The left has won a major victory in the UK, but we need to look further afield

Right-wing parties have been doing well 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. In the previous election in 2019, the Conservatives won 365 seats, breaking through Labour’s legendary red wall in the north.

Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the left wing of the Labour Party, is no longer a member of the party. Under Starmer, Labour has moved decisively to the centre, even as the Tories (as Britain’s Conservatives are known) have imploded in a post-Brexit fratricidal bloodbath.

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The United Kingdom has a first-past-the-post parliamentary system. The candidate who receives the most votes becomes an MP in each constituency. The leader of the party with the majority in the House of Commons becomes Prime Minister and governs the United Kingdom from 10 Downing Street.

First-past-the-post can produce some strange results. For example, the Liberal Democrats won a lower percentage of the vote than Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, but the former won significantly more seats than the latter in that election. However, the Conservatives and 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 wants to bring stability to the UK. 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 studied at Oxford University. But they did not come from wealthy backgrounds or elite schools. They overcame obstacles to reach the top.

Unlike left-wing leaders in many other parts of the world, Keanu 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 his government by raising private investment, employment and productivity. Both Starmer and Reeves are fiscally prudent, which should help stabilise the UK economy after eight difficult years following the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Fund managers and business leaders in New York and London believe the risk premium for British assets will fall because of the Labour government’s reputation for responsibility. They believe Starmer and Reeves will promote a closer relationship with Europe, reduce friction in UK-EU trade and boost housebuilding. Unlike most other democracies, this left-wing party has won the approval of markets and business leaders.

The collapse of the Conservatives made it easier for Labour to win. What now?

As this author predicted in 2016, Brexit proved to be a dicey proposition, and what followed was madness. Prime ministers came and went with alarming frequency; Truss had a shelf life far shorter than that of a head of government. lettuceAfter Brexit, Britain could not decide whether to become a Singapore on the Thames or a revived industrial powerhouse with rejuvenated northern cities. Immigration remains a problem. Shipping Migrants in Rwanda have not generated much public enthusiasm. Johnson’s holidays During the COVID-19 pandemic, public irritation at draconian government restrictions turned to open anger. Sunak had the charisma of a dead mouse and a knack for fatal political blunders such as exit The D-Day celebrations came early for an uninteresting TV interview. In short, the Tories made such a mistake that a Labour victory was a foregone conclusion long before the election.

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Labour’s victory is huge. But it is superficial. Only one in five Britons voted for the party. Strikingly, 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 voted for Labour. A graph from HE WASa political and geopolitical risk consultancy, tells an interesting story about voting figures and parliamentary seats in the last two British elections.

British politics has become extremely dynamic. New trends are worth highlighting. The large vote shares of the right-wing populist British Reform Party, second only to Labour in 92 constituencies, and the Green Party, second only to Labour in 41 constituencies, are putting pressure on Labour to improve immigration and environmental policies respectively. riots Polls in the UK show that voters are concerned about the influx of migrants into the country. The Starmer government will have to limit the arrivals. In fact, immigration was one of the main reasons why voters voted for Brexit in 2016.

During the election campaign, Labour pledged to tackle illegal immigration more effectively, unveiling a plan to reduce net migration by training British workers. Labour has threatened to block companies that do not comply with the rules from sponsoring visas for their foreign workers. On his first full day as prime minister, Starmer cancelled the outgoing Conservative government’s plans to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda, saying: “I am not prepared to proceed with plans that do not have a deterrent effect.” Instead, his government wants to clamp down on small boats crossing the Channel by hiring detectives and using counter-terrorism powers to break up criminal people-smuggling rings.

On renewables, Starmer’s government has promised to speed up the development of major projects by assessing them nationally, not locally, and by ending the effective ban on onshore wind farms. The Green Party, mentioned above, and the revival of the Liberal Democrats (the party of the nice Tories in the county) will ensure that Starmer’s Labour Party is more environmentally friendly than Sunak’s Conservatives. (In Conservative strongholds they won seats held by five former Conservative prime ministers.)

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

The country is no longer governed by alumni of the famous public schools (a quaint British name for expensive private schools), but by leaders from the working class and middle classes. They are more introspective, pragmatic and strict than their conservative counterparts. To use the jargon of the English Civil War, Starmer and Reeves are Roundheads, not Cavaliers. After years of rule by pupils from the posh public schools of Eton and Winchester, pragmatic citizens are at the top.

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