Britain’s Tory Party Has Suffered Its Worst-Ever Defeat

AN INTERVIEW WITHPHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

The big story of this month’s UK election was a Conservative meltdown, while support for Labour barely rose at all. Along with disastrous missteps by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, long-term structural factors mean the Tories are in decline.

Outgoing British prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party Rishi Sunak delivers a statement after losing the general election, outside 10 Downing Street in London on July 5, 2024. (Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images)

JACOBIN
07.15.2024
INTERVIEW BYDANIEL FINN

At first glance, the result of the British general election seems like a massive popular mandate for Keir Starmer and the Labour Party. Labour ended up with 411 seats in the House of Commons, while the Conservative Party had just 121. But we have to reckon with the British electoral system, which can give parties a large majority of seats without even a small majority of votes.

Labour will form a government with less than 34 percent of the overall vote. That’s barely 2 percent more than the party achieved with Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2019, on a much lower turnout. The real story of the election was a Tory collapse. The Conservative vote share dropped by 20 percent, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK divided the right-wing bloc with its anti-immigrant platform.

Phil Burton-Cartledge is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Derby, and the author of a book about the long-term crisis of the Conservative Party, The Party’s Over. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin Radio’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

DANIEL FINN

To begin with, can you give us a sense of how bad this defeat was for the Conservative Party, and how it compares to John Major’s loss back in 1997?

PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

In 2019, when Boris Johnson took the Conservative Party to victory, it won a majority of eighty seats. It won 365 seats overall with a vote of nearly 14 million. This year, the Conservatives lost 251 seats, and their vote more than halved to 6.8 million. Effectively, they’ve been handed the worst election performance in Conservative Party history. You’d have to go back to 1922 for them to have won fewer votes in absolute terms than this, and they actually won that election in 1922.

This is a worse defeat than 1997. Back then, John Major was still able to poll nine and a half million votes and get 30 percent of the overall vote. They had 165 seats in 1997, and that was regarded as a very bad defeat by Conservative Party standards.

This is much, much worse. When you consider that it took thirteen years for the Conservatives to clamber back from that defeat in 1997 and form a government, albeit in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, if they were to recover at the same rate this time around, you’re talking about another twenty years before the Conservatives can get back into power.Defeat suddenly flushes out all of the problems that Conservatives already knew they had but sat on before the election.

But things are even worse than that. Defeat suddenly flushes out all of the problems that Conservatives already knew they had but sat on before the election. There was some recognition among Conservatives that they need to have an offer they can make to younger working-age people, particularly around getting people on the housing ladder. You’ve had Conservatives opining about how constituency associations — the membership of the party — have been allowed to wither on the vine. You’ve had people complaining that in their safe seats, there hasn’t been door knocking taking place for well over twenty years.

There is that feeling of disconnect between themselves and their mass Conservative base. It could be papered over by the air war that Boris Johnson was able to launch in 2019, making the election all about Brexit and riling up the base without having to do the hard work or put down deep, authentic roots in those communities. But this is the election where that has really come home to roost.

Former prime minister Liz Truss, who will go down in Conservative Party lore for all the wrong reasons, had one of the safest seats in the country. Labour turned over her majority and was able to dump Truss out of the House of Commons. If that isn’t a measure of how bad the Conservative defeat is, I don’t know what is.
DANIEL FINN

In terms of explaining the reasons for this defeat, there was an argument that you made in your book, according to which the Conservative Party is facing a long-term decline because of a number of important structural and sociological factors. That was very much going against the grain of conventional wisdom when the first edition of your book came out — people were talking about Johnson bestriding the political scene like a colossus, ruling for another ten years, setting the agenda, yet you were arguing that the 2019 election victory hadn’t changed that picture of long-term decline.

Now since December 2019, there have also been a number of contingent scandals — although perhaps they reflect something deeper — from the demise of Boris Johnson’s leadership, plagued by a series of scandals that were known as “partygate,” to the short-lived fiasco of Liz Truss in Downing Street and the economic damage that resulted from it, and then the distinctly underwhelming leadership of Rishi Sunak, culminating in this snap election that appears to have been called almost on a whim. How do you think the balance can be struck between those long-term structural factors and what the Tories have gotten so badly wrong in the last three or four years?
PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

When I wrote the book, I was very clear about the long-term problems of the Conservatives, but you could not have foreseen the short-term issues — the kind of things that Boris Johnson would get up to in office. I offered a bit of a forecast that if everything went okay for Johnson, the long-term decline of the Tories would only start to nibble at their heels over the course of the 2020s. They would still be competitive in this election, and it would be in the late 2020s and throughout the 2030s that things would start getting difficult if they did not address the long-term issues.

But then we saw “partygate,” with the revelation that senior Conservatives and Downing Street staff were having parties when everyone else had to abide by lockdowns. You had the scandal around that and the fact that Boris Johnson lied repeatedly, claiming he did not know anything about these parties when he attended them himself and emails went out in his name inviting people for drinks. This was followed by the Truss fiasco and Sunak’s management of decline. All of that sped up the process of long-term decline, which was already in train.

But something I didn’t talk about in the book a great deal — in hindsight I should have — was the effect of the competition the Conservative Party was facing from the right. You’ve had the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the Brexit Party, and now Reform UK. In 2019, Johnson was able to win because he effectively out-Brexited the Brexit Party, making that election all about Brexit.In 2019, Johnson was able to win because he effectively out-Brexited the Brexit Party, making that election all about Brexit.

The lump of the electorate that is overwhelmingly right-leaning and that found UKIP and the Brexit Party quite beguiling amounts to roughly 14 or 16 percent of the vote, depending on the day. In the last election, they all lined up behind Boris Johnson because of his promise to deliver Brexit. Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit Party, also said that he was only going to run Brexit Party campaigns in Labour-held seats. That undoubtedly helped the Conservatives as well, because Farage was able to cream off a layer of Labour Party voters who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum but still would not countenance voting Conservative.

This time, Reform stood nearly everywhere. The difference that counted in favor of the Conservatives back in 2019 counted against them this time. There were somewhere in the region of 170 seats where the margin of victory for Labour or the Liberal Democrats over the Conservatives was smaller than the numbers of votes that went to Reform. That was another contingent factor as well.

If you take things in the round, lumping together the Conservative vote with the Reform vote — which you couldn’t really do in an actual election — it comes in lower than what Boris Johnson was able to achieve in 2019. But it’s still a substantial block of votes, and greater than what Labour achieved this time as well. UKIP, the Brexit Party, and now Reform have all had a similar voting base: overwhelmingly composed of older people or retired people, overwhelmingly propertied, and more likely to find authoritarian, nostalgic politics quite attractive, because of the social positions that they occupy.

The right-wing voting block is in long-term decline: they’re not replacing themselves, and as a result, the block can only get smaller as time goes by. It was already smaller in 2024 than it was in 2019. But again, if Boris Johnson had not presided over “partygate,” or if there hadn’t been the kind of foolishness that we’ve seen from the Conservatives over the last four or five years, the bulk of Reform voters might well have stayed with the Conservatives, and the margin of victory for Labour would have been a lot narrower than it has been.
DANIEL FINN

As you say, there was a real difference between the desire of Farage and his allies to damage the Conservative Party this time around compared with 2019, so it’s worth asking why that was the case. Second, if you compare this election with two previous high points for Farage’s political vehicles: back in 2015, UKIP got about 12 percent of the vote, and then in 2019, the Brexit Party got 30 percent of the vote in the snap European election and topped the poll.

In both of those cases, you could say that Farage and his supporters were representing a point of view that didn’t otherwise have representation in British politics. Back in 2015, they were calling for Britain to leave the European Union and to scrap free movement of workers from EU member states, which neither Labour nor the Conservative Party was willing to advocate at that point.

Four years later, it was three years after the Brexit referendum, and everything was in flux in British politics. For many of the people who had voted Leave, there was a sense that their vote had not been implemented or honored, and they were worried that there was going to be some sort of scheme cooked up by the political class to prevent it from happening at all. Farage represented that point of view, and his success motivated the Tories to select Johnson as their leader and commit to Brexit at all costs by the end of the year.

Five years on from that European election, we’re in a situation where Britain has left the EU on terms that were considered particularly hard. There have been all kinds of new restrictions put in place on immigration, and both of the two major parties are committed to that — not just the Tory Party, but also Labour. In the last days of the election campaign, Keir Starmer said that he couldn’t envisage Britain rejoining the EU, or even rejoining the customs union or the single market, in his lifetime.

On the face of it, it might seem like there was no longer a need for a political formation like Reform, and yet it has done very well and got a higher vote share than UKIP got back in 2015. Why do you think that constituency is still there, and what potential do you think there is for that party and that political perspective in the period that’s opening up now?

PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

I think it comes down to the words “Brexit betrayal.” Whatever you might say about the debates within the Conservative Party and why there was a significant section of those within it who were anti-EU, the way they were able to mobilize large numbers of votes in the referendum was precisely because of the anti-immigration pitch that Vote Leave and the various unofficial anti-EU campaigns put forward. Yet in practice, while Boris Johnson may have adopted very tough rhetoric, over the course of the last four or five years, we’ve actually seen record levels of immigration, albeit not from the EU this time.

A lot of people voted for Brexit because they identify immigration with all kinds of different things — uncertainty, discomfort with the way the world works, and a sense that Britain is being taken away from them, as well as the idea that these people are stealing jobs from their children and grandchildren or exacerbating the housing crisis. Those people cannot understand why they voted to end mass immigration and yet mass immigration is still happening. The Tory press has been going hard on this issue too.

In the early stages of his premiership, Rishi Sunak addressed the nation and said that he had five priorities, one of which was stopping the boats in the English Channel. You have refugee camps in northern France from which people have come over on dinghies to enter the country “illegally” — I use that term advisedly. This has been talked up as a problem by the media, and BBC reporters have even gone out in dinghies to try and interview people as they’ve been coming across on these small boats and ask them why they’re doing it.In the early stages of his premiership, Rishi Sunak said that he had five priorities, one of which was stopping the boats in the English Channel.

Sunak embraced the ridiculous Rwanda scheme, whereby people who arrived here “illegally” would be sent to Rwanda for processing. If they were eventually granted asylum, it was unlikely that they would ever end up in Britain anyway — they would have to make their homes in Rwanda. That scheme has spectacularly failed. It was very expensive, which of course was something that Keir Starmer was able to alight upon. The Conservatives haven’t been able to fulfill the promises they made around immigration, so Farage has capitalized on that.

Second, Boris Johnson linked Brexit very clearly to what he called “leveling up.” This was the idea that somehow the EU was holding Britain back and that any money Britain handed over to the EU could then be reinvested in the relatively neglected regions and nations of the UK. London and the Southeast are extremely dynamic economies, but the rest of the country has effectively been left to go to seed and now exists as the repository for a reserve army of labor that will go into the capital and the economically dynamic regions. Johnson said that he wanted to do something about that.

However, for a variety of reasons — not least because of clashes with Sunak and the Treasury — those schemes were derailed or wound down. They ultimately became ways of funneling public money from the center to Conservative-held constituencies — not just the formerly Labour-supporting areas they were able to win in 2019, but quite wealthy Conservative areas as well. For example, Robert Jenrick, the former Conservative immigration minister who is sadly one of the survivors from this election, was able to divert money to his local high street in a fairly affluent area.

You have a perception of pork-barrel politics where things hadn’t changed at all for the poorer regions. Jonathan Gullis was a relatively prominent, so-called Red Wall Tory who won Stoke-on-Trent North in 2019, which historically had been a Labour seat. I went to visit his constituency, where I used to live locally, about eighteen months ago. There were a lot more boarded-up shops than I remembered from my previous visit, but the only new thing on the high street was his constituency office. There is a sense that the Conservatives have taken everything for granted, and as a result, people have turned against them in droves.There is a sense that the Conservatives have taken everything for granted, and as a result, people have turned against them in droves.

There was a debate in the Conservative Party in the early months of 2020 about what they were going to do with all of these working-class seats. James Frayne, a senior Conservative strategist who has worked for the Centre for Policy Studies and a number of other think tanks, wrote an article for Conservative Home, which is effectively the online brain for Conservative activists. He argued that the party didn’t really need to do anything — all that it had to do was go hard on immigration and cut people’s benefits, and working-class voters in those seats would thank them for it. That is exactly what the Conservative Party has done, and nothing has changed; so people who would never vote Labour but were angry at this turn of events voted for Reform.

When it comes to Farage’s own motivations, he helped Boris Johnson win that huge majority in 2019 by specifically targeting Labour seats, but he has received no thanks for it at all. The Conservative Party still wants to keep him at arm’s length. There are a few figures in the party who think that a lash-up between the Conservatives and Reform would be wonderful, but they’re very much in a minority. Farage understands that he is an outsider and has been treated as a pariah. For his pains, he decided that a bit of revenge was necessary.

We should also note another reason why Farage decided to return to British politics and lead Reform into this election. Reform is a limited company, owned by Farage as the majority shareholder, rather than a proper political party. He can appoint himself managing director and leader if he wants. He was due to spend this summer in the United States campaigning for Donald Trump. He only changed his mind after Trump was sent down for felony charges in relation to the Stormy Daniels case.

It seems to me that Farage has decided that associating himself with Trump would perhaps not be the best thing for his long-term future in British politics. He returned to Britain and targeted the Conservatives on their vulnerabilities.

He also mobilized an explicitly racist vote by coming out with a number of dog whistles during the election, such as when he said that Rishi Sunak, who is from Indian heritage, doesn’t understand our culture. That message was picked up loud and clear by racist voters who would normally have stayed at home during this election, and that unquestionably boosted Reform’s showing at the polls too.
DANIEL FINN

If we think about the future of the Conservative Party over the years to come, what direction do you think they’re likely to embark on from this point? Is there going to be an attempt to move back toward the center or further radicalization toward the right? Which remaining Tory politicians are likely to be the key figures, and is there a potential path for them toward recovery over the next decade or so?
PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

If you’d asked me a few weeks ago, I’d have thought it was obvious that they were going to turn to the right because of the gravitational pull of Reform. Reform was able this time to break through the first-past-the-post system and win five seats in Parliament. The party won 4.1 million votes, which is more than were cast for the Liberal Democrats, who won seventy-two seats. Some Conservatives will say, “It’s obvious that we need to go hard on immigration and tax cuts” — tax cuts were another component of the Reform platform — “and then votes will flow to us.”

There is a degree of sense in that, from a rational-choice point of view. As happened in 1997, the Conservatives have suffered a devastating defeat. From the standpoint of recovery, they need to sort out their core vote and establish a foundation before they can build (or rebuild) the rest of the building.

Turning right — because of course, the Conservative grassroots are quite right-wing — makes sense in that context as well. You’d be able to build the core and start recovering on that basis, which is exactly what William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard did between 1997 and 2005. It was only after 2005, once they had cohered their core vote, that they were able to start going after the center ground.

You do have a number of right-wingers jockeying for position who could do this. You have Kemi Badenoch, who was previously the minister for equality. You have Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary, who is renowned for spouting conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism” and various other right-wing touchstones. You also have Priti Patel, who came up with the Rwanda scheme in the first place.

On the other hand, we should consider the observation of Paul Goodman, onetime editor of Conservative Home and a former Conservative MP. He pointed out that the way that the devastation has rippled through the Conservative parliamentary group means that it is no longer as right-wing as it was before the general election.

There are more — again, I use these terms advisedly — centrist or center-left figures in the spectrum of the Conservative Party. Bear in mind that these “centrist” or “One Nation” Tories were quite happy to go along with the Rwanda scheme and all the other horrors that the Conservative Party has come out with over the last five years, so everything is relative.The more centrist elements of the Conservative Party will want to make sure there are two centrist candidates that go to the membership.

Their favorite son is a guy called Tom Tugendhat who stood in the 2022 Conservative leadership election. He didn’t come close to winning that time, but this could be one of those occasions where he might be in a better position. He’s relatively centrist by Conservative Party standards. He has that aspect of the army major — not in a bawling sergeant-major sense, but in that quiet, reserved officer mold. He’s probably the nearest figure that the Conservative Party currently have to Keir Starmer, who is cut from very similar cloth.

It depends on who the Conservative MPs decide should go forward to the membership. The way the contest works is that everyone who wants to stand for the leadership needs a proposer and a seconder, but it gets whittled down to two candidates by the parliamentary party, who are then put to the membership. The more centrist elements of the Conservative Party will want to make sure there are two centrist candidates that go to the membership, because if it’s a contest between Tom Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch, for example, Badenoch will walk it, because the membership are incredibly right-wing.

While Badenoch might be able to consolidate the Conservative base to some extent over the course of the next four or five years if she becomes leader, it means they can kiss the 2029 election goodbye. On the other hand, Tom Tugendhat might have a harder task consolidating the base, but the reasoning will go that he could have more of a chance of winning back some of those liberal or centrist Tories who were attracted to Starmer’s changed Labour party and to the Liberal Democrats this time.

Either way, I can’t see them coming back any time soon. This is because of the nature of the electoral system, because of the pummeling that the Conservatives have just received, and because even though they have suffered a devastating defeat, the process of decline is still ongoing. They need to have a proper reinvention if they want to be electorally competitive again.

I can’t see either potential course cutting it for 2029: a more centrist Tory Party competing directly for votes while they still have Reform menacing them to the right, or a right turn to embrace some of the Reform voters while leaving more centrist voters in the bosom of the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. I can’t see it happening unless something catastrophic happens — unless somehow Reform and the Conservative Party are able to unite, which is very unlikely, and the Labour vote declines.
DANIEL FINN

Looking at this performance from Labour, there’s something quite odd about it, because there has never been such a discrepancy between vote share and seat share. Labour has come back with a commanding majority of seats comparable to Tony Blair’s landslide back in 1997. But that time, the party got around 43 percent of the vote, whereas this year, it was slightly under 34 percent of the vote. It was only a couple percent higher in relative terms than the Labour vote share in 2019, and because of the lower turnout, it was actually lower in absolute terms — more people voted for Labour in 2019 than in 2024.

This doesn’t seem to have been something that anyone expected to happen, certainly going by the polls. From the start of this year until Sunak called the election, even at the lower end of the scale, Labour’s vote share didn’t go below 40 percent, apart from a single poll where they were on 39.5 percent. Yet they ended up with 33.7 percent.

Does that mean that the polls were wrong, or is it a case of Labour having lost support over the course of the election campaign? If it did lose support, why was that, and is it going to be a problem for Labour?
PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

That trend in Labour’s polling became pronounced more or less at the time when Farage announced his decision to stand. Part of that shift wasn’t a question of Labour-supporting people transferring to Reform — rather, Reform was flushing out people who had previously intended not to vote, so Labour’s vote share went down proportionately in the polls. But you’re right: no one predicted that it would be this low.We’ve seen a big fall in Labour’s vote in its safe areas because all the resources have gone to the swing seats.

If you look at safe Labour seats — like Keir Starmer’s seat, for example — he had a ridiculous majority in 2019 of nearly 28,000 votes. His majority is now about 11,500, and turnout in his seat was down by more than 10 percent as well. It seems to have been a deliberate strategy. All of a sudden, now the election is over, Labour is saying it was their mastermind Morgan McSweeney who decided that they needed to go after seats rather than votes and game the system.

There’s a certain logic to that, which has meant that safe Labour seats were robbed of all resources. There was no campaigning in those seats, and everything went to what they identified as the key marginals. As a result, Starmer’s majority collapsed; Wes Streeting, the new Health Secretary, came within five hundred votes of losing his seat to a left-wing independent, Leanne Mohamad; and Jonathan Ashworth, who was a key strategist and member of the shadow cabinet before the election, actually did lose his seat in Leicester to an independent candidate.

We’ve seen a big fall in Labour’s vote in its safe areas because all the resources have gone to the swing seats. But we shouldn’t say that this is entirely down to the genius of Morgan McSweeney, because as I said earlier, there were about 170 seats where Reform made the difference between a Conservative win and a Labour or Liberal Democrat win. It was a gamble for the Labour Party to go for width rather than depth.

Will this cause some problems? It is certainly niggling at the new powers that be. Since Starmer has taken office, he’s been asked about this, and every time he keeps saying, “We’ve got a strong mandate,” as if repeating the words makes it true. But the problem he has is that it’s not just irritating left-wingers on social media who are saying, “You haven’t got a mandate, your numbers are rubbish, you got fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn managed.” People on the right know about this as well and have been playing it up.

Nadhim Zahawi, who was a senior figure in previous Conservative cabinets, said that even though it was a bad night for the Conservatives, it wasn’t a fantastic night for Labour; because of the shallowness of Labour’s vote, he argued, there is an opportunity for the Conservatives to come back quickly. According to Zahawi, all they need to do is go hard on tax cutting and so on. So he’s clearly learned nothing about what has happened, but he’s aware of this point.

Nigel Farage is aware of it as well, and he’s been talking about it since the election. Although I think it’s a mistake and a sign of hubris on his part, Farage has been saying that his party is going after Labour votes and seats at the next election. He is going to start targeting Labour more because he knows the majorities are very, very slim.

This is obviously a problem for Labour when it comes to doing anything controversial in government. We on the left know that Labour is weak despite its majority and despite what Starmer says about having a mandate. Democratically, its legitimacy is very low. That weakness gives added impetus to any street movements or strike activity to make political headway. It’s very much possible for us to lean on Labour MPs.If Starmer thinks that he’s going to have a fairly stable government, I think he’s got another thing coming.

It’s also worth noting that in over forty seats, the Greens are now in second place to Labour, having stood on an explicitly left-wing platform. They have also demonstrated an ability to take Labour seats, having won Bristol Central from another shadow cabinet minister, Thangam Debbonaire, so Labour is going to have to be thinking about the Left as well.

But knowing the Labour Party and its instincts as we do, it’ll notice that while there are forty-odd seats where the Greens are in second place to them, there are ninety-odd seats where Reform are the runners-up. There is going to be a temptation to go hard on immigration and other right-wing issues.

For Starmer and company, while they will try to plow on regardless and ignore democratic pressures, you’re going to have pressures from left and right in this parliament on Labour MPs who would quite like to remain Labour MPs, thank you very much. There is real potential here for the Left to make breakthroughs and lean on Labour MPs, and also potential for parliamentary rebellions as well. If Starmer thinks that he’s going to have a fairly stable government — and of course stability was one of the themes that Starmer ran on — I think he’s got another thing coming.
DANIEL FINN

Behind so many of these overlapping political crises that we’ve seen over the last decade, from Brexit and the Leave campaign to the Scottish Independence movement to the rise and fall of Corbynism, we can talk about the problems with the British economic model that have really come home to roost. Of course, Britain was one of the pioneers of neoliberal policy-making and went further and faster down that road than countries like France and Germany. For a long time there was a good deal of smugness about that on the part of British politicians, who saw themselves as the way and the light for other European countries. Now you get regular reports in publications like the Financial Times saying in effect that the whole setup is creaking and in danger of falling apart.

There’s a spectacular dearth of investment, and infrastructure is crumbling. There’s been a period of wage stagnation of a kind that hasn’t been seen for a couple of centuries since the early days of the Industrial Revolution, which is anticipated to carry on for the rest of this decade. You have regional inequalities within England that are wider than those between western and eastern Germany or between northern and southern Italy. Against that backdrop, is there any prospect of stabilization, and are there policies that any feasible government is likely to enact that can address those problems with the British model of capitalism?
PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

When you read the Labour Party manifesto, there is a recognition that these problems exist, but the solutions fall short or leave a lot to wishful thinking. When Rachel Reeves made her first speech as the new chancellor, her message was no different to what she’s been saying for the last couple of years.

She believes that the way to make things better doesn’t involve redistributing the ill-gotten gains of the rich or anything like that, because that’s far too radical. You need economic growth, which is going to lift all boats. That’s what she’s putting her emphasis on.Rachel Reeves is very much a model technocrat, far more so than Starmer. She’s fixated on the numbers, on deliverables, on trackers and spreadsheets.

I think what we will see, at least in the policy language coming out of the new government, is similar to what we saw under George Osborne when he was chancellor — in other words, a focus on GDP figures as a measure of growth to the exclusion of all else. Reeves is very much a model technocrat, far more so than Starmer. She’s fixated on the numbers, on deliverables, on trackers and spreadsheets.

In that spirit, Reeves will be looking for quick wins. I expect that when the renegotiation for the European free-trade agreement comes up next year, governing the relationship between the UK and the EU, Starmer’s government will be looking to lower trade barriers that have been put up over the course of Brexit in order to facilitate economic growth.

Reeves is also committed to a much more industrially active state, so there is going to be an abandonment of neoliberalism, at least when it comes to industrial policy — it’s not going to be left to the market anymore. But she’s pursuing this goal through initiatives like Great British Energy, which are in effect investment vehicles or public-private partnerships that are designed to take the risk out of infrastructure investment for private business.

I think we’ll see large numbers of companies starting to invest in British infrastructure because ultimately the profits from doing so are going to be underwritten by the Treasury — it’s a guaranteed return. Of course, that will boost the GDP figures as well. Reeves and her allies will hope for various spin-off effects from this such as more employment and an upward push on wages.

But looking at various parts of the Labour manifesto, where the party identifies problems and crises, you find gestures to the effect that something has to be done rather than actual policies. By not promising anything concrete, this gives Labour a great deal of leeway to do whatever it wants to do.By not promising anything concrete, this gives Labour a great deal of leeway to do whatever it wants to do.

With higher education, for instance, the manifesto recognizes that there is a funding crisis and that levels of student debt are unsustainable. It doesn’t say what it’s going to do in response, but it promises to look into it. Of course, looking into it will be a job-creation scheme for civil servants and researchers.

We’ve got a quiet commitment to expand the state, although no spending figures are attached to it. Starmer has also put a lot of emphasis on giving metropolitan mayors and local authorities across England, Wales, and Scotland more powers. We haven’t seen yet what the nature of these powers are going to be.

There were some proposals authored by Gordon Brown in late 2022, where it seemed that Labour was aiming to create a sort of German model. Local government in Germany has a lot more freedom to raise its own finances and pursue its own economic strategies. It seems to me that Starmer is going to go down a similar route, with each local authority area responsible for developing a growth plan.

When those growth plans come through, I think Starmer will be minded to give local authorities enough powers to follow through on the plans, which again means more civil-service jobs and more jobs for wonkish researcher types and academics like me. The hope is that this will have an effect of unlocking further investment and entrepreneurial talents in the regions.

That’s pretty much what we can expect from a Starmer government when it comes to addressing the crisis of British capitalism. You’re going to have a push from the center saying, “We want to go in this direction,” but devolution will mean that local authorities are going to be able to do what they want within limits in terms of pursuing economic growth. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves will be making sure to create as benign and risk-free an environment as possible for British and foreign capital to invest in infrastructure.

CONTRIBUTORS

Phil Burton-Cartledge is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Derby and the author of The Party's Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak.

Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.