With Labour Party in the lead in Britain, Britons seek calm after chaos

National elections often mean, for voters, a repeat of the same scenario. But every now and then, a choice presents itself that can fundamentally change the direction of a country.

One such election took place in Britain on July 4, 2024, which resulted in a decisive victory for the Labour Party and its leader, Keir Starmer.

Labour won 411 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, more than double its 2019 total. The Conservatives won just 121 seats, a third of the number they won five years earlier, with their share of the popular vote collapsing from 43% to 23%.

As I write this, it has been a month. But recently, a new era has dawned: one in which Britain’s many problems are being addressed in a more orderly and frank manner. Starmer, the new Labour prime minister, emphasises the values ​​of duty and public service. He is modest in his promises, stressing that the changes he wants to implement will take time.

As with all prime ministers, his government will have mixed success. Events and internal party politics will intervene. But it seems likely that decisions will be more carefully considered and better balanced against other priorities. This is, in my view, a return to what I would call normal government.

When chaos reigned

Contrast that with the last nine years of the Conservative Party’s frenzied and noisy rule. From 2015 onwards, we saw five prime ministers come and go as the party and the country were torn apart by Brexit.

First the 2016 referendum, in which voters voted 52% to 48% to leave the European Union, forcing then-prime minister David Cameron to resign; then the bitter discussions under his successor, Theresa May, who favoured a soft Brexit, with members of her party’s right wing often voting against her in parliament; then her replacement by Boris Johnson, who delivered a hard Brexit and didn’t bother with the details; then his collapse into a quagmire of scandal; then the seven-week term of Liz Truss, whose tax-cutting plans sent borrowing costs soaring; and finally Rishi Sunak, who tried to restore order but never exercised authority.

There are three main factors behind the Conservatives' crushing defeat. First, Brexit, which has seen populist and anti-immigration rhetoric take over within the ruling party, causing it to lose touch with voters' primary concerns.

The promises of the Brexit campaign have not been kept: immigration has increased and the economy has suffered, leaving voters disillusioned. Small boats have continued to ferry migrants across the Channel.

Second, Labour, which itself had lurched to the extreme in 2015 with the choice of Jeremy Corbyn, an old-school left-wing activist, as leader, managed to move rapidly back to the centre from 2020 under Starmer. This gave it credibility as a party capable of addressing the third factor, namely the decline of British public services.

Can government work for its people?

The Conservatives, preoccupied with a mutually destructive war after the Brexit vote, starved municipal services and allowed the National Health Service to slide into crisis. There was a widespread perception of falling living standards and incompetent government. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine didn’t help, but neither did the parties thrown by Johnson’s team during the Covid lockdown and the indecent antics of other senior officials.

Fortunately, the chaos has now passed. The noise has suddenly quieted down. The new government is emphasizing the depth of the problems it inherited, in order to make difficult decisions acceptable.

His priority is to get the finances in order before committing to spending unaffordable sums to restore public services. This approach may not set hearts racing, but after a decade of din, the fact that it has become normal is welcome.

For those who fear that democracy is under threat in the Western world, the outcome of the British election, as well as that of the French election three days later, offers assurance that voters will ultimately reject populists who offer simplistic solutions that ignore the real complexities of government.

Attention now turns to the United States.