Two weeks before the parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom, no one disputes that the center-left Labor Party, led by lawyer Keir Starmer, will win its largest victory in a quarter of a century, with polls that assign him up to 450 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. The bets are on what so disastrous will be the defeat of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservativeswhom some polls place below 100 seats compared to the 344 they have today.
According to the criteria of
The only time Labor took over more than 400 seats in Parliament was in Tony Blair’s successive victories in 1997 and 2001. But the Tories (Conservatives) have never won fewer than 150 seats in more than two centuries of parliamentary elections. In fact, in the last half century they have governed with comfortable majorities for 32 years.
More than 200 of its current seats are at risk, including those of uncontested MPs such as current Finance Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who has won the Surrey constituency seat in five elections in a row. As the correspondent of The New York Times in London, Stephen Castle, “that the second most powerful man in the Government is emerging as a loser is testament to the scale of the threat facing the Conservatives.”
That the second most powerful man in the Government is emerging as a loser is testament to the scale of the threat facing the Conservatives.
The main polls released this weekend predict that Labor will obtain between 40 and 46 percent of the vote, against between 19 and 23 percent for the Tories, while the Liberal Democrats will be around 12 percent and the Greens, 6 percent. All polls show a rise in the nationalists of the populist right of Nigel Farage, the man who led and won the campaign for Brexit in the 2016 referendum, which marked the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union.
Despite the economic, commercial and tourism trauma that this decision brought, since now a large majority of Britons deny Brexit, Farage has managed to advance this campaign by targeting the control of immigrants, who – as often happens in these facile speeches – blame for all evils.
Farage is at the head of the Reform UK party, which scores between 12 and 16 percent in the polls, although in one of them, that of the YouGov firm, he reaches 19 percent and surpasses the conservatives by one point. The problem for the right-wing group is that these votes are distributed more or less equally throughout a good part of the country’s geography, without concentrating on a significant number of strongholds.
As the UK electoral system is based on single-member constituencies, where each elects a single MP, Reform UK can come second or third in total votes nationally, but get a very poor crop of seats because it fails to win. strong and win in a good number of districts. But if he continues to grow in the polls at the expense of the Tories, he could obtain more and give a surprise on July 4, although in any case very far from the Labor Party.
Aware that in these elections he will obtain his best result at the national level, but that in terms of seats he will not obtain a significant number, Farage announced on Monday, when presenting his programmatic manifesto, that he is running now to be prime minister, but not now. but in the year 2029.
Labor moderation
After a very slight rebound in the first quarter of the year, when it grew 0.6 percent, the British economy disappointed in April (the last month with consolidated figures), when the combination of the different sectors marked an increase of 0 percent. The International Monetary Fund reduced its forecasts for 2024, from 0.7 to 0.4 percent, something that is explained, according to IMF experts, by keeping interest rates high due to inflation that does not subside and which also contributes to curbing consumption.
Many UK voters were exhausted by Boris Johnson’s emotional promise speeches, and are now looking for a ‘more serious, sober and methodical’ prime minister.
Added to all this is a labor shortage that some relate to Brexit, which removed from the British Isles many workers from Eastern European countries integrated into the European Union, who were authorized to work in the United Kingdom when This was part of the EU. The economic crisis that resulted from the explosive mix between the global slowdown in activities following the post-Covid rebound and the serious disruptions caused by the brexit It has hit hard the image of Prime Minister Sunak and the Conservatives, and in the process has benefited Starmer’s Labor party.towards whose candidates the majority of voters have turned.
Starmer is not a traditional politician: he trained as a lawyer – specializing in human rights – and as a prosecutor, and tends to present “facts and evidence rather than grandiloquent speeches”, as explained by the English journalist and writer Tom Baldwin, in a recent interview with National Public Radio in the United States. Baldwin argues that many voters in the United Kingdom were exhausted by the emotional promise speeches of Boris Johnson, and now he is looking for a prime minister “more serious, more sober and more methodical” than those who have governed the country in recent years. In his youth, Starmer was convinced of the socialist ideas that marked Labor ideology for decades, until Tony Blair led the party towards the center in the 1990s.
Now Starmer is imitating him. According to Baldwin, he is a leader “who has brought the Labor Party back to the political centre, who has transformed a party that was unreliable in terms of national security or the economy, into one that is now more reliable than the Conservatives on both counts.” ”.
With victory practically assured, Starmer has had the luxury of playing moderation and being cautious about promises, in contrast to his predecessor at the head of the party, the leftist Jeremy Corbin, whom Starmer replaced after the Labor collapse. in the 2019 elections. In fact, a few months ago he received criticism from the left wing of his community, because when outlining the general lines of the Labor program, some said that these were proposals that the conservatives could easily sign.
From program to reality
At the end of May, after Sunak’s announcement of the dissolution of Parliament and the early call for elections for July 4, Starmer accentuated the message of moderation in his speech. During a rally in which one of the protesters reproached him for saying that his program was in no way different from that of the Tories, he took the opportunity to say that Labor had stopped being “a party of protest and had become a political party.” of government”.
Starmer does not talk about nationalizations or new taxes on companies or their shareholders, knowing that these measures could further prostrate economic activity. His offer consists, instead, of “reestablishing the foundations of stability and building on them to rebuild Britain,” and of making Labor a “business- and worker-friendly movement (…) and the party of wealth generation.”
The British economy is stagnant: in April it grew 0% and by 2024, the IMF predicts it will increase 0.4%
Noted by conservatives for wanting to raise taxes, Starmer has defended himself by saying that his tax program seeks to increase public revenue by £8.6bn, the majority of it (£5.2bn) as a result of the fight against tax evasion.
He has promised to recruit several thousand doctors to decongest the national health system (NHS), which today has endless waiting lists and delays of several months before patients can access their appointments. Regarding the shortage of teachers in schools, he has announced the hiring of 6,500 teachers.
Still, analysts warn that if the economy does not react in the first year of the Labor government, it will be impossible to increase tax revenue. And that, in the long run, as Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, suggests, would lead Starmer to “proceed with budget cuts, review its objectives or increase taxes.”
At the international level, Starmer proposes maintaining financial and military support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, as well as recognizing the Palestinian state as a result of a peace process, and not before. And regarding the critical issue of illegal immigration, he promises to reduce the number of admissions, but assures that he will renounce the criticized conservative program of returning hundreds of asylum seekers to Rwanda.
But the issue of the economy is the one of greatest interest to voters. A few days ago, an editorial in the British newspaper Guardian He valued the Labor program called ‘A plan to change Britain’, because “it is well structured, logical and its language is well focused.” But he questioned whether the entire commitment is based on “stabilizing economic growth,” when there are complex issues, such as those related to climate change.which involve making decisions that do not necessarily facilitate that growth.
In the face of these criticisms, Starmer appears imperturbable and defends his pragmatic and serious vision. To those who criticize the excess of caution in his program, which lacks – they point out – proposals that excite, and even warn him that this could discourage a sector of voters, the Labor leader responds: “I am running for prime minister, not for circus director.”
MAURICIO VARGAS
Senior analyst
TIME
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