A snap election is a rush to judgment on the state of a nation, and in Britain, the vote coming in less than six weeks appears likely to be a devastating referendum on the governing Conservative Party, which is heading for all but certain humiliation. But perhaps it will also be an indictment of the Labour Party opposition, which seems remarkably uninterested in seizing the moment.
To Americans watching the sudden sprint to a new Parliament, Britain looks like a zombie state and a cautionary tale — it actually embodies many of the economic maladies Americans somewhat falsely diagnose in our own country. As of last year, the country’s per capita G.D.P. is 8.4 percent below its 2007 peak — a significant decline, which has helped make the country outside of London poorer than Mississippi.
And although the prolonged slowdown in productivity may be the worst Britain has experienced since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the country’s struggles aren’t purely economic. Britain’s housing crisis is so bad that one homebuilders’ group called it “the most difficult place to find a home in the developed world,” and Britain’s homelessness rates are the worst in the developed world. According to research by the House of Commons, the number of people waiting for hospital treatment from the National Health Service has tripled since 2009; the share of patients spending more than four hours in the emergency room has grown from about 5 percent in 2011 to above 40 percent today; and the number forced to wait more than 12 hours for admission to the hospital, which was near zero before the pandemic, is above 40,000 this year. In late 2022, ambulances were taking more than an hour and a half to respond to calls for strokes and heart attacks. When the bedraggled prime minister Rishi Sunak called a surprise news conference last Wednesday, announcing a July 4 election almost inaudibly through blankets of rain, it seemed like an act of self-mercy — to put himself and his party out of their misery.
It also seemed, intuitively, like the turning of a page. Britain has been governed by austerity-minded Tories now for 14 years, and the results have been bleak. Brexit was another self-inflicted wound from the British right and is now lamented by a large majority of the public. It was only Boris Johnson’s peculiar charisma and idiosyncratic campaigning, in which he pledged massive public spending programs to “level up” the country, that briefly brought the Tories above water. Today, 96 percent of voters have grown less likely to vote conservative since the last election, and the British public as a whole believes it’s “time for a change” by a margin of 73 to 18.
All this points to a huge wave election, and that is exactly what appears to be coming, with middle-of-the-road analysts projecting that Labour will win 380 seats or more, compared to 190 or so for Conservatives, and neither of the country’s smaller parties expected to crack 30. How significant a victory would this be? To trust those projections, Labour could easily win a larger share of Parliament than either party has won in more than 20 years, enjoying decisive voting margins over the opposition that have only been achieved twice in the last 40 years. Parliament works differently from Congress, but the last time an American party had a two-to-one advantage in the Senate was between 1965 and 1967, when Democrats launched the Great Society. In Britain’s parliamentary system, which gives even the slimmest majority total control of the government, this would be an absolutely dominant political position that would reduce the Tories to a shriveled opposition. But what is most striking about the coming vote is not the potential deathblow it represents to the Conservative Party, which has presided almost uninterrupted over Britain’s post-crash stagnation. It’s how weakly Labour is limping forward to grasp the opportunity of what appears almost certain to be a massive, even generational, electoral triumph. And the victory could prove more sweeping still: one pollster, predicts Labour might even reach 479 seats, with only 92 for the Tories.
Big changeovers like these come pretty rarely in mature democracies, and when they do they are almost invariably seen — by both sides, both in prospect and in retrospect — as major turning points ushering in whole new political paradigms. In 1997 Tony Blair promised “New Labour, New Life for Britain” — with a political program that borrowed a fair amount of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberalism, of course, but was also designed to steer the country on a new path, toward a prosperous and progressive “Cool Britannia.”
In 2008 Barack Obama, feeling the political wind at his back from the partial collapse of George W. Bush’s Republican Party and the more total collapse of the American financial system, imagined that his election might be as significant a turning point in American political history as Ronald Reagan’s had been — and reflected that the moment he accepted the Democratic nomination would be remembered as, among other things, “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Onstage that year in St. Paul, Minn., Obama declared, “America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the politics of the past.”
This is nothing like the rhetoric coming now from Labour or its leader, Keir Starmer, though the party is poised to storm into power with perhaps greater force than Obama did 16 years ago. A week before the election announcement, Starmer laid out six central pledges for the campaign to come. The first was that in power, Labour would stick to tough spending rules — i.e., austerity — to promote economic stability. Another was to launch a border security program to police the arrival of migrants by boat. Several of the pledges express more liberal values — cutting N.H.S. wait times, for instance, or establishing a publicly owned clean power company, though Starmer has also cut his previous green investment pledge in half, citing the cost.
There are also some progressive heroes in Labour’s shadow government, and surely a Starmer-led Parliament would pull the country a few steps leftward. But none of Labour’s campaign promises suggest the grand ambition of a party returning to power after more than a decade in the wilderness and determined to make the victory really count. Or the kind that progressives the world over might hope to see, observing the coming wave from a distance and hoping it might signal a sea change in the direction of global politics as surely as Brexit did. Failing that, at least a liberal bulwark against global forces running in the opposite direction.
There are local factors that help explain this, to a certain degree. The Labour Party has been in some amount of disarray since Blair brought the country into the war in Iraq 20 years ago and more wary of a surge leftward after Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in 2019, and conventional wisdom holds that their recent gains in the postindustrial districts of Britain’s so-called Red Wall are likely to be fleeting. Starmer himself has always looked to Britain’s voters like the very caricature of a vacuous establishment figure; often mocked as “Starmer Chameleon,” he owes his leadership of Labour to his apparent lack of meaningful ideological commitments, which helps explain his remarkable pattern of policy reversal and has made him seem, for all his flatness, the “safe” choice. On top of which, Britain’s treasury is pretty broke to begin with, British taxes are relatively high already, and even though it’s unpopular, Brexit remains a bit of a political straitjacket.
But it also illustrates a more general shrinking of the left’s verve all across the world in recent years. It was not that long ago that Corbyn and Bernie Sanders seemed to represent ascendant wings of their respective parties. In Europe, the story of the last few years has been the continued march of the nativist right, with the ambitions of parties on the left somewhat clipped by fear of backlash. In the United States, they have been somewhat clipped by similar fears — not just of backlash but of Donald Trump.
The pathetic position of the British Tories shows that backlash can come for the right, as well — in theory, at least, opening up new and expansive opportunities for the left. As the campaign wears on, Labour may find a more aggressive footing and offer voters something more positive than just the opportunity to punish conservatives by ousting them. But for now the election looks like it will be both a generational wipeout and an anticlimactic changing of the guard, with Labour not writing a new political chapter for Britain but content to preside somewhat thanklessly over the “Stagnation Nation” status quo instead.
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