Britain has its first Labour prime minister in 14 years, with a parliamentary majority of more than 170. It is a remarkable accomplishment for Sir Keir Starmer to have thus transformed Labour’s fortunes within a single parliament. Sir Keir has qualities that merit respect and should inspire public confidence. It does not diminish his achievement to note that beneath Labour’s emphatic victory are unresolved tensions in British politics and worrying fissures in society, and the new prime minister will be tested by them.
The extent of Labour’s win should not be gainsaid. The party won the popular vote in each of the nations of Great Britain. It trounced the SNP and holds 27 out of 32 seats in Wales. In England, it regained seats in areas it had traditionally held before the 2019 election and swept some that have never had a Labour MP. Perhaps the most emblematic of these unlikely gains was in South West Norfolk, where the party overturned a 26,000 majority for Liz Truss on a 26 per cent swing.
It was not ordained that the collapse of support for the Tories would have this outcome. It required making Labour a safe choice for voters who were repelled by the message the party gave in 2019. Sir Keir confronted the antisemitism that had debased the party’s reputation and sought to dispel doubts about Labour’s commitment to national security. He stressed the party’s historic commitment to Nato and enabled a cross-party consensus in support of Ukraine in its just war of self-defence.
And whereas Labour fought the 2019 election on an unabashedly socialist programme, such utopian schemes now feature nowhere in the party’s thinking. There is some support for radical socialism in Britain. Allied to his visibility as a constituency MP over 40 years, Jeremy Corbyn gained from this sentiment in retaining his seat in Islington, as an independent. But it is a ruinous course for a party of the centre-left seeking government.
Sir Keir, by contrast, resembles the judgment of one giant of Labour politics of an earlier age, Roy Jenkins, about another, Denis Healey: “He has long carried light ideological baggage on a heavy gun carriage.” To have a grasp of policy detail while lacking dogmatism has its attractions after the premierships of Boris Johnson and Ms Truss.
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This much is true of Labour’s victory and the likely course of Sir Keir’s administration. But this is a different kind of landslide from Sir Tony Blair’s in 1997 and 2001. The victory is far from unalloyed. Labour won 65 per cent of the seats with 35 per cent of the vote. The scale of the Tories’ defeat is due in part to a lethal pincer movement of tactical voting, whereby Labour and the Liberal Democrats between them picked up many apparently secure Tory seats. And it also reflects the influence of Reform UK in splitting the coalition of voters, galvanised by the issue of Brexit, that won a big majority for Mr Johnson in 2019.
That coalition of voters is heterogeneous. It includes affluent younger professionals in booming parts of the country and older voters in parts that have languished, who are worried about decline and averse to radical social change. That electoral coalition proved unsustainable for the Conservatives. And the tension has not been abolished by Labour’s entry into government.
Though Brexit is now an accomplished fact, the regional and demographic divisions exposed by the referendum vote in 2016 remain acute. There is no obvious way of reconciling the demands of a dynamic economy dependent on specialisation and international competition, and the communal bonds that these forces tend to dissipate. It explains why immigration became such a salient issue, beyond its economic and cultural effects. Reform UK, with a message of social conservatism and economic populism, managed to fracture Conservative support but also gained in Labour areas. In 12 of Labour’s 27 seats in Wales, Reform came second. In many seats in the north, Labour’s vote declined while Reform’s surged. Nigel Farage’s party now has five MPs, including himself, and it may prove to be as much a threat to Sir Keir’s government as it ultimately was to Rishi Sunak’s.
Labour also suffered in a number of urban constituencies from another recent fissure. Not counting Mr Corbyn, four independent candidates defeated Labour while running on the issue of support for Gaza. Jonathan Ashworth, in Leicester South, was the most prominent of these Labour casualties. Other senior Labour figures such as Jess Phillips and Wes Streeting fought off similar challenges only narrowly.
It is satisfying that George Galloway was defeated in Rochdale by Labour, but there is no doubt of the strength of feeling on Gaza among many British Muslims, which Mr Galloway exploited. Yet the tendency to political organisation on a communal issue should leave democrats uneasy, and Labour may be tempted to accommodate it. Labour’s immediate reaction to the Hamas slaughter on October 7 was correct: Israel does have a right to defend its citizens from terrorist attack. And the notion that a British government should tailor its foreign policies to the balance of communal opinion is iniquitous. The fragmentation of Britain into tribal voting blocs would be a historic tragedy.
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In one of the more notable victory speeches of the election, Jeremy Hunt, the outgoing chancellor, observed that “we are incredibly lucky to live in a country where decisions like this are made not by bombs or bullets, but by thousands of ordinary citizens peacefully placing crosses in boxes and bits of paper”. He is absolutely right. The citizens of a complex society exemplify many diverse attachments of such things as ethnicity, national origin and religious affiliation. But the only attachment that matters for a democratic polity is common citizenship under the rule of law.
All reasonable people must wish Sir Keir Starmer’s government success in the hard choices it now faces, though the voting pattern reveals little enthusiasm for its projects. Sir Keir has a lower vote share than any prime minister dating back to 1832. Never has a modern government won so many seats with so few votes. It may be that the social divisions the Conservatives ultimately failed to master will be beyond Labour’s ability to bind too. But it is vital competitive politics never degenerates into social conflict and communal discord.
