The United Kingdom’s Conservatives Party has been called the most successful political party in the Western world. Yet, Labour won Thursday’s election by a historic landslide that may redefine the UK’s polity and economy into the 2030s.
Incoming prime minister Keir Starmer will have little time to catch his breath after the campaign as he will seek to quickly make his mark in international summitry. Next week, he heads to Washington for a Nato summit to commemorate 75 years of the military alliance. Moreover, a week later he is expected to host the European Political Community conference of leaders from across the continent.
However, while Starmer faces no end to the international dialogue on the horizon, it will be domestic politics that occupies him as he seeks to make the most of his first 100 days in power. Some of the big policies which Labour has said it will move forward with include kick-starting reforms to boost infrastructure development.
A part of this process will be new legislation to create “Great British Energy”, a new state-owned generator of green electricity which Labour claims will help make the country “a clean energy superpower”. The party says the new company will cost around £8.3 billion (US$10.58 billion) and be paid for by a windfall tax on oil and gas companies. In addition, Labour has pledged to repeal the current de facto ban on new onshore wind farms.
Also likely to be scrapped is the Conservative Party’s controversial, flagship Rwanda migrant deportation scheme. Labour has pledged to instead create a border security command, appoint hundreds of investigators and use counterterror powers to “smash criminal boat gangs”.
To move forward with this big agenda, Labour will seek to take advantage of the disorientation among the Conservatives who have suffered a huge setback. To put Labour’s win into historical context, the number of seats the party looks likely to have won is comparable with 1997, under Tony Blair’s leadership, which was one of the largest number of seats won in post-war UK history.
By almost any standards, Thursday’s vote is a new political dawn for the UK. It is also historic in two other potentially important senses.
First, the UK has now experienced back-to-back landslides, in opposite directions, in the last two national ballots for the first time in around 120 years. The last time this happened was in 1900, which saw a Conservative landslide, followed by a massive Liberal absolute majority in 1906. That was also the general election in which neither Labour nor the Conservatives won the popular vote.
The huge victory for the Liberals in 1906 helped catalyse an era-defining realignment that led to the modern UK electoral system dominated by the Conservatives and Labour. So it is possible that Labour’s big win could also herald major political change in the UK.
A further dimension of the historic nature of this election is the vastly increased prevalence of digital campaigning. On election day alone, UK political parties are forecast to have spent more than £1 million pounds on online advertisements, more than was spent on online channels by the parties during the entire 2015 campaign.
Ultimately, it was Labour’s campaign message of change that got through to voters. Fourteen years after the Conservatives won power, as well as five prime ministers, four election cycles, multiple UK-wide referendums and a global pandemic later, a lot has happened to switch the nation off from the Conservatives.
This includes the fact that around 7.6 million people are on waiting lists for hospital treatment in England, which is about three times the 2010 figure. Around 3 per cent of the UK population uses a food bank, all while the cost of groceries, household bills and mortgage repayments has risen significantly since the pandemic.
A key question now for the Conservatives is how fast the party will move forward with a contest to find a new leader. In recent years, major party leaders who lose elections badly, like Rishi Sunak now has, have tended to resign quickly. However, Sunak has suggested that he is not likely to resign. The goal would be to stop the party rushing into a leadership election before it has had a period of reflection.
Following its massive victory, Labour has much to deliver. While the party will dominate the political landscape for the next few years, whether it wins big again later this decade will depend on whether and how fast the Conservatives rejuvenate themselves.
Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics
