Britons went to the polls on July 4 exhausted by fourteen years of Tory rule, but not overjoyed by the projected landslide victory of Labour. Labour won more than four hundred MPs in the last election, with more than 33% of the vote, although its result was only 1.4 percentage points higher than the previous election. Its candidate and new prime minister, Keir Starmer, lacks the charisma of the man who led the party to its last major victory, former prime minister Tony Blair. Instead, many consider him a boring politician. But they share a common denominator of moderate character and a central-centre approach to the party.
However, the Conservative Party crisis also finally gave wings to Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist party that entered Parliament with four deputies. Despite the failure of the Conservatives, with a loss of more than two hundred seats, the two formations together surpassed the Labour Party in terms of votes. The election therefore reflected the intention to remove the Conservatives from government after years of scandal and instability, rather than a left wave led by the Labour Party itself.
It’s Labor’s turn to the centre
Little remains of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, Starmer’s predecessor. In 2015, just before the Brexit referendum, Corbyn tried to steer his party toward positions close to European social democracy, with proposals that focused on strengthening the welfare state, such as tax increases for the highest earners and big businesses. But popular British tabloids labeled him a radical leftist, Marxist, anti-nationalist and even anti-Semite because of his support for the Palestinian cause. The project was halted by the landslide victory of Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in the 2019 election.
Starmer took over the leadership of the Labour Party in 2020, months after the election. He has since shifted…