Tomorrow, July 4, voters in the United Kingdom are called to the polls for what polls have been describing for months as a Labour wins by a landslide after 14 years of Tory rule. So much so that Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister in October 2022 – the last of the five Conservative Prime Ministers who have succeeded each other in Downing Street since Brexit was approved in 2016 – has campaigned mainly on urging people not to give Keir Starmer’s Labour “the blank cheque” that it would receive from a super majority in the Commons.
But the extent of the defeat that Sunak seems inevitably heading for is shown by the fact that the latest polls show the Conservatives not only 20 points behind the Labour Party – 18% against 38% – but also behind, according to some surveys, Reform UK, the new, still populist and far-right face of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
The path that led 61-year-old Starmer to this point was neither short nor casual. Already two years before taking over the leadership of the party in April 2020 following the resignation of left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn following the disastrous results of the 2019 elections, he held regular secret meetings, every Monday, with trusted friends and collaborators to discuss how to change Labour.
Which he then did without any hesitation, abandoning the Corbyn era, sharply shifting the party’s orientation, and machine, to the center and drastically tackling the problem of anti-Semitism. “He is instinctively a Labour voter and person, but not in a tribal way,” a person very close to Starmer told Politico, explaining that he does not have his own circle of MPs and has often hired career civil servants for key roles, such as his powerful chief of staff, Sue Gray.
The Labour Challenge
As Labour leader, Starmer promised voters and business and industry leaders in the UK a reliable management of public spending and a recovery in economic growth. Also excluded is an increase in tax rates – except for VAT on private school fees and the elimination of “loopholes” in favour of funds and energy companies – in exchange for economic stability and an improvement in public services, particularly the health service by making 40,000 appointments available per week to reduce waiting lists.
The Labour programme also includes the hiring of 6,500 new teachers and the opening of 3,000 more nurseries, the creation of a publicly owned energy company, Great British Energy, with the promise of reducing bills. In addition, 650,000 new jobs are promised in green industries. On the immigration front, Starmer promises to abolish the Conservative law for the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, but at the same time he pledges to fight networks for the entry of illegal migrants.
Fiscal experts, the Financial Times reports, say whichever party wins the election will have to choose between raising taxes or cutting public spending to tackle the country’s severe deficit problems. And Starmer’s critics say the Labour manifesto contains no concrete proposals for increasing public revenue.
In the outgoing Parliament, Labour had 206 seats, but according to recent national projections by the Guardian, they could end up with 424 of the 650 Commons seats in tomorrow’s vote, much more than the 326 required for a majority. In addition to Starmer, a leading figure in the increasingly likely Labour government will be Rachel Reeves, a former economist at the Bank of England, currently shadow chancellor of the Exchequer.
The Tories’ heavy baggage
The Tories enter Thursday’s election with 14 years of government marked by tension and chaos behind them, in a post-Brexit United Kingdom marked by rising unemployment, frozen pensions, a decline in the purchasing power of wages and a sharp deterioration of public services. Not to mention the costs and complications of leaving the EU, which in 2016 the majority of British people had voted for also because they were convinced, by Brexit supporters, including Tory exponents like Boris Johnson, that it would instead improve their quality of life.
Since the referendum, called by David Cameron precisely to try to block the advance of the Eurosceptics even within the Tories, the party has been torn apart by internal struggles, producing the result of five prime ministers in nine years. In the two years of government, Sunak managed to keep the promise to cut inflation, but not that of reducing waiting lists for the public health service and of “stopping the boats” of migrants, despite having finally managed to pass the controversial and highly contested law for deportations to Rwanda.
Among Sunak’s promises in the event of a highly unlikely stay in Downing Street, that of tax cuts of 17 billion pounds, a promise that clashes with economists’ forecasts. On immigration, he promises to go ahead with the plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and to introduce a maximum limit on the granting of work and family reunification visas, thus also limiting regular immigration. On the Defense front, Sunak, very busy on the front of aid to Ukraine, says that military spending will reach 2.5% of GDP by 2030 and that he will introduce compulsory military service for all 18-year-olds.
The Conservatives had 345 seats in the outgoing parliament, which they won in 2019 when Johnson led the Tories to a resounding victory, but they face an unprecedented defeat on Thursday, with the Guardian’s projections from recent days putting them at just 135 seats.
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