The UK Election

 

To no one's surprise, the Leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer has been summoned by the King to form a new government in the wake of his party's landslide victory in yesterday's election. (The UK just conducted an election campaign in exactly six weeks. Why can't the US do something similar?)

The Labour landslide (412 seats in the House of Commons, a 170-seat majority) had been expected. The corresponding catastrophic shattering of the Conservatives had likewise been expected. In the last General Election in 2019, the Conservatives won a majority of 80 seats against a severely weakened Labour Party. If nothing else, these results confirm the volatility of the electorate and how quickly things can change in a democratic polity.

British politics are British politics, not American or French or anything else. One cannot uncritically extrapolate the results of one country's election as directly reflective of politics in other places. But there are, I think, some obvious observations one can make. 

In France, voters seem to be voting rightward, in Britain leftward. What both have in common appears to be an anger against the government in power. This is obviously not the best time to be an incumbent seeking reelection, which may (in part at least) explain some of President Joe Biden's poor poll numbers, which were already problematic even before last week's debate. There seems to be a kind of generic anger among voters reflecting the widespread perception that things are not going well, that people are not doing well, at least not so well as they should, at least as well as should perhaps be expected in our prosperous society - and that the established parties have repeatedly failed to address those popular anxieties.

All over the "West," voters seem angry and willing to turn in whatever direction promises change of some sort or other. Indeed, while the Conservatives clearly lost in Britain, Labour's vote share was not some magnificent improvement on its perilous performance. Instead, many votes apparently went to other parties and "Independents" - including the new radical right Reform party and a smattering of far-left, pro-Palestinian Independents. (The one part of the UK where Labour seriously increased its vote share was Scotland, to the well deserved detriment of the Scottish Nation Party. Labour'sScottish resurgence was a welcome vote for the Union.) Turnout among voters was also low, which may send its own ominous message.

Again, political trends are not directly transferable from one national context to another, but the widespread (and in many instanced well justified) anger of voters at currently ruling elites has to be acknowledged as a critical factor in the current US campaign - and perhaps the biggest challenge to preventing a Trump restoration. US Democrats would do well to tone down their counter-productive obsessions with identity politics and focus more forcefully on ordinary people's concerns.