Can Starmer Save Britain?

Although the polls had been predicting it for many months, the result of the United Kingdom’s July 4 general election was nonetheless stunning. This was the worst performance in the 190-year history of the Conservative Party. It lost almost half its share of the vote and 250 parliamentary seats. One former prime minister (Liz Truss), nine cabinet ministers (including the secretaries of defense, education, and justice), and other prominent Conservative figureheads were unceremoniously ejected from the House of Commons by their constituents. This was a tidal wave of anger washing over not just outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak but also the last 14 years of Tory rule, and it made landfall with a deafening roar.

Seldom in any democracy has a governing party gone so quickly from triumph—Boris Johnson won a huge majority in 2019—to disaster. The reasons are clear: a botched exit from the European Union, stark social and economic decline, institutional decay, a revolving door of ineffective and sometimes disastrous leaders, Johnson’s anarchic antics, and Truss’s ill-fated and short-lived experiment with extreme neoliberal economics. Over the last decade and a half, the widespread feeling that the United Kingdom was on its last legs was reflected in surging English nativism and Scottish, Welsh, and Irish separatism that in different ways threatened to pull the union apart. The voters have left the world in no doubt as to whom they blame for this malaise.

On the other side of the coin, Labour leader Keir Starmer now finds his party with a projected 413 seats, a total that brings him close to repeating Tony Blair’s historic victory of 1997. From the very low state it was in when he became leader just five years ago, Labour has not only been resurrected; it has ascended into a heaven of euphoria. It has recaptured most of the “red wall” of working-class constituencies that, in 2019, it lost to Johnson’s strange charm and his promise to Get Brexit Done. It has regained its dominance in Scotland, which had seemed over the course of this century to have become the fiefdom of the pro-independence Scottish National Party. It has also won 27 of 32 seats in Wales.

The new Labour government can therefore claim to be a genuinely “British” one in ways that none of its predecessors since Blair’s could. In the short term, the threat of the country breaking up has undoubtedly receded. The United Kingdom under Johnson—who inaugurated an especially unruly series of chaotic Conservative governments—seemed to be under the same spell of performative, personality-driven reactionary politics as the United States under former President Donald Trump. Now, the accession of the pragmatic, charisma-free Starmer bucks the trend toward the far right in so many European democracies, from Italy and France to the Netherlands and Sweden. It holds out hope that the center can hold after all. The sigh of relief will be heard far beyond the shores of the United Kingdom.

And yet, as overwhelming as they are, these results come with a very large caveat. Labour’s overall share of the vote, at 34 percent, was actually quite low. It rose by less than two percent from the poor showing of 2019. The popular rage that has swept the Tories out of power is not matched by a surge of belief in Starmer’s ability to save the country. Starmer owes his huge majority to the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system, which can conjure dramatic national swings in seat numbers from relatively small changes in individual constituencies. Equally, the vast sea change in the relative fortunes of the Conservatives and Labour in just five years suggests how extremely volatile the United Kingdom remains.

Even as Starmer grasps the reins of power so firmly, the road ahead remains rocky. The deeper tremors that have slowly but inexorably been eroding the social and political foundations of the country will continue to rumble just under the surface. Although it was hardly mentioned in the campaign, the Brexit debacle is a continuing reality that will severely constrain Starmer’s frantic push for economic growth, without which his promise of renewal will quickly turn hollow. Living standards are in shocking decline, amplifying social divisions and widening the gap between southern England and the rest of the United Kingdom. And without vast new infusions of cash, the looming collapse of public and health services threatens to destroy some of the few remaining sources of a collective British identity.

Labour’s overall share of the vote was actually quite low.

None of these challenges can be met without radical reform to the basic system of government. For years now, London has shown itself to be incapable of solving large-scale problems or giving all citizens the belief that the central institutions of power belong to them. The slogan that won the Brexit referendum for the Leave side in 2016—Take Back Control—was so effective because it identified a genuine loss of faith in the promise of democracy: that the people are running the show. The wildly careening course of British politics since then has surely done nothing to restore that faith.

Nor does Starmer present himself as a man who lights fires. His public demeanor is stiff and remarkably downbeat. Despite its slogan of “change,” his party’s offering to the electorate was relentlessly risk averse. Labour has accepted the very fiscal constraints laid down by the Conservatives while largely eschewing tax increases to raise the revenue it needs if it is to shore up public services and begin to make up the deficit in investment. Given the multiplying social and economic stresses facing the country, the new leadership will be tempted to avoid bolder reforms in favor of mere crisis management.

But such a cautious approach would not really be risk free. It would in fact risk squandering a parliamentary majority of historic proportions. Either the incoming administration can seize the moment to finally shake up the system and confront the core constitutional and democratic issues on which the long-term viability of the union may depend, or it can choose to muddle through and hope for the best. For such a fractured polity, this could be the last time there is such a choice.

BACK IN THE D.D.R.

From the very start of the campaign, a sense of doom hung over the whole idea of a Conservative United Kingdom. On May 23, the day after Sunak called the unexpectedly early election, he made a campaign stop at the Titanic Quarter in Belfast, an upscale waterfront development area named after the ill-fated ocean liner that was built in shipyards nearby. Inevitably, a reporter asked the prime minister if he was the captain of a sinking ship. After all, it was hard not to predict the dramatic implosion of the Conservatives, who had returned to power under Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010 and then supplied a dizzying merry-go-round of failed leaders since 2016: Theresa May, Johnson, Truss, and finally Sunak. In a recent book, The Conservative Effect 2010–2024, the political historians Anthony Seldon and Tom Egerton have concluded that “overall, it is hard to find a comparable period in the history of the Conservatives which achieved so little, or which left the country at its conclusion in a more troubling state.”

Yet the Titanic metaphor raised a less obvious but more profound question. What if the sinking ship is the United Kingdom itself? That the country is in deep trouble is not in dispute. Wage growth between 2010 and 2020 was the lowest over any ten-year period in peacetime since the Napoleonic Wars. The country’s annual growth rate in productivity since 2007 has been a minuscule 0.4 percent, its lowest over an equivalent period since 1826. It is perhaps apt that one of the country’s most popular cultural exports, the Netflix historical fantasy Bridgerton, is set in a version of the early nineteenth century—the last time the British economy was performing so sluggishly.

GDP per capita has grown by a mere 4.3 percent over the past 16 years, compared with 46 percent in the previous 16 years. Moreover, GDP growth over the past few years has been driven almost exclusively by increases in the overall size of the population—in other words, by the immigration that both main parties say they want to limit severely. Conservative governments, theoretically tax averse, have been forced to increase overall taxes to a level not seen since 1950, when the United Kingdom was still recovering from World War II. The average annual real wage has fallen about $14,000 below its level before the financial crisis of 2008. These economic trends will not simply disappear with a change in government.

Living standards in many parts of the country are in shocking decline.

Measures of social well-being are no more encouraging. The National Health Service, a source of justifiable British pride since its inception in 1948, is in crisis: in June, the nonpartisan Institute for Government described its current state as “dismal” and found that “hospital performance is arguably the worst in the NHS’s history.” There are three-quarters of a million more British children living in poverty than when the Conservatives came to power in 2010, and 4.3 million children are going hungry. Many local agencies have gone bankrupt, leading to deep cuts in basic services such as waste collection, social care, and libraries. In 2022, the Commission on the UK’s Future, an independent body chaired by former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, found that on the simple measure of GDP per capita, “half the British population”—more than 30 million people— “live in areas no wealthier than the poorer parts of the former East Germany, poorer than parts of central and eastern Europe, and poorer than the U.S. states of Mississippi and West Virginia.”

A sense of decline flows through and around the land in the form of rivers and shores polluted with sewage. In March, one of the great English public rituals—the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race on the River Thames—was for the first time preceded by warnings to the rowers that because of the concentration of E. coli bacteria in the water, they should cover cuts and grazes with waterproof dressings and take care not to swallow any splashes from what used to be called the “Sweet Thames.” The British Environment Agency has found that in 2023, the companies managing the national water supply—water service was privatized by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the late 1980s—spilled more raw, untreated human effluent into the country’s rivers and seas than in any previous year on record.

Indeed, the electoral revolt against the Tories in many of their rural bastions was partly driven by the feeling even among traditional Conservative voters that what the poet William Blake called “England’s green and pleasant land” had been blighted. For many of those voters, such concerns are made worse by the awareness that they were, after all, supposed to be entering an era of uplift and optimism. Just five years ago, in his first speech in the House of Commons after he swept to power as prime minister, Johnson insisted that the years of “managed decline” were over and hailed “the beginning of a new golden age.” 

Of course, the fulcrum of this transformation was supposed to be the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. The narrative spun by Johnson and his allies was that the country’s natural exuberance had been stifled for half a century by bureaucrats in Brussels and that freed from these encumbrances, the union would flourish. The cold reality is that Brexit has merely shown that the United Kingdom has no one to blame for its problems but itself. And those home-grown problems have been made worse by the folly of erecting new barriers between British exporters and their primary markets in Europe.

DON’T MENTION IT

Among the more striking features of Starmer and Labour’s campaign this spring was the utter absence of Brexit from party talking points. This silence may, in purely electoral terms, have been wise: polling now suggests that just 13 percent of voters see relations with the EU as one of the most important issues facing the country. Anand Menon, the director of the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, noted during the campaign that “if you do focus groups and mention Brexit, the biggest reaction you get from voters is a yawn and an eye-roll.” Yet it is nonetheless remarkable for the opposition to decline to attack the ruling party for its single greatest policy fiasco and for voters to seem bored and irritated by their country’s most momentous political change of the last half century.

In the 2016 Brexit referendum, Johnson and his fellow advocates had persuaded a small majority of voters that breaking with Brussels would restore “Global Britain” to its natural place at the summit of prosperity and achievement. In fact, this vision was more a narrowing than an expansion of the horizons of Britishness. It was driven by an inchoate but resurgent English nationalism. It had little appeal in multicultural London, in Scotland, or in Northern Ireland, all of which voted heavily to stay in the EU, as did Welsh-speaking Wales. But enough of Johnson’s English compatriots were persuaded of this proposition to give him a massive parliamentary majority in the election of December 2019, just seven weeks before the Brexit deal was consummated. 

It is hard to think of a successful political project whose luster has faded as quickly as Brexit’s. In June, in a report titled “Life in the Slow Lane,” the nonpartisan Resolution Foundation found that “since 2019, Britain’s relative performance in goods exports has tanked,” noting that it has grown at just 1.1 percent annually, a mere fifth of the average for members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The reasons for this kind of collapse are not mysterious: choosing to leave the world’s largest single market has consequences. As the report boils it down in hard cash, had the United Kingdom preserved its pre-Brexit market share, its exports would have grown by $64 billion instead of shrinking by $4 billion between 2019 and 2022.

Increasingly, the British economy is kept afloat by its export of financial, legal, technical, and advertising services, much of it driven by U.S. companies outsourcing this kind of work to British firms, and notably by private equity outfits. This is very good for bankers, lawyers, ad executives, and management consultants—but far less so for farmers, manufacturing workers, and ordinary consumers. There are many more losers than winners: in March, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility found that its prediction that Brexit would lead to a long-term four percent drop in productivity is being borne out, one of many factors contributing to the worst decline in living standards since the 1950s.

Amid these disastrous effects, few in the British political class seem willing to say the “B-word.” Given that just 18 percent of those who voted Leave in 2016 now think Brexit is going well, Sunak, an enthusiastic Brexiteer, declined to even mention it on the campaign trail. But consider Nigel Farage, the veteran anti-immigrant and anti-EU campaigner who now leads the far-right Reform Party. If Farage can reasonably be said to be the progenitor of Brexit, he now seems able to do no more than shake his head in disappointment at the way his child has turned out and issue vague admonitions that it must do better. 

Starmer and Labour’s omerta may be far more telling. In the weeks before the election, Starmer hardly uttered a word about Europe; as the incoming prime minister, he will have a strong temptation to ignore not just Brexit itself but all the unresolved questions of British identity that were wrapped up in it. In part, this may be a matter of sheer expediency. Almost all the country’s public services—from health and social care to policing and prisons to water and sewage to schools and libraries and even to basic nutrition for large parts of the population—are struggling. The country urgently needs massive amounts of public investment. But Labour has accepted the fiscal restraints it has inherited from the Conservatives—government borrowing is to be limited to three percent of GDP and overall government debt is targeted to keep falling—and it has promised not to raise taxes for “working people.” Squaring that circle will be so hard that Starmer may well feel that large-scale political reforms are a luxury he cannot afford.

HOLLOW EMPIRE

But Starmer will soon confront the inescapable truth that he cannot address the country’s economic failure without also confronting the profound problems of the union itself. First, Labour will need growth to fund those urgent public services improvements it has to deliver to its newly expanded electorate. Ironically, because its trade with the rest of the world has shrunk, the United Kingdom has actually become more dependent on European markets since 2019. The solution is obvious: the government has to undo at least some of the damage it has done to its trade with the EU. Starmer has gestured broadly in this direction but has ruled out the only moves that would actually make a difference—seeking to rejoin the EU’s single market or its customs union.

Something has to give, and when it does, all the big questions that were raised by Brexit—sovereignty, the United Kingdom’s postimperial place in the world, the antiquated nature of the country’s democracy, the tensions between its individual nations—will be back on the table. It would make sense, therefore, for Starmer to address these large existential issues while his government still has the air of novelty and while the British electorate is so clearly crying out for a fresh start.

The second reason why Starmer cannot ignore the parlous state of the union is the strong connection between power and prosperity. The parts of the country with the least political power—roughly speaking, the northern region of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—are also the ones that are the most impoverished. Feelings of national and regional resentment have been channeled into different forms of separatism—independence movements in the so-called Celtic fringes; “independence” from the EU in England—but they have common roots in the realities of the country’s chasmic geographical inequalities.

According to the economist Philip McCann, the United Kingdom is “almost certainly the most interregionally unequal large high-income country” in the world. And those gaps have expanded in recent decades. In 2019, GDP per capita in London was $73,000—almost 90 percent higher than in Scotland and eastern England, where it was just $38,000. Brexit, which has depressed manufacturing exports while allowing the service economy to continue to thrive, has only exacerbated these regional inequalities; just within England itself, the wealth gap between the southeast and the languishing north is expected to reach $290,000 per person by 2030.

All the big questions raised by Brexit will be back on the table.

Even Boris Johnson recognized this. His signature domestic policy was “levelling up”—bringing all regions up to the standards of the rich southern areas. But neither he nor his successors managed to do much to achieve that goal. In March, a report by the all-party parliamentary Public Accounts Committee found that only ten percent of funding for the “levelling up agenda” had been spent and that Conservative ministers were unable to furnish “any compelling examples” of what the funding had accomplished. These failures are not merely the products of incompetence; they highlight the inability of a top-down postimperial state to devolve real power to its member nations and its neglected regions.

As an opposition party, Labour was hardly blind to these issues. In 2022, it published the findings of the Brown Commission on the UK’s Future, which made precisely this connection between the United Kingdom’s economic stagnation and its forms of government: “At the root of this failure” is “an unreformed, over-centralised way of governing that leaves millions of people complaining they are neglected, ignored, and invisible”—people who, as the commission put it, increasingly see themselves “treated as second class citizens in their own country.”

It was with this democratic deficit in mind that the Brown Commission proposed radical constitutional changes, among them the abolition of the “indefensible” House of Lords and its replacement with an elected “chamber of the nations and regions,” and greatly enhanced status and powers for the devolved Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish assemblies, as well as for cities and regions in England. It also recommended at least the beginnings of a written constitution, with a “constitutional statute guiding how political power should be shared” as well as “constitutionally protected social rights—such as the right to health care for all based on need, not ability to pay.”

At the time, Brown’s ideas were driven by his sense that this may be the last chance for the United Kingdom to right itself. Polling showed that the proposed reforms had significant voter support; they also were endorsed by Starmer. At the launch, the Labour leader predicted that people would someday look back at the report and view it as “the turning point between an old economy that was not working and a new economy that has worked for the whole of the United Kingdom.” Yet none of Brown’s proposals were featured in Labour’s hypercautious election campaign, and Starmer seems disinclined to spend his new stock of political capital on overcoming resistance to such a fundamental rethinking of the union.

FIX OR FAIL

What the incoming government needs to recognize is that the United Kingdom has already changed irreversibly. It was created and held together by huge historical forces: the development of the British Empire, the forging of a Protestant (and explicitly anti-Catholic) identity, the Industrial Revolution, the apparent invincibility of British arms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the successful invention of a “relatable” monarchy, and the building of a postwar social democracy. All these stabilizers have been kicked away. The empire is no more; the United Kingdom is no longer a majority Christian, let alone Protestant, country; its industrial base was abandoned under Thatcher; its days of military might are long gone; the monarchy, with the death of Queen Elizabeth, has lost its anchor in history; and many of the achievements of British social democracy have been destroyed by the Conservatives.

It is still, just about, possible to imagine a whole new kind of union, one that revels in the diversity of a place that has many different national, regional, and ethnic identities and plays to its potential economic strengths by reopening itself to trade and human capital from Europe and further afield. But Starmer and his government would have to begin by acknowledging that what was holding the country back was not, after all, an unaccountable Eurocracy in Brussels but rather an overcentralized government in London—one that was created to rule a far-flung empire of largely voiceless subjects and still rules over a smallish island with citizens who want to feel in control of their own lives.

Starmer will certainly try, however hesitantly at first, to rebuild the social democracy that buttressed the union in the decades when the empire was vanishing and gave ordinary people in every part of the country a tangible sense of common belonging. He seems, at least in principle, to understand that the only viable future for the United Kingdom is, in effect, as a federal democracy in which power flows to and from the nations and regions—and the people who inhabit them. He is, moreover, rather good at reinvention, having reinvented himself from his early persona as a radical left-wing human rights lawyer to a stolid technocrat and having given his party a similarly drastic makeover.

The economy will not rebound without far-reaching changes in the way the country functions.

Can Starmer go further and reinvent the union? It is not at all clear that he wants to take on that task. He seems inclined to see his own triumph across so many different parts of the country as proof that the kingdom is indeed still united and intact; that a restoration of decency, competence, and coherence to government will also serve as a restoration of pride in Britishness itself.

In the immediate term, he may well be right. Feelings of relief and renewal will certainly be widespread. But they won’t last unless communities start to see improvements in public services, reductions in poverty, and rises in productivity and wages. Those things in turn will not happen without far-reaching changes in the way the country functions, both internally and in its relations with Europe. The same political systems that got the country into such a deep hole will not suffice to get it out. They are not for the purposes they have to accomplish: bringing the United Kingdom, gradually, back to where it belongs in the EU; restoring pride in institutions such as the National Health Service; convincing people across the union that they have an equal stake in the country’s future.

Starmer has to create a virtuous circle in which a radical renewal of the United Kingdom’s sclerotic democracy feeds into and is in turn fed by an energetic revival of its flaccid economy. But if there is no virtuous circle, there will be a vicious one. Political disillusionment will quickly take hold again. Over four million people voted for Farage’s far-right Reform Party, giving it 14 percent of overall party support. Although the workings of the electoral system translated this into just four Commons seats (including one for Farage himself), it gives him a solid base from which he can seek to capitalize on the Conservatives’ disarray. 

If Starmer fails to turn public anger into a more long-term optimism, the sour English nationalism that Farage taps into will thrive on that hopelessness. With traditional conservatism in such deep disarray, there is the potential for the right-wing of English politics to end in a MAGA-style takeover. Not the least of its consequences will be the blocking of any moves toward taking the country back into Europe. That in turn will renew the drives toward separation in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales.

Labour’s victory has given the United Kingdom a chance to save itself by remaking itself. It has sprung from a very deep pool of disenchantment with the way things work in the country—and the multiple ways in which they patently do not. If Starmer grasps the truth that his triumph is a function of the United Kingdom’s brokenness, he will have the courage to begin to fix it. If not, it will remain dangerously unfixed. And it may indeed become unfixable. The party that has dominated it for 200 years has imploded. It would be foolish to imagine that the same thing could not happen to the country.