The left has won big in the UK – but look deeper

Parties on the right have had a lot of luck in Europe recently. But this year’s British election was a relief for the left. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won 411 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. At the previous election in 2019, the Conservatives had won 365 seats, breaking through Labour’s legendary red wall in the north.

Jeremy Corbyn, the former left-wing Labour leader, is now out of the party. Under Starmer, Labour has moved resolutely to the centre, while the Tories (as Britain’s Conservatives are known) have imploded in post-Brexit fratricidal bloodshed.

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The UK has a first-past-the-post parliamentary system. The candidate with the most votes becomes a Member of Parliament (MP) in each constituency. The party leader who has a majority in the House of Commons becomes Prime Minister and governs the UK from 10 Downing Street.

The first-past-the-post system can lead to some strange results. For example, the Liberal Democrats won a lower percentage of the vote than Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, but the former won many more seats than the latter in this election. However, the Tories and the Scottish Nationalists were the big losers in 2024, while smaller parties flourished, as the table below shows.

Unusually for a British government, the new Labour government is led by former civil servants rather than career politicians. Starmer is a centrist who aims to restore stability to the United Kingdom. Before his political career, Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service. His new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, worked at the Bank of England. Both have a reputation for competence and caution. Like previous prime ministers Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Teresa May and David Cameron, Starmer and Reeves went to Oxford University. But they did not come from wealthy backgrounds or attend elite schools. They defied expectations to rise to the top.

Unlike left leaders in many other parts of the world, Reeves is not promising more government spending. Instead, she is advocating supply-side economics to boost growth. In her first major speech, Reeves pledged to make economic growth the top priority of her government through increased private investment, labor force participation and productivity. Both Starmer and Reeves are fiscally prudent, which should help stabilize the British economy after eight difficult years following the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Fund managers and business leaders in New York and London say the risk premium for British assets will fall because of the Labour government’s reputation for accountability. They believe Starmer and Reeves will push for a closer relationship with Europe, ease frictions in U.K.-EU trade and boost housebuilding. Unlike most other democracies, the left-wing party has been given a thumbs-up by markets and business leaders.

Conservative collapse gave Labour victory, what now?

As this author predicted in 2016, Brexit turned out to be “a bloody close call,” and what followed was madness. Prime ministers came and went with alarming frequency; Truss had less than the shelf life of a lettuce. After Brexit, Britain could not decide whether to become Singapore-on-Thames or a revived manufacturing powerhouse with rejuvenated northern cities. Immigration remained a problem. Shipping migrants to Rwanda failed to excite the public. Johnson’s parties during the COVID-19 pandemic turned public irritation at draconian government restrictions into open anger. Sunak had the charisma of a dead mouse and a knack for fatal political blunders, such as leaving D-Day celebrations early for a meaningless television interview. In short, the Tories screwed up so badly that a Labour victory was obvious long before the election.

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Labour’s victory is huge. Yet it is a superficial one. Only one in five Britons voted for the party. Importantly, turnout has fallen from 69% in 2019 to 60% in 2024. In 2017, almost 12.9 million people voted for Labour. In 2019, that figure fell to under 10.3 million. This year, just under 9.7 million voters cast their ballots for Labour. A chart from FOI, a political and geopolitical risk consultancy, tells an interesting story about voting figures and seats in parliament in the last two UK elections.

British politics has become extremely dynamic. New trends are worth noting. The significant vote shares of the right-wing populist Reform UK Party — second only to Labour in 92 constituencies — and the Green Party — second only to Labour in 41 constituencies — put pressure on Labour to improve immigration and environmental policies respectively. Recent riots across the UK show that voters are concerned about migrants flooding into the UK. The Starmer government will have to limit the arrivals. Indeed, immigration was a major reason why voters voted for Brexit in 2016.

During the election campaign itself, Labour promised to tackle illegal immigration more effectively, unveiling a plan to reduce net migration by training British workers. Labour threatened to block companies that failed to comply from sponsoring visas for their workers abroad. On his first full day as prime minister, Starmer cancelled the outgoing Conservative government’s plan to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda, saying: “I am not prepared to continue with gimmicks that do not act as a deterrent.” Instead, his government wants to restrict small boats crossing the English Channel by hiring detectives and using counter-terrorism powers to “crush” criminal people-smuggling rings.

On renewables, Starmer’s government has promised to accelerate the development of large projects by assessing them nationally, not locally, and to end an effective ban on onshore wind farms. The rise of the Green Party, as mentioned, and the revival of the Liberal Democrats (the party for the nice Tories of the counties) will make Starmer’s Labour more environmentally friendly than Sunak’s Tories. (As an aside, the Liberal Democrats’ victory in the heartland of the Tories saw them win seats held by five former Tory prime ministers.)

Most political parties with such a large majority would pursue a much more radical agenda. Starmer is determined not to do that. People close to the prime minister reveal that he is playing the long game and aims to stay in power for at least two terms. Starmer is determined to restore Labour’s credibility as a party of responsible government after 14 years in opposition and the damage done under Corbyn’s leadership.

The country is now run not by alumni of the famous public schools (the quaint British name for expensive private schools), but by leaders who come from working-class and middle-class backgrounds. They are more self-reflective, down-to-earth and tougher than their conservative counterparts. To put it in English Civil War terms, Starmer and Reeves are Roundheads, not Cavaliers. After years of posh public schoolboys from Eton and Winchester calling the shots, down-to-earth citizens are at the top.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Fair Observer.