Labour has just won an early general election in the UK, ending the Conservatives’ long reign. But Keir Starmer’s mandate will only perpetuate anti-social and xenophobic policies and deepen the political crisis.
“I wonder if you two are really the best at being Prime Minister,” one voter asked dryly during a debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Judging by one of the highest abstention rates (almost 40%) in British election history, it was a question many working and young people in Britain were asking themselves on Thursday.
Millions of people voted to punish the Conservatives who have been in power for the past 14 years and are responsible for Brexit, the financial crisis, the recession, the collapse of public hospitals and the impoverishment of the working class. Other sectors of the electorate have oscillated between apathy and resignation. And for good reason: the alternative to the Conservatives is terrible. Their defeat had more to do with the Conservatives’ crises than with the gains made by Starmer’s Labour party.
The Labour Party, under Keir Starmer’s leadership, has revived the neoliberal traditions of Tony Blair’s New Labour: hard left on security and immigration, and conciliatory to the bosses on economic issues.
After Jeremy Corbyn’s decade of neo-reformism as Labour leader, which brought hundreds of thousands of young progressive activists back into the party by promising them nationalisation of the transport and energy sectors, an end to university fees or even massive investment in public services, Labour’s far right has taken revenge in recent years and purged almost the entire left wing of the party, with Corbyn as its leader.
British editorialists have been keen to compare Corbyn’s Labour manifesto to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. But when it comes to Starmer’s Labour manifesto, almost everyone agrees that it is a red Tory programme.
Amid massive mobilizations of solidarity on the streets with the Palestinian people, both Sunak and Starmer agreed to relentlessly support Israel’s “right to defend itself”, that is, the right to continue its genocide against the Palestinian people, long before adopting the coy position of supporting a “cessation of hostilities”.
Labour and the Conservatives also agree on the need to reduce immigration in a brutal way. Labour and the Conservatives agree on the need to follow a “responsible” fiscal policy that is open to dialogue with companies and investors, the refusal to raise taxes on companies, and the conditioning of social assistance and public service funding on economic recovery. With this openly pro-business program, it is not surprising that even bourgeois media such as the Financial Times or The Economist officially support Keir Starmer’s candidacy.
If Labour wins, it will be mainly due to the peculiarities of the voting method in British general elections: there are no second rounds and whoever gets the most votes wins a seat in parliament, even by a small margin. This process has benefited both parties in the regimes that have been in power since the beginning of the 20th century, thus slowing down the emergence of new political groups.
Thus, in 2024, Labour lost hundreds of thousands of votes compared to 2019 and millions of votes compared to 2017, but won a supermajority of 411 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons. This is despite the fact that some of its supporters have switched to the Green Party and pro-Palestinian independent candidates, including Jeremy Corbyn.
The Conservative Party’s electoral base, particularly among the middle and working classes, has been significantly eroded, benefiting Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party and the Liberal Democrats (who made a big gain, with 71 seats), but the Conservative party remains with 121 seats. Although Reform UK won 14% of the vote, not far behind the Conservatives who won 21% of the vote, they only won 4 seats.
Where is Britain headed? If Keir Starmer is to be believed, this election result promises “glimmers of hope” and significant change. In reality, Labour will inherit the same downward spiral of economic decline and disintegration of influence that the country experienced after the 2008 financial crisis and Brexit. The exhaustion and collapse of public services will continue, the queues at food banks will continue to grow, unemployment will continue to amplify the sense of humiliation in many homes.
Even before coming to power, Labour had broken many of its long-standing promises, such as investing £28m in the ecological transition and abolishing university tuition fees. The changes promised by Labour would be a continuation of austerity and neoliberal policies and would deepen the trend towards political crisis in Britain, and further pave the way for the far right.
Beyond the more general dynamics between the ruling parties in this regime, there are also millions of people in Britain who have participated in strikes in the health and education sectors, among others, in recent years or who have shown solidarity with the Palestinian people, and who have been attacked by the Conservative and Labour parties for this. In the near future, these workers and young people, whose voices are not represented by any party in this regime, will also have a say in the future of their country. And to express this, voting in elections alone will not be enough.
“Web specialist. Incurable twitteraholic. Explorer. Organizer. Internet nerd. Avid student.”
