The British Labour Party has won its largest majority since the founding of the party over a century ago, securing at least 412 of the House of Commons’s 650 seats. And in an age of populism and polarization, it has done so on a moderate, centrist platform.
The new version of Labour — led by Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who served as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service — may seem reassuringly reminiscent of the consensus of the 1990s and early 2000s, when moderate progressives like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were committed to liberal economics, liberal democracy and a liberal global order.
But it is too early to celebrate this election as a triumph of the center. There is no clear sign that British voters are any more enthusiastic than voters anywhere else for the socially liberal, fiscally conservative politics that this incarnation of the Labour Party represents. At its heart, this election was an emphatic rejection of a chaotic incumbent. The Conservative Party has been reduced to 121 seats, with two seats left to declare, the worst defeat in its 190-year history. It lost vote share not only to Labour and the centrist, pro-European Liberal Democrats, but also to the hard-right, anti-immigrant Reform U.K., led by Nigel Farage, an ally of Donald Trump.
With the far right ascendant and the Conservative Party battered, Britain has entered new political territory. What centrist forces in Britain have earned is not so much a victory as a brief reprieve; how long it lasts depends on how well they use it.
The Conservatives deserved the rebuke they got. They were in power for 14 years, with little to show for it other than a damaging exit from the European Union. After winning by a landslide in 2019, the party burned through three prime ministers, lurching from the feckless populism of Boris Johnson to the reckless 49-day libertarianism of Liz Truss to the uninspiring technocracy of Rishi Sunak.
After its own disastrous showing in the 2019 election, Labour embarked on a transformation. Mr. Starmer took over from Jeremy Corbyn — a veteran of the party’s left, a critic of liberal economics, free markets and Israel, and a passionate opponent of the U.S.-led global order — and committed the party to reduced public spending and lower debt, no increases to income taxes and backing President Biden’s position on the Israel-Gaza conflict. Mr. Corbyn, who was suspended from the party in 2020, was blocked from standing as a Labour candidate in this election.
Squint at these results and you can just about see a picture of a moderate landslide. But there are two things to bear in mind about Labour’s win. First, British voters had a limited sense of Labour’s platform — in part because Labour, so far ahead in the polls going into the election and determined to avoid unforced errors, has presented them with very few policies. The second is that Britain’s “first past the post” electoral system, which, like America’s, awards parliamentary seats to the candidate who wins the most votes in each individual race, rewards parties with concentrated voter bases. Labour, which secured 33.8 percent of the popular vote, has 412 seats, while the far-right Reform, with its base spread thinly across the country, has won four seats and received about 14 percent of the vote.
For a decade at least, the world has seemed to be tilting from democracy to strongmen, free trade to protectionism, intervention to isolation. The liberal global order is in retreat. The American and European response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was initially impressive, but the decade is better defined by the failures in Syria, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the conflict in Israel and Gaza and the nine military coups in Africa since 2020.
There have been recent examples in Poland, Greece and Spain (and to a lesser extent, Turkey and India) of voters turning away from populism. But it has made significant advances elsewhere: Far-right populists won the most votes in the most recent Italian and Dutch elections, pulled ahead of the governing party in Germany and are on track for a resounding victory in France after the nation’s first round of voting. Trump’s current polling suggests this may not be a purely European phenomenon.
The governing classes in the West have been discredited by the humiliations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis and a perception that they are unable to manage immigration or improve ordinary people’s living standards, while social media has intensified polarization. A majority of voters sense that liberal democracies are no longer delivering and believe that future generations will be worse off.
Britons have given Mr. Starmer’s Labour Party a chance. He has promised to finance government by securing “the highest sustained growth” in the Group of 7, but the odds are against him. Britain is troubled by poor productivity, creaking public services, a cost of living crisis, unaffordable housing and an aging population. And Mr. Starmer has limited his options by ruling out additional borrowing, tax increases, higher immigration and rejoining the E.U. single market.
If voters sour on him and this centrist vision of Labour, the next election will almost certainly draw them back to the extremes. The Reform party is already betting on this, with Mr. Farage’s vow to “reshape the center right, whatever that means.”
Labour must demonstrate that it can improve people’s lives and transform public services — and soon — or we may look back at the British election of 2024 as merely a pause on the journey to polarization and the fantasies of populism.
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