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“Keir Starmer vowed to rebuild Britain as its next prime minister after his Labour Party on Friday surged to a landslide victory in a parliamentary election, ending 14 years of often tumultuous Conservative government. The centre-left Labour won a massive majority in the 650-seat parliament. Rishi Sunak's Conservatives suffered the worst performance in the party's long history…
“Labour won some 410 seats, an increase of 210, while the Conservatives, the western world's most successful party, lost about 250 lawmakers, including a record number of senior ministers and former Prime Minister Liz Truss… Meanwhile, the populist right-wing Reform UK party, headed by Nigel Farage, the colourful Brexit campaigner and friend of Donald Trump, won more than four million votes.” Reuters
The left praises Labour, and urges Starmer to implement his campaign promises expeditiously.
“Rishi Sunak’s campaign appealed to the basest instincts; he became more desperate by the day, throwing tax-cut bribes like meat to the wolves. But the public knew that money came straight from their hospitals, schools and children’s futures. Neither bribes nor threats of £2,000 tax rises under Labour shifted the dials. People are nicer and better than Tories know, time and again backing not cuts, but more tax and spend. Twice as many want spending on public services increased ‘even if it means tax rises for households like theirs.’”
Polly Toynbee, The Guardian
“Instead of fighting ideological battles, Starmer wanted the party to talk about ordinary people’s problems… ‘You have to deliver for working people,’ [Britain’s new foreign secretary] said…
“‘You have to address how they feel about crime, how they feel about health, whether their children will have lives as good or better than them. That has got to be your focus. You cannot get distracted by social media, cancel culture, and culture wars that I’m afraid are totally tangential to most people’s day-to-day lives.’”
Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic
“Starmer might be the most underrated politician ever… He chose not to win a mandate for sweeping policies. Instead, he campaigned on five popular — if broad — ‘missions’: high growth; safe streets; breaking down ‘barriers to opportunity’; turning Britain into a ‘clean energy superpower’; and making Britain’s National Health Service, hobbled by Conservative austerity, ‘fit for the future.’…
“He even scaled back his clean-energy spending proposals, lest he give the Tories targets for charges of fiscal irresponsibility… Starmer recognized that voters in all the democracies are skeptical of grand and gaudy promises. ‘People need hope,’ he told the Financial Times, ‘but it needs to be realistic hope.’”
E.J. Dionne, Washington Post
“[Starmer] is banking on growth not just as a means to fund better public services but effectively to glue society back together again, recognising that prosperous, confident countries don’t descend into the same dark places as impoverished ones fighting over scraps. His plans for ‘mission boards’ to drive the delivery of his manifesto promises across Whitehall show a welcome seriousness…
“[But] mingled with the joy in this victory is a faint unease born of knowing that it’s only five years since Boris Johnson surfed into Downing Street on an equally unstoppable wave of glory, and that we are most probably entering a world where the mood of the crowd turns dizzyingly fast. Keir Starmer has a gargantuan task ahead of him.”
Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian
The right is critical of the Conservatives, and notes Labour’s relatively low vote share.
The right is critical of the Conservatives, and notes Labour’s relatively low vote share.
“Mr. Starmer campaigned for change, but Thursday’s estimated turnout of 60% was one of the lowest in the U.K. in modern times. Mr. Blair’s vote share in 1997 was 43.2%. Boris Johnson’s share in 2019 was 43.6%. On Friday, with almost all ballots counted, Mr. Starmer won the popular vote with an estimated 33.9%. That’s less than Mr. Blair’s narrow third-term victory in 2005 (35.2%), and little more than Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous defeat in 2019 (32.1%)…
“While Mr. Corbyn crashed with 10.27 million votes, Mr. Starmer has triumphed with 9.7 million due to a split on the right. Nigel Farage has defeated the Conservatives for the fourth time since the European elections in 2014, the Brexit referendum of 2016 and the European elections of 2019. This week, his Reform U.K. vehicle drove the Tories off the road… Rather than a victory for centrism and consensus, the result reflects division, disillusion and despair.”
Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal
“The Tories won the 2019 election on a right-wing platform. This won them a broad coalition of voters up and down the country, and they were subsequently let down, as the party failed to keep almost all the promises they made to the public. Instead of cutting immigration, the party more than doubled it…
“The Conservatives promised to massively increase housebuilding so a new generation of young British people can become homeowners more cheaply… Instead, planning reform was essentially killed by the parliamentary party… In 2019, the party pledged to increase prison capacity by over 10,000 cells by 2024. This week, it is being reported that Britain’s prisons are full to the point that a one-in, one-out policy is about to be introduced…
“This is what provoked such incredulity on behalf of the public when presented with the Tories’ manifesto this year. The majority of its proposals could or should have been done in office already, and many were the restatement of existing policies which had not been delivered — or, worse, were halfway through being delivered and cancelled by the election. Sticking to your promises in politics matters, and this should be the main lesson the party takes from its defeat.”
Fred de Fossard, The Critic
“Millions of disillusioned voters understandably asked themselves what the point of a conservative government is if it is unable to secure the borders or the streets and leave ordinary people with more money in their pockets. The election results should be understood not so much as a rejection of conservative policies but rather as a rejection of a government that failed to carry out conservative policies.”
John Gustavsson, National Review
