For an American the most amazing thing about the UK general election July 4th was watching a defeated right-wing politician state the reality that his party had lost, announce that he would be resigning that very day, openly acknowledge that his opponent, Keir Starmer, “will shortly become our Prime Minister”—shortly meaning that same day—and then go on to say,
In this job, his successes will be all our successes, and I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is a decent, public-spirited man, who I respect. He and his family deserve the very best of our understanding, as they make the huge transition to their new lives behind this door [of 10 Downing Street].
There was a peaceful and even friendly transfer of power. Whatever happens in the US presidential election in November it will not be any of this. I read the outgoing PM Rishi Sunak’s statement a couple of times for the sheer novelty of the loser admitting he’d lost and leaving.
The General Election has produced a Labour landslide of a size that happens only every 20 or thirty years in British politics. The media is busy complicating this but the basic situation is stark. It’s complete power shift, based on the crushing of the Conservatives and the domination of Labour in parliament. Keir Starmer is only the 4th Labour head of party in history to win an outright majority, with Tony Blair being the last. Labour has won 411 seats, a doubling of its 202 in the last Parliament. The Tories have collapsed to about one third of their power until a few days ago, from 365 to 121. The current truism is that this was a Tory loss more than a Labour win. Ok, but what a loss, and so deeply deserved.
Unless you live here, the crumbling that the Tories generated is hard to believe. Trains, health care, sewage treatment, home building, education, universities, you name it, it doesn’t work. The Tories actively made everything worse. They presided over a capital strike in the private sector, made much worse by Brexit, so that basic investment in business is years behind where it would normally be in a wealthy country. Public sector investment is decades behind. Cameron and Osborne deliberately starved it on the grounds that services like education, health, and transport are Labour strongholds—while also prepping it for private-sector take-over by Tory-connected firms. Outside of London and a few other rich cities, the British social fabric is noticeably worse than that its former West and Northern European peers. In capitalist terms, it’s no longer competitive. There’s an ex-First World feeling here, and widespread doubt whether, given the damage done in only 14 years, Britain will ever catch up again.
You’d also have to live through everyday Tory behavior to believe it. The U.S. is big enough to escape Washington. There is no escape from Westminster on the British Isles. The individual cabinet members were never picked for competence or knowledge, like, ever. Some had a certain momentum in media messaging—Kemi Badenoch for example--but were nonetheless intellectually chaotic and self-serving. They were also always wrong. Michael Gove set the tone for the decade with his TV crack that “the people of this country have had enough of experts,” by which he really meant Tories, and the government was a parade of people who not only knew nothing about their briefs but distained people who actually did—like civil servants, renamed by dopes like Liz Truss as “the blob.” Well the blob had more brains in one protoplasmic cell than an entire Tory cabinet at any given time.
The British learned how that turns out. People die unnecessarily from Covid and get an unending series of fake solutions to problems only indirectly admitted to exist. Ministers changed their minds constantly, and each idea was worse than the one before. Their immigration plan was to take migrants who’d crossed the channel in “small boats” and fly them to Rwanda. (Many of them were Afghanis who’d worked for the UK in Kabul and elsewhere before being abandoned there.) Their solution on transport was to cut the national high speed rail plan to one 100 mile stretch from Birmingham to the outskirts of London. Their response to 50 universities in deficit and 45,000 pounds in average student debt was to propose mandatory national service for young people. The British military now has trouble firing its missiles. Press events with the prime minister Rishi Sunak were like Monty Python sketches. Luckily Marina Hyde and John Crace were there to write them as such in their Guardian columns. Summing up, Hyde’s book was called What Just Happened?
So Starmer offered himself as a human off-switch for a country that above all wanted Tory misrule to stop. His acceptance speech was an unrousing promise of “a government unburdened by doctrine, guided only by a determination to serve your interests. To defy, quietly, those who have written our country off.” But actually promising also nothing was great! Using government to fix potholes will be the same. It means the next few years will at least not be idiotic.
In other words, there is general relief that Labour will stop the bleeding. Self-harm, first and foremost Brexit, will not keep repeating itself.
But I still have to ask, why did the Tories do so much damage to their own country in the first place?
I see two big reasons. The first I’ve already mentioned. Tory culture is still deeply Thatcherite, which always choses power over knowledge. People have been saying for years how absurdly centralized British government is. It controls student fees at every university in England, for example, and controls council budgets. A US equivalent would be the Santa Barbara city and county base budgets being set not in Santa Barbara or even in Sacramento but in Washington D.C. This has been Conservative Party policy since Thatcher. When the Greater London Council became a stronghold of Labour opposition to her policies in the early 1980s, she got it abolished by an act of parliament. This is good for central power, but also for central ignorance. Local knowledge and expertise never turns up where the decisions are actually made. “Devolution” was constantly discussed after 2015 but never enacted. Hence the hallmark of the Tory rule that I experienced since started to spend extended time here in 2013 and then moving here in 2020 was that steady dribble of obviously bad ideas, none of which could possibly work. And indeed none of them did.
So the first reason for their failure was a permanent Tory knowledge crisis rooted in Tory authoritarianism. When a warmed-over Thatcher idea like Cameron’s “Big Society” wasn’t working (it was really “starve government”), they just bore down harder on people and issued more orders.
The second reason for deep Tory damage was what filled the intellectual vacuum: entrenchment in a kind middle-aged influencer culture. Government communication was spin directed at the media, always authored by hustlers focused on building their personal brand. It would take a book to summarize the ludicrous acts booked onto the Tory government variety show. The effect was an entire society making major decisions like whether to leave the European Union or obey Covid lockdown rules with government-issued fake information. Naturally, the decisions were main bad, including making Boris Johnson, the epic liar about Brexit yielding £350 million a week for the National Health Service, the prime minister to “get Brexit done.” Large majorities now do see that Brexit hasn’t worked out, and the Tories sent trust in government to modern lows.
Each Tory trait, authoritarianism and non-stop marketing, has the same relation to knowledge, which is to replace it with bullshit in the philosophical sense—with signalling aiming only at getting people to think and do what you want. Authoritarians are good at marketing, since they are tightly focused on compliance. But marketing is terrible for defining and addressing actual problems—terrible at government in every sense. And Tories have finally been punished for it.
I mentioned that many people see the Conservatives as losing more than Labour winning. And they point to the fact that Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, wrote a bland and empty manifesto, promised very little and trimmed back even that, and focused mainly on reassuring business and financial markets. I have often said that they were running on Clintonomics circle 1992, which is also true. Everyone agrees their economic plan is too tiny to do anything—it amounts to a weekend of British GDP, Andy Haldane pointed out in the Financial Times.
But the great thing is that there’s been an epistemic break. Starmer et al, though the center-right of Labour, see the government as the place to address social problems and not as their personal hustle. They will lower the quantity of destructive nonsense. Less lying will make people more trusting. The ideas will have some connection to reality.
Finally, a vigorous nod to the consensus view: this has been a very shallow landslide for Labour. They got a huge majority of seats with 33.7% of the national vote. That was only one point more than Jeremy Corbyn got in the 2019 win for Boris Johnson that supposedly shattered the Labour party. And it was over 6 points less than Corbyn won against Teresa May in 2017. This was a national kicking of the Tories, as this slide from Ed Conway shows:
Labour owes over 100 of their 2024 seats to Nigel Farage’s far-right Racism Reform UK Party taking votes away from the Tories. Reform got 14% of the vote—3 points more than the Liberal Democrats got in their night of huge resurgence. The disproportion between votes and seats is unbelievable, and the biggest ever: Reform’s 14% got them 5 seats, or 1% of seats. The Lib Dems got 71 seats or 11%. Meanwhile, Labour’s 34% of the votes translated into 63% of the seats (the Conservatives 24% produced 19%). The Greens had a great night, with 7% of the votes, yielding 1% of seats.
British politics is much more local than North American, but still this is absurd, and says that an increasingly multi-party system will need to move to proportional voting.
By the way, I live in Islington North, where Jeremy Corbyn has been MP for decades. I and all my neighbors are happy to say that he won reelection as an Independent in spite of Starmer having purged him from Labour. And he beat the candidate that Labour had imposed—a medical services privatizer whose views were a further slap in the face to Corbyn.
I’m just going to declare this the start of a new era, really. And hope that France and the US do nearly as well.
