The 2024 British Election: Big Change Ain’t Gonna Come
Photograph Source: Simon Dawson – OGL 3
Yeah, yeah, I know the Tories are out, Labour won big time and Keir Starmer is the new PM and at home at 10 Downing Street. Starmer called for “Change.” That’s what voters clearly wanted after years and years of disastrous Conservative Party rule that saw a widening gap between haves and have nots and an economic crisis that might be beyond repair unless something decisive is done and done quickly. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
Yes, change is in the air, but don’t expect anything revolutionary. England hasn’t had a real revolution since the 17th century, when King Charles I was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell became the “Lord Protector” who did everything but protect the Irish, the Catholics, the Royalists, and supporters of the Crown.
I arrived in England in 1964 to begin a three-year course of study at the redbrick University of Manchester, in a working class town where as one English woman explained to me, “Where there’s muck there’s brass.” (Where there are poor people there are rich people).
Almost all of my friends were Irish, Scottish and Welsh. The English were and still are elusive. No wonder that Doris Lessing who was born in Persia in 1919 and who was raised in Southern Rhodesia and didn’t arrive in England until 1949, wrote a book called In Pursuit of the English. I pursued them for years, drank beer and tea with them, cheered for Manchester United and Arsenal, learned English slang and spoke some Cockney.
In the fall of 1964, when Harold Wilson became the Labour Party PM some of my new-found friends predicted a revolution. That was wishful thinking. England is an evolutionary kind of place, where change happens slowly and over the course of centuries. No wonder Charles Darwin, with his theory of evolution, was English.
In the three years I lived in Manchester, heated my digs with coal, learned to live with rain, rain, rain, and learned to love fish and chips there was no revolution and nothing remotely resembling anything revolutionary, though there was Carnaby Street in London, Mary Quant fashion and the beginnings of the rock ‘n’ roll rebellion that would roil the US. The boys in the bands were very effective at cultural approbation; stealing from and recycling the blues.
In England in the mid-1960s,there was racism and there were racists. Black babies were described by whites as “pickiness,” brown thread, English sales girls said, was “nigger brown” and Robertson’s Jams offered a “Golly” or “gollywog”—a stereotypical Black cartoon figure— on all jars that sold in stores. “Paki Bashing”– attacks on Pakistan immigrants — was a favorite pastime of rowdy racist youth, and workers in some Manchester unions went on strike to protest against Pakistani immigrants who wanted to join the unions. In movie theaters when “God Save the Queen” played on loudspeakers, audience members stood at attention. I was not so inclined.
“Reform U.K.,” the insurgent anti-immigration party, which just won more than four million votes, is nothing new in English politics. Brit racism goes back centuries and is deep seated. Hell, the Brits even look down at the French and the Italians, though they’ll vacation on the French Riviera and on Italian beaches.
As a Yank in England from 1964 to 1967, I didn’t expect a revolution and might not have joined it either, though on holiday in Italy I joined demonstrations against the War in Vietnam and paid a call on the Cuban Embassy in Rome to wish the Cubans a Happy Anniversary on their revolution and to smoke cigars and drink rum. I had to cross the channel to celebrate anything that smelled as sweet as Cuban tobacco.
I was happy to return to England where I could enjoy a “proper” breakfast which meant eggs, bacon, beans, toast and tea and not the skimpy continental breakfasts of café au lait and a buttered tartine. I’ve been back to England again and again over the last several decades, You can take the boy out of England but not England out of the boy. Still, I’ll never love the Tories and I’ll never learn to love the British Crown.
Labour may not be what the British working class needs and really wants, but Labour is better than the Conservatives any day or night of the week, including Guy Fawkes Night, when lads and lassies built bonfires and celebrated the Gunpowder Plot when Guy Fawkes and his comrades planned and failed to blow up the House of Lords. For three years running, I never failed to attend.
Massacre at the Ballot: The Punishing of the Tories
Few would have staked their political fortune, let alone any other sort of reward, on a return of the British Conservatives on July 4. The polls often lie, but none suggested that outcome. The only question was the extent British voters would lacerate the Tories who have been in office for fourteen years, presiding over a country in divisive decline, aided by policies of austerity, the galloping cost of living and the lunatic tenures of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Predicted numbers varied from a return of 53 seats to what was forecast in the more accurate Ipsos exit poll of 131 seats.
As the night wore on, the laceration became a ballot massacre. It was clear that most voters were less keen on Sir Keir Starmer’s dour Labour team, supposedly reformed and devoid of dangerous daring, as they were of voting against the Tories. Any other option would do.
A whole brigade of senior Conservatives suffered a rout. Commons leader Penny Mordaunt lost her seat, as did defence secretary Grant Shapps. That manorial relic of Tory tradition and privilege, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, was also ousted from his seat. The Liberal Democrats made huge inroads into traditional Conservative territory, winning seats held by two former prime ministers – David Cameron and Theresa May.
Recriminations, long readied in reserve, came out. Former party chair, Sir Brandon Lewis, pointed the finger to his leader, Rishi Sunak, whose decision to call the election was considered monumentally ill-judged. “I suspect right now that’s weighing on him very, very strongly … He will go down as the Conservative prime minister and leader who had the worst election result in over a century.”
Other Tories thought Sunak’s efforts to push the Conservatives further to the right to stem the leaching of votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK a serious error of judgment. Former Tory universities minister Lord Jo Johnson, also famed for being the sibling of that buffoonish wrecker-in-chief Boris, called efforts to make the Conservatives “a Reform-lite kind of party” a “big mistake”. Only a return to the “centre-ground of British politics” would spare them a lengthy spell in the wilderness.
The strafing of the more liberal Tory members does, however, place them in an unenviable position. Are they to, as Lord Johnson suggests, alter course to “appeal to metropolitan, open-minded, liberal voters”? Or should they, as Rees-Mogg insists, dig deeper into the soil of Conservative values, what he calls “core principles” that had been essentially pinched by Reform UK? Amidst the debate, former lord chancellor Robert Buckland could not resist quipping that this Conservative “Armageddon” was “going to be like a group of bald men fighting over a comb.”
The most staggering feature of these elections, leaving aside the ritualistic savaging of the Tories, was the wholly lopsided nature of the share of votes relative to the winning of seats. “This election,” the Electoral Reform Society solemnly declared, “saw Labour and the Conservatives receive their joint lowest vote share on record, with a combined 57.4%.”
That did not prevent the two major parties from snaring the lion’s share. Labour received 33.7% of the vote yet obtained 63.2% (411 seats) of the 650 on offer, making it the most disproportionate on record. The Tories, despite the bloodbath, could still count on 121 MPs with 23.7% of votes winning 18.6% of seats in the House of Commons.
The Lib Dems burgeoned in terms of representatives, gaining a record number of MPs (they now stand at 72), despite only having a vote share of 12.2%. It was a modest percentage hardly different from the 2019 election.
Reform UK, Farage’s rebranded party of Brexiteers, had every right to feel characteristically foiled by the first past the post system that is always defended by the party that wins majority, leaving smaller contenders to chew over its stunningly unrepresentative rationale. Having netted a higher percentage than the Lib Dems at 14.3% (over 4 million votes), they had only five MPs to show for it. “That is blatantly not a properly functioning democratic system – that is a flawed system,” a resentful Richard Tice of Reform remarked on BBC 4 Radio’s Today program. “The demands for change will grow and grow.”
The Greens, similarly, received 6.7% of the vote (just under 2 million), but returned a mere four MPs to Westminster. Despite this, the strategists will be seeing these wins, the most successful in their party’s history, as stunning, bettering the heroic if lonely exploits of Caroline Lucas. Tellingly, the party pinched two seats off Labour, and one from the Conservative stable.
Given that Labour proved the largest beneficiary of a voting system that should only ever apply in a two-way contest and given the prospect of Reform and the Greens posing ever greater threats from either wing of politics, appetite for electoral reform is likely to be suppressed.
In Westminster at Last: The Threat of Nigel Farage
“This is the inflection point,” warned Nigel Farage last month as he assumed the reins of power at the incarnated Reform UK party, standard bearer of the often inchoate group known as the hard right of British politics. “The only wasted vote is a Conservative one. We are the challengers to Labour. We are on our way.”
On July 4, an important stop was made on that way. A figure who had exerted more influence on British politics outside the houses of Parliament than any other this century, a figure who had conspicuously failed in getting elected despite seven previous efforts, had finally convinced voters he was electable.
The new member for the Essex seat of Clacton had unseated the Conservative candidate, Giles Watling, who had held the seat since 2017. The margin was impressive: 21,225 votes to Watling’s 12,820.
To keep him company in the House of Commons will be such colleagues as Richard Tice, Reform’s chair, along with former Southampton football club chairman Rupert Lowe, and former Conservative deputy chair Lee Anderson. They now form a snapping rearguard of politics that is not so much nipping at the heels of Britain’s oldest party as tearing it apart.
As the Tories contemplate their ruin and richly deserved defeat, the new Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer will find little time to relish the joys of victory. Farage is already promising rapacious raids into enemy territory. “We are coming for Labour … be in no doubt about that.” While eschewing notions of working with the Conservatives, he offered an olive branch by way of invitation: Tory members could join Reform if they wished.
Commentators on Farage’s life have noted a streak of luck suggesting the blessings of the devil. He has cheated death, surviving car crashes, a plane crash and a misdiagnosis regarding testicular cancer. The party that caught his eye, the UK Independence Party (Ukip), would have vanished into the suffocating arms of the larger Referendum party of James Goldsmith had the latter not perished to cancer 10 weeks after the 1997 election. “Farage takes his chances, and though things often blow up – planes, parties, countries – he walks away and on to the next caper,” writes David Runciman.
Reform UK is certainly one such caper, and its somewhat anti-democratic operations, often chaotic, poorly organised and lacking any institutional framework, make its electoral returns even more remarkable. But even on Farage’s side of politics, it is hard to mistake the fact that he has treated the party much like a political start-up, where he has assumed the role of director and majority shareholder. Reform will, in time, require reform if it is to be a durable force. Farage has admitted as much. “We have a structure. We do have a constitution, but to build a branch structure, we have to give people the ability to choose candidates to vote.”
Durability, however, may have nothing to do with it. As with many charismatic buffoonish party goers, he may leave when required to help with the cleaning up, leaving the washing to the snarling and fractious functionaries who fight over the leftovers and break the crockery. This may well be Starmer’s hope. It is certainly the assessment of Fraser Nelson in The Spectator. “Whatever his intention, Farage has ended up serving as a purely destructive force. He has become the nemesis, not the rejuvenator, of the causes he purports to care about.”
Otherwise, the threat is palpable, and comments by the new Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds about Reform’s policies being like “Liz Truss in terms of the economy” and similar to “Russian positions in terms of … the war in Ukraine” are unhelpful. Labour’s lack of clarity on how it will deal with the Channel crossings of irregular migrants is something Farage is salivating over.
Concerned about such matters, Tony Blair, Labour’s longest serving prime minister and overly remunerated circuit speaker, has been willing to offer the sort of advice in the Sunday Times he charges obscene amounts for. His typically soupy ideas all go to trying to blunt the effect Reform will have in the next election. “We need a plan to control immigration. If we don’t get rules, we get prejudices.”
Showing his recurrent fascination with surveillance (as the Coronavirus pandemic raged, Blair suggested adopting a “Covid Pass” to distinguish the anointed from the unwashed), a “digital ID” could be used to maintain the integrity of borders. Law and order matters, another favourite of the New Labour era, also needed to be dealt with. “At present, criminal elements are modernising faster than law enforcement.” To round off the trifecta, it was also important that the Starmer government not succumb to “any vulnerability on ‘wokeism’.”
Farage is now in the temple of Westminster and, in time, hopes to bring it down. He will woo, seduce and despoil, as he has done to a string of lovers and prominent figures he has lured to his camp over the years. He will be remorselessly destructive. For Labour and for those more progressive than Starmer’s stiffly starched set, the threat has been truly enlivened.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.
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