if a result from a small island nation off the European continent slipped by you. Especially if you thought we were still ruled by a monarch. But our democratic institutions are very much alive and kicking, thank you very much. For better or worse, Britain has just received the sort of explosive electoral outcome only democracies are capable of.
Let’s not mince words — the result of this snap election is bloody lush. I would be surprised if even the biggest critics on the left of Keir Starmer weren’t a little bit relieved to see him humbly celebrate his victory at a London reception on Friday. With a simple declaration ‘We did it!’, the former senior civil servant was hardly gloating — his party had just won the biggest majority in the nation’s modern political history.
This overwhelming mandate for Britain’s traditionally progressive party is significant given Britain’s last fourteen years of Conservative government. From engineering Brexit, to austerity, to deteriorating services and an ailing healthcare system, Boris Johnson’s lies and Partygate, and the catastrophic change in Tory party leadership that followed, a stagnating economy and Rishi Sunak’s D-day disgrace being the icing on the stale cake, the Conservatives had become unredeemable in the eyes of even their most dedicated base. All they had left to run on was a parochial blend of Thatcherist callousness and fear-mongering, a strange acknowledgement of how badly things had become while having the gall to suggest that they were the ones to improve them.
Given this, some are cautious to credit Labour for this win — especially considering their low vote count and vote share. It might seem that they banked on being the only adults in the room. Variously slanted by the media as dull, humourless and pragmatic, Starmer nonetheless signals a return to sensible politics. At the moment, this is appealing. The big ‘but’ is that this needs to be a government of fresh ideas.
Starmer has already tested the allegiance of progressive voters. Though appearing to carry over many of party predecessor Jeremy Corbyn’s themes when he took the job in 2020, Starmer would rewrite many of his initial promises by the time he actually faced off his opponent, Rishi Sunak, on the ballot. Victory for Labour may have been a given from their unfluctuating point lead in the polls, but Starmer was leaving nothing up to chance. He had practically spelt out that his government would be a return to the centre: a ‘broad church’ that could speak to farmers as much as fine art students, small business owners as much as NHS workers.
Starmer wanted his campaign to be watertight. By some definitions, he succeeded. Yet his careful avoidance of controversy contradictorily led him to defend Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Meanwhile, his ruthless pragmatism has been at the expense of veteran Labour party members such as Diane Abbott, and of course, Jeremy Corbyn. For many, these details will fade into the background. Let’s just hope they won’t be recurring motifs in his premiership.
This election has proven again that politics is not just left vs. right. It’s more about riding a wave, reading the current climate. There’s a reason we use the term ‘landslide’ to describe an overwhelming political victory — there is an element of the uncontrollable. Nature itself sweeping away the political debris, bringing into power something not even the winners can fully contain. Some political commentators have already pointed out the ‘volatility’ of the British electorate, who were until recently thought to be influenced heavily by long standing party loyalties. Four years is a very short time for a party to go from crushing defeat, as Labour did in 2019, to total victory.
The subplot of this election is the rise of Reform, the hard-right party led by Nigel Farage. Some would say Labour’s majority is in no small part due to Reform splitting the rightwing vote. With 71 seats, The Liberal Democrats have also seen significant results in this election, as have the Greens, now with four seats. Starmer’s Labour will now have to contest with a politically fragmented country, where the old rules do not necessarily apply.
As for the fixing of Britain’s deep-rooted inequalities — the new prime minister has his work cut out for him. Britain is a country that has long run on cognitive dissonance; that tells itself one thing, and does another. Will he really reassemble our fragmented welfare state? Transform the education sector? Supercharge the green economy? His broad promises are encouraging, but fragile — fail to live up to them and in a single term the party could find its hold slipping.
Yet, progressives should curb their reservations about Starmer — for now, at least. If his promises to return Britain to an upward trajectory of living standards are fulfilled, to flush the sleaze and bring integrity back to politics (or, basically, to do the bare minimum) we have something to celebrate. In a chaotic political landscape that is seeing the rise of the hard-right in Europe and across the American continent, where the climate crisis depends more than ever on nonpartisan policymaking, this is a small, but not negligible, reason for hope.
