After 14 years of failed neo-liberal governance by the Conservatives-in-name-only, the Labour Party swept to victory in Thursday’s election as anti-Tory sentiment helped boost the leftist party to win a Tony Blair-style majority.
While most of Europe has shifted to the right, Britain is set for a shift to the left, as Sir Keir Starmer will meet with King Charles today at Buckingham Palace whereupon the monarch will appoint the leftist Labour Party leader as the next prime minister of the country with a majority of around 170 seats.
With 648 of 650 seats declared, the BBC has projected that the Labour Party secured 33.7 per cent of the vote compared to 23.7 per cent for the Conservatives, 14.3 per cent for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, 12.2 per cent for the Liberal Democrats and 6.8 per cent for the Green Party.
The vote share marks the lowest in the history of the Conservative Party, which fell to 121 seats, however, despite being projected to have at least 412 seats in Parliament and having won the second-largest majority of any Labour government other than Tony Blair’s in 1997, Labour actually underperformed compared to polls prior to the vote, many of which predicted Labour to beat the Tories by over 20 per cent, whereas the actual vote only saw them best the so-called Conservatives by around 10 per cent.
Labour also barely outperformed in terms of vote share from the 2019 general election when they were headed up by septuagenarian socialist Jeremy Corbyn when the party won 32 per cent of the vote but lost a heavy defeat to Boris Johnson’s Tories. Even more embarrassingly, Starmer appears to have won less total votes than Corbyn did in 2019. This means that while it will have complete control over the Parliament, Labour won a “loveless” victory based on divisions on the right rather than on passion for their platform.
Demonstrating the utter lack of a mandate the Labour government is coming in with, a YouGov survey released ahead of the vote found that 61 per cent of voters intended to back Labour “to get the Tories out” or because the “country needs a change”. Meanwhile, just five per cent said that they were mainly supporting the party because of its policies.
The transfer of government may also not see such a stark difference, regardless, given that the “Conservative” party which has led the country for the past 14 years has shifted so far to the left that many within the country regarded both Labour and the Tories as merely two sides of the same Westminster establishment coin.
However, others, notably Conservative political commentator Peter Hitchens, have warned that Sir Keir Starmer has intentionally cast himself as a boring, managerial technocrat in order to obscure his true radical nature and his alleged plans to continue with the Blairite project of dismantling British institutions.
During the tenure of Blair — whose premiership will likely serve as inspiration for Starmer — the UK saw wide-sweeping constitutional reforms which continue to impact the country to this day, including the creation of a Supreme Court, the creation of locally devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales, giving the Bank of England the ability to set interest rates without government approval, the introduction of a minimum wage, and the expansion of criminalising so-called hate speech.
Like Blair, Starmer has tried to put forward the image of a moderate to the public and to downplay his history as a radical Trotskyite socialist, claiming to have moderated from the days when he served as the editor of Socialist Alternative, a magazine dedicated to promoting the Pabloite brand of communism which seeks to combine socialist economic theories with the green agenda.
Just four years ago, Starmer admitted to holding many of the same views as he did as a young Trot, telling the New Statesman: “I don’t think there are big issues on which I’ve changed my mind.
“The big issue we were grappling with then was how the Labour Party, or the Left generally, bound together the wider movement and its strands of equality — feminist politics, green politics, LGBT — which I thought was incredibly exciting, incredibly important.”
As a “green-red” Pabloite, it is no wonder that climate-extremist policies will likely dominate his government, with the party vowing to achieve “Net Zero” carbon emissions by 2030, a plan which will fundamentally transform the British economy, likely raising the cost of living for millions, destroying domestic industry, and making the UK more reliant on foreign powers to meet its energy demands.
This will likely serve as a main area of attack against Labour for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which has become the principal challenger to Starmer’s party in many working-class regions. Reform has called for the ‘Net Zero’ goal to be scrapped entirely — arguing that it only serves to impoverish Britain while doing little in reducing emissions given that UK industries are merely offshored to countries like China. The Farage-led party has also called for an opening up of fracking for natural gas and investments in next-generation nuclear power plants.
Immigration will likely be a hot political battleground between Labour and Reform. Ahead of the election, Starmer vowed that mass migration would be reduced under a Labour government, however, he refused to commit to a specific annual cap, meaning that net migration will likely remain in the hundreds of thousands per year for the foreseeable future. On illegal immigration, Labour has vowed to scrap the plan to send boat migrants to Rwandan asylum processing centres while making a vague commitment to cracking down on the people smuggling gangs trafficking migrants across the English Channel.
Farage on the other hand has called for “net zero” legal immigration while advocating for the Royal Navy to be deployed to immediately return boat migrants back to the beaches of France. Reform has also advocated for an immediate withdrawal from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which controversially interceded in British domestic politics to block a migrant removal flight to Rwanda in the summer of 2022. Conversely, Starmer has expressed a willingness to partner more closely with Brussels to take in a quota of migrants from the EU to secure a returns deal with the bloc.
On top of likely having to face down Reform UK in working-class constituencies on the issue of migration, the resulting multicultural landscape in Britain looks to be a challenge for the new government. While Labour has vowed to recognise Palestine as a state, it still faces significant opposition in heavily Muslim regions, with Jonathan Ashworth, who was widely expected to be part of Starmer’s cabinet, losing his seat on Thursday to an independent candidate who ran on a pro-Palestinian platform.
To sure up support amongst Muslim communities, Starmer has vowed to enact a “zero-tolerance approach” towards so-called Islamophobia, promising to crack down on speech online “more robustly” to police what many have argued will be de-facto blasphemy laws in Britain.
The issue of gender will also likely be a controversial area for Labour, with even Sir Keir Starmer appearing to be at odds with himself on the issue in recent years. With the return of Red Wall seats to Labour on Thursday, the metropolitan woke elite in control of the party may come at odds with more socially conservative Members of Parliament from the working-class constituencies.
After going back and forth on the issue, Labour is reported to be planning to “modernise” the legal process for changing ones gender, scrapping the requirement for multiple doctors to sign off on a gender recognition certificate and the need for patients to demonstrate that they have been living as the opposite gender for at least two years. The party will also reportedly scrap school guidance saying teachers must tell children that there are only two biological sexes.
Starmer has personally struggled to maintain a consistent message on transgenderism, initially declaring that “99.9 per cent” of women could not have penises and later admitting the biological reality that a woman is an “adult female“. Longtime Labour supporter and prominent feminist, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has accused the party of “abandoning” women in its pursuit of woke ideology on gender.
Perhaps the most radical proposal put forward so far by Labour will be to allow 16-year-old children to vote in national elections, potentially creating a polity that would ensure Labour governance for many elections to come given the propensity of low-information young voters to support left-wing parties. However, with Nigel Farage’s surging popularity on youth-oriented platforms like TikTok, Reform may seek to use the increasingly conservative Gen Z to bolster its ranks as it builds a coalition to defeat Labour in the 2029 general election.
“This Labour government will be in trouble very, very quickly and we will now be targeting Labour votes, we are coming for Labour, be in no doubt about that,” Farage vowed Friday morning after winning a seat in Parliament.
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