The election results in the United Kingdom were as dull and predictable as the persona of the new prime minister, Keir Starmer. Starmer’s Labour Party won a massive 412 seats on the basis of merely 34% of the popular vote. In fact, Labour’s vote share under Starmer was only marginally better than the share in 2019 when Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was decisively defeated by Boris Johnson.
Labour governments have proven to be surprisingly transformative. In its first term between 1997 and 2001, before Britain went to war in Iraq on the basis of "sexed up" reports about weapons of mass destruction, the Tony Blair government achieved significant constitutional milestones such as the devolution of power in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 ended many years of trouble in Northern Ireland.
Keir Starmer lacks Blair's charisma and resembles the dullness of Clement Attlee. Attlee’s government created Britain’s post-war welfare State and the National Health Service. The question is whether Starmer’s Labour can be transformational in the way that Attlee’s was or that of Blair’s New Labour government.
Starmer’s timidity on taxation indicates wariness on high spending to get one of the most unproductive economies in the G7 moving again. Back in 1945, after the
ravages of the Second World War, Attlee, riding on Keynesian economics, was able to create a break for post-war Britain in what has been called the ‘Attlee revolution’. This was undone by the disruption of Margaret Thatcher's free market in the 1980s. Starmer has shown signs of committing himself to a continuation of the austerity that had characterised Conservative rule and caused irreparable harm to the social fabric as expenditure on public services had been cut back almost to the bone.
Yet, austerity barely seemed to be an issue in the 2024 elections. Instead, both Labour and the Conservatives kept appealing to and appeasing the electorate on the question of immigration. Thus the ill-effects of austerity got camouflaged by concerns over immigration. Both Labour and Conservatives seem to kowtow to two things. First, the logic of the market that dictates fiscal prudence, which, in turn, demands no or low tax rises, could fix Britain’s creaking public services. Second is the issue of immigration, the tune for which has been set by Nigel Farage’s immigration-obsessed Reform UK that received 14% of the vote share.
Those seeking the slim possibility of a transformative Labour government will take note of two surprising appointments in the Starmer cabinet. The pro-Palestine lawyer, Richard Hermer, was appointed attorney-general and James Timpson, the prisons minister. Centrist governments notionally on the left come into power with a great deal of promise, like the Joe Biden administration did in its early days after dislodging Donald Trump. They tend to make big on their promise in the early days, as the Biden administration did with legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act before sinking in the quagmire of unqualified support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. The Blair premiership had a similar story, with Iraq being the quagmire back then.
Gaza will make its presence felt in the British Parliament too in the form of four MPs, the most prominent among them being Shockat Adam. There will also be the brooding presence of Corbyn who has won as an independent from Islington North. In his 41 years as a parliamentarian, he has been proven right on most issues, such as his opposition to the Iraq war. But Corbyn has always been a maverick. His rise as party leader in 2015 was incongruous, to say the least. In the 2017 elections, Corbyn’s Labour was within striking distance of victory. Eurosceptic and socialist Corbyn has been a lifelong campaigner against racism and, yet, was ambushed by allegations of anti-Semitism that proved to be his undoing. His presence will likely highlight the historical wrong-footedness of the Starmer government.
Amir Ali teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU
