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The old order cannot hold

Labour’s unravelling shows British politics is ripe for creative destruction.

Tom Slater

Tom Slater
Editor

Topics Politics UK

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Cast your minds back to the summer.

The British Labour Party had just been returned to power for the first time in 14 years. The denizens of Hampstead erupted, even if no one else did.

A new dawn had broken, again – or so we were told. Those supposedly nasty, culture-warring, Brexit-obsessed Tories had been dispatched by Keir Starmer – a sensible social democrat; a Good person.

Lobby journalists took turns congratulating the new PM, asking him questions that wouldn’t look out of place in a Smash Hits cover feature. (‘Good afternoon, prime minister. Firstly, have you got used to hearing yourself get called that yet?’)

Column inches were filled with a kind of gushing that at times bordered on TMI. Caitlin Moran told Times readers that she was literally aroused by events. ‘There is nothing more erotic to a middle-aged woman than competency’, she wrote.

An only slightly more restrained Andrew Marr declared on BBC Question Time that Starmer’s Britain was a ‘little haven of peace and stability’.

Six months on, and 61 per cent of voters are dissatisfied with Starmer. Just 10 per cent think his government is doing well. And you really can’t blame them, can you? From the economy to winter fuel payments to the farmer tax row to the Chagos Islands, everything this reverse-Midas touches turns to shit.

Despite a ‘laser-like’ focus on growth, the economy has posted no growth since Starmer’s Labour took office. Last week, the cost of government borrowing soared above that of the Liz Truss interlude, putting chancellor Rachel Reeves firmly on sack watch.

It’s now a dead heat between Reeves and Ed Miliband – the energy secretary who keeps having to reassure us there won’t be blackouts – to see who will follow Tulip Siddiq out the door, after the anti-corruption minister named in a Bangladeshi corruption probe finally fell on her sword last night.

Then there’s the grooming-gangs scandal, Labour’s mishandling of which – first in local government, now in its efforts to block a national inquiry – could wreck the party’s preening, self-righteous image for a generation.

Still, voters had this lot’s number to begin with. Labour’s majority was won on a piddling 34 per cent of the vote and a historically low turnout of 60 per cent. Around 20 per cent of the eligible electorate backed Starmer. His victory was almost entirely down to the collapse of the Tory Party, which was itself facilitated by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK cannibalising the right-wing vote.

A demoralised public acquiesced to Labour rule, rather than enthusiastically endorsed it. Starmer may have seduced Moran and her ilk, but for the rest of the country it was more ‘lie back and think of England’.

What commentators hailed as a renewal of social democracy is really technocracy’s last stand: another creature of our failed managerialist consensus scuttling into power in the absence of any viable alternative.

His grip is already slipping. A ‘mega poll’ published recently by More in Common projected that, if another election were held now, Starmer would lose his majority and 200 seats, shedding 87 to the Conservatives and 67 to Reform, which would leapfrog the Liberal Democrats to become Britain’s third-largest party. Labour would still be the largest, but would be forced to cobble together a fractious, multiparty coalition.

Even these numbers mask a staggering breakdown in the old party allegiances. The implied vote share of that poll would put the Tories first on 26 per cent, Labour second on 25 per cent and Reform third on 21 per cent. Party politics is fragmenting. It’s just that first-past-the-post is, by its unrepresentative nature, failing to reflect it.

Meanwhile, other polls show Reform surging into second place, with YouGov now putting Farage one point behind Labour and three ahead of the Tories.

The old party duopoly, under which both Labour and the Tories could always count on at least a third of the vote, is breaking down. And it has been for some time. After the 2019 European elections, before the Boris Johnson takeover of the Tories, some pollsters had the Brexit Party (Reform’s predecessor) and the Lib Dems pushing Labour and the Tories into third and fourth place.

Labour isn’t just paying the price for a woeful six months, it is continuing to reap the whirlwind of our volatile political times, in which the old allegiances are dying, even if the new ones are struggling to be born.

Starmer’s ‘landslide’ increasingly looks like a fluke, thrown up by our dysfunctional electoral system and the total collapse of the post-Johnson Conservative Party. Indeed, Labour’s supposed great victory was secured on a significantly lower vote share than Jeremy Corbyn won in 2017, and even fewer votes than Corbyn won in 2019.

So long as the right-of-centre vote remains split, Labour will likely remain the largest party. But make no mistake: this is a zombie government, staggering on despite nothing going on upstairs, showing us all just how much damage a braindead corpse can still do.

The other cheek of the establishment backside is hardly faring much better, of course.

Kemi Badenoch, the culture warrior who gets things done, was the Conservatives’ best pick for leader by a country mile. Those who think Robert Jenrick – the charisma-free, vice-signalling ex-Cameroon who seems to have taken all the red pills at once – is the man the British public are waiting for are even more deluded than he is.

But whether or not Badenoch has an offer, a vision, an argument, something more than re-heated Thatcherism with a side order of trans-scepticism, remains to be seen. Without it, the Tories seem unlikely to rebuild bridges with the provincial, Brexity working classes.

Following decades of betrayal and misrule – from the financial crisis to the Brexit wars to the green penury that, though long coming, is beginning to be more sharply felt – the old order is crumbling. It cannot hold.

Labour’s unravelling reminds us that British politics remains ripe for creative destruction. Bring it on.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater

Picture by: Getty.

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