The Labour Party has stormed back into power in the United Kingdom after 14 years in opposition, promising to replace the “chaos of the Conservatives” with a bland, utilitarian agenda to fix the things in the country that are broken.
“The change begins right here,” said Leader Keir Starmer after leading his party to a resounding 412 seats in Parliament.
That’s only slightly less than Tony Blair’s landslide win for Labour in 1997 and ties Blair’s result in 2001.
“I don’t promise you it will be easy,” said the 61-year-old Starmer. “Our task is nothing less than renewing the ideas that hold the country together.”
WATCH | New PM Keir Starmer meets with King Charles after Labour election win:
Keir Starmer, whose Labour Party defeated the ruling Conservatives in a general election, met with King Charles on Friday.
The Conservatives won 120 seats, down from the 342 with which they began the campaign.
Rather than making a hard ideological swing to the left, Labour under Starmer is promising to tack closer to the political centre and give Britons a break from the constant internal warfare that plagued the Tories throughout much of their four consecutive terms in office.
Included in Labour’s “mission-driven” platform are pledges to reduce hospital waiting times and crime by hiring more health-care workers and police officers. The public school system will get a new infusion of teachers. Labour also says it will fix a million potholes on British roads every year.
On the revenue side, it’s promising to raise money through targeted tax increases on things such as private school tuition fees, while avoiding across-the-board hikes.
Begrudging endorsement
When Starmer took over the party after former leader Jeremy Corbyn resigned in 2020, he dumped many of Labour’s traditional — and controversial positions — including nationalizing energy companies and railroads.
WATCH | Keir Starmer says U.K. voted ‘decisively’ for change:
Keir Starmer, appearing outside 10 Downing Street after Labour defeated the Conservatives in a U.K. general election, said voters want ‘national renewal and a return of politics to public service.’
He also began sounding more like a CEO, echoing the talking points of the business community by emphasizing the need to create the conditions for more wealth creation in the U.K.
In the end, even the notoriously anti-Labour Sun newspaper begrudgingly endorsed Starmer for prime minister.
“I think Keir Starmer has done a tremendous job of transforming the Labour Party and putting forward a program for government that I’m hopeful that people have got behind,” said Angela Rayner, who was No. 2 on the opposition benches, as the election results rolled in.
Rayner was named deputy prime minister on Friday.
After five prime ministers in eight years and near-constant turmoil over Brexit, Boris Johnson’s integrity and Liz Truss’s economic missteps, many British voters appeared ready to accept — although not necessarily embrace — the muted, measured presence of Starmer.
WATCH | Sunak resigns as PM and announces he will step down as party leader:
Rishi Sunak, speaking after the Conservative Party suffered defeat in a general election, said he is resigning. ‘You have sent a clear signal that the government of the United Kingdom must change and yours is the only judgment that matters,’ he said.
A human rights lawyer and the country’s former top Crown prosecutor, Starmer was knighted by the Queen in 2014 for his services to the criminal justice system.
Tories punished
The election result is “far more an anti-Tory outcome than a pro-Labour outcome,” said Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London.
“While Labour did very well, their vote [share] did not go up massively. They picked up votes where they needed them and didn’t where they didn’t need them.”
Labour gained 211 more seats than they won in 2019, but the party’s share of the vote in Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system only increased by less than two per cent. The Conservatives, on the other hand, saw their vote share plummet by 19 per cent.
This suggests the outcome of the election reflected voters’ desire to punish the Tories and not necessarily that they were enthralled by the Labour alternative.
Given the depth of Britain’s challenges — an underfunded health-care system, as well as an urgent need to build more social housing, tackle immigration and invigorate the economy — Menon says Starmer could end up with a very short political honeymoon.
“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Labour starts to become very unpopular within a very short space of time,” he said.
Populist breakthrough
The other big winner of the night was Reform UK.
The party — modelled on Canada’s former Reform Party, which began as a Western populist movement in the late 1980s — won its first ever seats in Britain’s Parliament.
Reform picked up four constituencies and won 14 per cent of the vote, as its anti-immigrant, low-tax platform appeared to connect with disillusioned Conservative voters.
For Leader Nigel Farage, it was eighth-time lucky, as he finally succeeded in winning a seat in the House of Commons, after trying for more than 20 years.
“To have done this in such a short space of time says something very fundamental is happening — it’s not just disappointment with the Conservative Party,” Farage told supporters in Clacton-on-Sea, after cruising to victory.
“There is a massive gap in the centre-right of British politics, and my job is to fill it.”
Reform will “add a new dynamic to the system,” said Simon Usherwood, professor of politics and international studies at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, in an interview on CBC News Network.
“[The party] will be a presence in the House of Commons, and they’re going to be putting pressure on that rump of the Conservative Party to move further to the right, in a way that we’ve seen in other countries.”
Unlike Starmer, Farage is a natural public speaker who often addresses political gatherings at length without speaking from notes. With more than one and half million followers on TikTok and face recognition from his time as a contestant on a British reality-TV show, the 60-year-old is also familiar to a youthful audience.
“On the one hand, Reform is not a massively strong parliamentary force, but what is interesting with Nigel Farage is that he’s quite a good performer in an era when the other party leaders all look a little bit boring,” said Menon.
“So, Reform’s profile will go up.”
Heavy hitters out
Conservative heavyweights didn’t try to sugarcoat the outcome.
“The British people have delivered a sobering verdict,” said outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak after watching his front bench get decimated.
Former prime minister Liz Truss lost her seat, as did House Leader Penny Mordaunt, Defence Minister Grant Shapps and former cabinet minister and Tory stalwart Jacob Rees-Mogg.
“It’s clearly a terrible night,” Rees-Mogg told the BBC. “I’m afraid I think the Conservative Party took its core vote for granted, which is why you see so many people who may have voted Conservative previously going off to Reform.”
Sunak could have waited until the winter to go to the polls, but called the election early, perhaps hoping to catch Labour off-guard and take advantage of a trickle of good economic news that showed Britain’s economy on the rise.
The tactic backfired, as Sunak stumbled out of the gate with a series of gaffes, including bailing early on the 80th-anniversary D-Day commemorations in France in June.
In his concession speech early Friday morning, in which he also stepped down as party leader, Sunak accepted blame for the loss, but indicated he would stay on as MP.
A small silver lining among the carnage is that in spite of the worst losses in the Conservative Party’s history, Sunak managed to avoid the total wipeout some polls had predicted.
There will still be a robust supply of seasoned former cabinet members in the House of Commons in a position to challenge for the leader’s job.
But that rebuilding could take years. In the meantime, Labour will get to govern the United Kingdom and implement its policies largely uncontested.