Labour Delivered a Decisive Victory in Britain. Now Comes the Hard Part

2 days ago

Oppositions don’t win elections, received Westminster wisdom tells us. Governments lose them. And in Britain’s July 4 election, the ruling Conservatives lost big. After a 14-year governing streak defined by Brexit, a pandemic, and an astonishing period of political and financial turbulence that ushered in three Prime Ministers in just one year, the world’s most successful political party—which since 1945 has been in power twice as long as it’s been out of it—has been shunted back into opposition. In its place stands the Labour Party, which has secured an electoral landslide. The party’s leader, prosecutor-turned-politician Keir Starmer, will become Britain’s 58th Prime Minister.

“We did it!” Starmer told supporters in a jubilant victory speech in the early hours of Friday morning. “Change begins now.” His party is slated to claim 410 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, according to exit polls, which have proven historically reliable. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are projected to be reduced to just 131 seats—a result that, if confirmed, would mark the party’s worst performance in its nearly 200-year history. Should the exit poll hold, Labour will enjoy a roughly 170-seat parliamentary majority, just shy of its record achieved under Tony Blair in 1997.

“Across our country, people will be waking up to the news, relieved that a weight has been lifted, a burden finally removed from the shoulders of this great nation,” Starmer said, pledging to restore hope to British families. “It is hope that may not burn brightly in Britain at the moment, but we have earned the mandate to relight the fire. That is the purpose of this party, and of this government.”

Britain's Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, center, is hugged as he arrives with his wife Victoria to deliver a speech during a victory rally at the Tate Modern in London early on July 5, 2024.

Outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who said he called Starmer to congratulate him on Labour’s victory, told his constituents that the British people delivered “a sobering verdict” and claimed “responsibility for the loss.”

Sunak, who ascended to the premiership in 2022 on a promise to restore stability to the country after his immediate predecessors Liz Truss and Boris Johnson decimated public trust and tanked the British economy, is due to formally announce his resignation as Prime Minister later Friday. It remains to be seen whether he will continue being the Conservative Party’s leader or whether the Tories, as the Conservatives are known, will elect a new head to serve as the leader of the opposition.

Though it was a seismic result, it wasn’t much of a surprise. The Labour Party enjoyed a double-digit poll lead for more than a year before Sunak called the snap general election, which barely narrowed over the course of the six-week campaign. This was aided by a series of Conservative gaffes and scandals—the most damaging of which involved revelations that multiple Conservative Party staffers had allegedly placed bets on the date of the election using insider knowledge, in what is potentially a criminal offense—as well as the resurgence of arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage, whose insurgent anti-immigration party Reform U.K. succeeded in siphoning off votes from the Conservatives in key constituencies. So anticipated was a Labour victory that the Conservatives spent the last few days of the election campaign warning voters against handing Starmer a so-called “supermajority.” That message, needless to say, did not break through.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the night was just how well Reform performed. The party, which emerged in 2021 as a reincarnation of Farage’s Brexit Party, could win as many as 13 seats, eclipsing more established forces like the Scottish National Party, which could be reduced to as little as 10 seats, according to exit polls. Farage, a key force behind Brexit and a close ally of Donald Trump, secured a parliamentary seat of his own after seven failed attempts.

Although Labour achieved a landslide, it may have done so with a lower share of the vote than it has won in previous contests. Under Britain’s “first past the post” electoral system, parties can win seats if their candidate secures the highest number of votes, regardless of whether that amount constitutes a majority of the votes cast. Turnout has been down across the country compared to the country’s last election in 2019, hovering at below 57%, according to early estimates. While this doesn’t diminish the scale of Labour’s victory, it could indicate the level of disillusionment that many Britons have felt going into this election—one that, despite the scale of the result, felt relatively dull and devoid of much policy discussion.

As the Conservatives retreat back into opposition, the Labour Party will now be tasked with bringing about the change they’ve promised. This includes articulating plans to address key campaign issues such as resuscitating Britain’s ailing National Health Service and strengthening the countries ties with its European partners—work that could conceivably begin as early as next week, when Starmer travels to Washington, D.C., for NATO’s 75th anniversary summit.

As tempted as some observers will be to declare this election result a new dawn in British politics, the reality is that Labour’s challenges in government have only just begun. “You’re going to have a Labour coalition that is incredibly broad but also incredibly shallow, and elected on a platform that doesn’t really address some of the massive problems the country faces,” says Anand Menon, the director of the U.K. in a Changing Europe think tank in London. If there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing, it’ll be this for Labour: The party is on track to claim a base that spans north and south, urban and rural, deprived and affluent. Balancing the needs of all these constituencies, and maintaining their support, will be a challenge.

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“Starmer could become very unpopular quite quickly,” Menon adds. “The only thing that really matters is whether they deliver—and that’s delivering on growth, delivering on public services, all the while having said we’re not going to raise certain taxes.”

Starmer admitted as much in his victory speech, acknowledging that “changing a country is not like flicking a switch—it’s hard, patient, and determined work.” Some observers note that Labour’s unwillingness to make any grand policy announcements during the campaign could help manage expectations, at least in the short term.

“Having promised precious little, there’s not much space for them to get much wrong,” Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics, told journalists in the run up to the vote. “They promised so little that the bar is set very low.”

Getting elected, even by as massive a margin as this, may prove to be the easiest task for Starmer. The change that Britons demand comes next—that will almost certainly be harder.

“Just how long does it take before the Labour Party becomes unpopular? Now some people say late on Friday, the fifth of July,” Travers says. “The electorate doesn’t tolerate much for very long.”