The British Labour Party’s landslide victory is historic. “Change begins now,” the new prime minister Keir Starmer said, capturing the public mood – and the hunger for a better Britain. His parliamentary majority is enormous, and so is Labour’s mandate for “change”.
The catch is that the problems facing the new government have built up over 14 years and are also enormous. However impatient voters – and new Labour MPs – may be, Mr Starmer has an in-tray that no one will envy. It’s a list of problems that voters want fixed immediately but which have been years in the making and will take more than a five-year parliament to fix.
The lack of affordable housing, for example, is so severe that many young British people feel they may never own their own home. The fix doesn’t just involve building the homes, which itself takes time.
What’s needed includes changing planning laws, improving the economy, paying good wages and cutting the cost of borrowing. Then, how does Mr Starmer’s new team – a party out of government for almost a decade and a half – fix record waiting lists for National Health Service appointments?
Where do we find and train new medical teams? How does he fix the problem of many people unable to find an NHS dentist? What – despite all the hot air, promises and senseless ideas of sending migrants to Rwanda – is a realistic solution to the problem of migrant boats in the English Channel? And how do you fix the underfunding of the great British cultural assets including universities?
The problems facing the best and the brightest among us are enormous. British students right now leave university with debts averaging around £45,000. According to the Student Loans Company one (anonymous) student who pursued advanced degrees has accrued student loan debts of more than £200,000. In another case, a newly qualified doctor, Dr Luke Amos, told the BBC that his student debt "became almost a joke when I saw the outstanding balance break the £100,000 barrier".
And then, although it will not be presented by Mr Starmer in exactly this way, what does the triumphant new Labour government do about Britain’s image abroad? Can we reverse our decline in hard power? The British army has been under-resourced to the point where even the former Conservative Defence Secretary Ben Wallace suggested it was only good for “tootling around” at home.
As a result of Brexit, Britain has made itself much less significant within Europe. The knock-on effect recognised by diplomats is that the UK is now also less important to its indispensable ally, the US.
The New York Times graphically illustrated the UK’s difficulties for its politically savvy and internationally minded readers this week. They reported that in the UK food bank use has increased by 5000 per cent in the 14 years the Conservatives were in power. Graduate debt is up 210 per cent. Homelessness is up 120 per cent. The asylum backlog is up 1,300 per cent. Hospital waiting lists are up 210 per cent. And while cutting migration was a cornerstone Conservative policy – net migration is, in fact, up 170 per cent.
That list of problems and failures sunk the Conservative party to a truly historic, inevitable and – many commentators might conclude – deserved defeat. But that same list has now become the Keir Starmer in-tray. Starmer has therefore been extremely cautious about promising immediate improvements.
But the key takeaway from this election is an extraordinary hunger and mandate for change. Big names in the Conservative party have been punished and humiliated for their years of failure.
The Conservatives will head into bitter in-fighting (no change there) and are split between traditional moderate right-wing policies and some radical far-right ideas. They have lost seats in every direction including to the troublesome Reform party of Nigel Farage.
Mr Farage, after seven previous failed attempts is now – eighth time lucky – at last an MP. His well-financed right-wing Reform party is now a force to be reckoned with and more trouble for the Conservatives. But Labour are the clear winners. They have plenty of ideas, even if the scale of change they believe is necessary will take a decade.
Labour has even succeeded in turning back the tide of Scottish nationalism, winning back many seats from the Scottish National Party. They have helped wipe out the Conservatives in Wales, and the Conservative allies in Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party have suffered setbacks. Sinn Fein has done well. The Conservatives are therefore essentially an English – rather than British – political party now.
But the election – and the future – belongs to Labour. The British people have shown their impatience with failure and a suspicion of the promises of governments and politicians of all types.
One of the little-discussed but interesting statistics about the UK is that British people tend to trust each other much more than citizens of comparable OECD countries. But we trust our governments less than other comparable countries. That means the Keir Starmer honeymoon is likely to be brief.
He will, however, be helped for a time by his political enemies. The Conservative party for years has been having a kind of nervous breakdown. The bitterness on the right of British politics is based on grudges, personal ambitions and loathing, and that will undoubtedly continue.
Mr Starmer will enjoy the briefest of honeymoons because the real problem he faces is not that anyone doubts his victory. It is that in terms of seats the Labour Party has won a landslide but in terms of votes, under the peculiar British system of First Past The Post, Labour has not received a vastly different share of the votes from its big historic loss in the 2019 general election.
Mr Starmer has begun to climb the mountain of power. He talks well of the politics of public service, saying that “it is now time for us to deliver.” Well, that’s true. But when your vote share is the same as in 2019 – one of Labour’s worst defeats in almost a century – and in 2024 that same vote share produces one of your best results, Mr Starmer has to be humble in victory not triumphant.
A historic vote of no confidence in the Conservative party is not evidence of long-term enthusiasm for Labour. The Labour project has an enormous parliamentary mandate and for now a great deal of good will. But – as a former British prime minister once said of his opponent – “you were the future once.”
