Starmer is in number 10: David Purdy offers extended perspectives on issues raised by the UK general election
On 4 July 2024, the Conservatives lost almost 60 per cent (251) of the seats they won in 2019, while their share of the vote fell from 43 to 24 per cent. It was, according to John Curtice, the party's worst electoral defeat since the 'Great Reform Act' of 1832, when Britain's rulers took their first, nervous mini-steps on what turned out to be a century-long journey to universal adult suffrage. At every general election held since, public bars throughout the land have resounded to the cry of “kick the buggers out”. And indeed, the most basic argument for democracy as a method of deciding who governs is that it allows citizens to remove corrupt, oppressive, incompetent or otherwise intolerable rulers without having to take up arms. Yet it is rare for the governing party at Westminster to suffer a rout on the scale UK voters meted out last week. Hitherto, the Tories had been crushed on only two occasions: in 1905-6 by the Liberals and their allies, the Irish Nationalists and the fledgling Labour party; and in 1997 by New Labour. They had also proved far more adept than their opponents at building alliances and winning elections, governing either alone or in coalition – normally as the senior partner – for 82 of the 124 years since 1900: hence their reputation as the “natural party of government”.
How the Tories' condign defeat came about is clear enough, but it would be wise to await the results of in-depth investigation before coming to firm conclusions about why it happened. Labour amassed 412 seats – almost two thirds of the total – with only 34 per cent of the vote, less than 2 points higher than in 2019, when it won 203, its lowest tally since 1935. In England, Labour's share rose by only half a point, while in Wales it actually fell by four points. In both countries, there was widespread tactical voting alongside a surge of support for Reform UK, whose predecessor, the Brexit party, withdrew most of its candidates in 2019 to help Boris Johnson win what amounted to a “de facto referendum”. The beneficiaries of this double squeeze were Labour and the Lib Dems, depending on which of them was better placed to beat the Tories. In addition, many disaffected Tory voters stayed at home, deepening their party's slump and contributing to a fall in turnout, which was down from 67 per cent in 2019 to 60 per cent this time.* In Scotland, by contrast, there was a marked swing from SNP to Labour, as foreshadowed by the Rutherglen and Hamilton by-election, though contrary to earlier assumptions, Labour would still have won a big majority at Westminster, even without Scottish Labour's 37 gains from the SNP. For once, the nations of mainland Britain were travelling in tandem, albeit by different ways and means.
But if Labour's victory was broad, it was also shallow: a repudiation of Tory misgovernment rather than a ringing endorsement of Labour's minimalist policy offer, encapsulated in the cryptic campaign slogan, “Change”. Both the tone and the substance of Keir Starmer's brief address to the nation on becoming Prime Minister seemed to bear out this assessment. He took care to avoid triumphalism, signalled the end of campaigning, paid tribute to his predecessor, and vowed that his would be an inclusive administration, dedicated to serving all citizens in all four UK nations, regardless of how they voted. He also pledged that his government would strive to restore public faith in the country's political institutions, which had been badly shaken by the misdemeanours of politicians and by systemic dysfunctions in the machinery of government and the public services. In the days that followed, the buzzword among Labour ministers was 'reset', liberally applied to everything from relations with the EU and defence policy to land-use planning and NHS recovery. But 'reset' is no more informative than than 'change'. Once used by printers to refer to the recomposition of type, the word covers everything from minor policy adjustments to root-and-branch reform. Labour's message, in short, is sombre and cautious: having promised nothing that cannot be 'delivered', the government is hoping for growth to replenish the public coffers, while holding out the assurance that better times lie ahead simply because responsible grown-ups are now in charge.
Electoral politics and the war of position
Evidently, a change in the governing party does not necessarily bring a change of policy-regime. In fact, since the end of the Second World War, this has happened only twice: in 1945, when the first majority Labour government consolidated the wartime shift to a managed form of capitalism and put the maintenance of full employment, the creation of the welfare state and the pursuit of the common good at the heart of public policy; and in 1979, when the first Thatcher government abandoned these commitments and put market forces back in charge of society's development. After 45 years of neo-liberal social engineering, we desperately need a new policy regime to tackle what Ed Miliband calls the twin crises of economic inequality that scars our society and of climate change that imperils the world. But in a liberal democracy, radical reform cannot be achieved without winning hearts and changing minds, and this takes time: it can hardly be done in the space of a six-week election campaign. As Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist leader, remarked: “The counting of votes is merely the final stage in a long process.”
The trouble with Labour – one of the troubles – is that with its single-minded focus on fighting or preparing to fight elections in order to win the power that comes with being in government, it ignores what Gramsci called the “war of position” in civil society: the relentless, unending engagement with entrenched and widespread habits, practices, attitudes and preconceptions that obstruct or inhibit progress towards a fairer, greener, happier, less divided and more democratic form of society. To be fair, Labour's left-wing critics frequently display the same fault, making demands on government or proposing solutions to economic and social problems that might be feasible if we were already living in a different world, but which, in this one, are at odds with prevailing values and beliefs and could not be achieved without an implausibly large shift in the balance of political forces. A prime example is the proposal for a 'universal' or 'citizens' basic income.
We are, then, at a rare – indeed, in some ways unique – moment in British history. The Tories are defeated, discredited, demoralised and divided. They also face the threat of a reverse takeover by Reform UK, whose leader and majority shareholder, Nigel Farage, has warned that once he has finished hoovering up members, voters and donors from the Tories, he will be “coming after” Labour. No one knows or can know what the political landscape will look like in five years’ time, but a realignment of the right, perhaps involving a formal split between traditional 'one-nation' Tories and their hard right opponents must be reckoned a distinct possibility. After all, this pattern is already the new norm in continental Europe and a second Trump presidency in the US will send shock waves across the Atlantic. In the meantime, Keir Starmer's government will have its work cut out mending “broken Britain” and laying the foundations of “national renewal.” Its ideas about how to do these things are still a work in progress and for the time being caution remains the watchword. On the other hand, with a parliamentary majority of 174, Labour can expect to serve at least two terms in office – geopolitical and other 'external' events permitting – and this in turn offers scope for progressive forces both inside and outside the Labour party, to influence its thinking.
Electoral reform and tax (in)tolerance
I argued earlier that the Labour party is primarily an election-fighting machine, with little or no capacity to provide the moral and intellectual leadership that in the long run determines how far and how fast progress can be made towards a better world. The question for the scattered remnants of the left, whatever their current political home, is whether they are willing and able to step into the breach. To illustrate what this entails, consider two key issues: electoral reform and tax (in)tolerance. The former scarcely figured in the election campaign, but looms over the results; the latter took centre stage in a series of televised 'debates' as the Tories laid into Labour's pared-back tax and spending plans with cavalier disregard for honesty and truth. These slanging matches were not just unedifying, they also served to conceal a basic misconception shared by both sides: that taxes are an unalloyed 'burden' on private firms and workers, regardless of what the taxpaying public gets for its money. Given this tacit assumption, what passed for 'debate' was bound to focus on the growth of the overall 'tax burden' in a flat-lining economy.
The case for some form of proportional representation (PR) is, in part, the case against the existing, first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. The 2024 election powerfully reinforced the chief objection to FPTP: that it can and usually does result in wide disparities between the shares of the votes cast for the various parties and the shares of the seats they win. Labour, with 34 per cent of the votes, scooped up 63 per cent of the seats; the Lib Dems, who are normally disadvantaged by FPTP and have long advocated PR, obtained 12 per cent of the votes and 11 per cent of the seats; while Reform UK, with 14 per cent of the votes, ended up with a mere 5 seats – less than one per cent of the total. The other defects of FPTP all stem from this inherent unfairness: safe seats, wasted votes, tactical voting and the high barriers faced by new parties seeking to break into the system, though despite the obstacles, challenger parties have managed to establish themselves: the SNP in Scotland; Plaid Cymru in Wales; and across the UK as a whole, the Greens and the party now known as Reform UK. Moreover, the traditional defence of FPTP that it produces 'stable government' has been exploded by the upheavals that began with the Brexit referendum in 2016, gave us three general elections in seven years and unseated five prime ministers in the process.
It is, however, not enough to spell out the faults of the existing system. To have any chance of changing it, would-be reformers must decide which version of PR to campaign for, and this means asking not which is best in some abstract timeless sense, but which is best all things considered, in the specific situation we find ourselves in. An achievable alternative to FPTP will have to command broad cross-party support and cut with the grain of public opinion, which almost certainly means retaining the existing system of parliamentary representation based, as far as possible, on distinctive local constituencies, each with roughly the same number of voters.
It will not be easy to persuade a government with a majority of 174 to embrace PR. After Labour's landslide victory in 1997, Tony Blair appointed Roy Jenkins to chair a commission on electoral reform and would have enacted its recommendations but for the stubborn resistance of Labour MPs, seemingly incapable of recognising that even governments with gargantuan majorities will one day fall from power. Borne by chariot on his first ceremonial procession through the streets of imperial Rome, a new emperor was accompanied by a slave who would whisper in his ear, “Memento mori” (Remember you are mortal). Today's Labour parliamentarians need to be reminded that politics is much more volatile than it used to be. In the 1960s about one in eight British voters switched their choice between elections. By the 1980s, it was one in five. In 1997, the proportion was two fifths. In 2019 most of the electorate were swing voters. In short, a government elected by only 34 per cent of the votes on a turnout of 60 per cent must take care to keep the public onside. And prudence apart, if the government is serious about restoring trust in our political institutions, it needs to grasp the nettle of electoral reform.
Efforts to raise the ceiling of tax tolerance and change the discourse of fiscal policy are no less important if we in Britain are to tackle the scourge of economic inequality and play our part in averting existential threats to humanity, from global warming to great-power rivalry. The left has always argued that taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society, that those with the broadest backs should bear the heaviest load, and that systematic inequalities of income and wealth are justified only to the extent that they benefit society as a whole. But in a world of privatised lives, fragmented class structures and competing sources of identity, these venerable social precepts have lost their appeal and need to be thoroughly refurbished if they are to form the basis of a new common sense and a new social settlement.
16 July 2024
Endnote
*Three other factors depressed the turnout: the requirement for voters to show valid photographic ID at polling stations; Rishi Sunak's decision to call the election in July rather than in the autumn, as previously expected; and voter fatigue and irritation brought on by a long and rancorous election campaign.