In the UK, the Conservatives are attacking asylum seekers, alarming “Islamists” and mobilising the rights of trans people.
In the UK, the Conservatives are attacking asylum seekers, alarming “Islamists” and mobilising the rights of trans people.
It’s been eight years since 2016, the fateful year when the British electorate experienced a political earthquake by voting to leave the European Union later, and when the American electorate experienced a second earthquake by electing Donald Trump as president.
Now, both countries are once again facing very important elections. In the U. S. , Trump is once again trying to seize force despite four criminal trials and huge civil fines. Meanwhile, in the U. K. , the embattled Conservative government, guilty of a (a series of recurring crises since Brexit and now the fifth prime minister since mid-2016) must call a general election until early 2025, with top observers predicting that the election will take a stand, which it took a stand in the fall. It is perfectly conceivable that the United States and the United Kingdom would vote within a few weeks of each other.
British opinion polls paint a bleak picture of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government. The standard of living of the average Briton is falling sharply (wages have not stagnated for so long since the Napoleonic Wars). The once vaunted National Health Service appears to be in free fall. And while the country is mired in social disputes on a scale not seen since the 1970s, with movements in everyone from doctors to maritime workers, public opinion has largely turned against the Conservatives since the last election, which took a stand in December 2019.
In the 2019 British election, the triumphalist Boris Johnson led to a major parliamentary victory, breaking through Labour’s so-called red wall in northern England and paving the way for what Johnson’s idea would be decades of newly populist Conservative hegemony. But five years is an eternity in politics. And now it is the Tory “blue wall” in the south of England that is in danger of collapsing.
Johnson suffered an ignominious fall in strength following a series of scandals in the COVID era, and the economic policies of his short-lived successor, Liz Truss, led to a sudden implosion of the British economy, a stock market crash, and a currency crash. crisis. For at least a year, the Conservatives have been in double digits Labour (a party led by Sir Keir Starmer, a staunch moderate). Some polls put Labour ahead at 25 per cent. Recent polls recommend that figure be slightly lower, at about 19 percent.
Be that as it may, those figures suggest that the Conservative Party is facing electoral erasure on a much larger scale than a divided Labour Party experienced in the 1983 election, when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party benefited from Labour’s shift to the left and the rise of the Labour Party. A third centrist party split the opposition vote and won a landslide election victory. In that election, Labour’s representation fell to 209 MPs and the Conservatives won just under 400 seats. If the general election were held today, Sunak’s party would win fewer than a hundred seats, as Labour shed its supposedly radical baggage after getting rid of left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn and purged many of his supporters from the party’s ranks, winning more than a hundred seats. 450 seats.
It is surprising, given the political climate, that a gigantic number of Conservative MPs, in addition to many senior ministers, have already announced that they intend to run for public office.
The remaining Conservative MPs are resorting to Trump-style attacks on what they see as an “awakened culture” in a last-ditch effort to re-anchor their political fortunes. They stepped up their efforts to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda (with which the government signed an agreement a few years ago to remove a number of asylum seekers from British hands, a policy they maintained despite a series of defeats in the courts and Parliament). , and despite estimates that it would cost far more to deport each and every asylum seeker to Rwanda than to space them out in the UK). They have amplified their rhetoric that the UK way of life is allegedly under attack by “Islamists”. Like their conservative counterparts in the United States, they have sought to exploit public opposition to expanding rights for the transgender community. And they have opposed their own environmental commitments in an attempt to portray the Labour Party as more concerned with summary ecological environmental objectives than with quality-of-life issues.
There is also talk – probably very beautifully – of a challenge to leadership by the right, aimed at ousting Sunak as prime minister and installing the Conservative leader before the election. In reality, members of the far right are far more likely to wait for the party to suffer a humiliating defeat and then seek to consolidate its strength, installing a Trumpist-type leader who will forge alliances with Nigel Farage – the architect of Brexit and leader of a diversity of nationalist parties and movements over the past fifteen years – and fully embrace the kind of flag-waving nationalism so popular in those days in the past. the American right.
None of this has improved either the party’s voting figures or Rishi Sunak’s private approval ratings: when he won the Conservative Party leadership race and assumed his role as prime minister, Sunak was sunk by around nine percent; Today, he is defeated by a staggering 28%, and fewer than one in four voters express confidence in his leadership. By contrast, Joe Biden is below 16%, with four in 10 electors approving of its functionality at this point in the election cycle. . It’s not good, but it’s not as bad as Sunak’s numbers. Similarly, Trump is much less underwater, around 10%. Simply put, the British public has lost all confidence in the leaders of the Conservative Party and their ability to govern. . For a party that has traditionally prided itself on its stated competence and manpower, this represents a common misfortune.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party is doing its best to express political and economic promises, on the premise that any inclination towards radical and progressive politics would remind the electorate of the Corbynitian political priorities they flatly rejected in 2019. Starmer’s party has announced that it will not do so. It has also done its best to downplay expectations of dramatic and sudden adjustments in public spending levels. Starmer has publicly stated that the country is in the worst economic malaise it has seen in part of a century and that therefore the Labour Party will not turn on the spending taps without bureaucracy to the next government.
Labour’s strategy would possibly make pragmatic sense, but, from a progressive point of view, it is daunting.
Post-Brexit Britain is moving from one political and economic crisis to another. Its ruling categories are facing a crisis of legitimacy on a scale not seen in generations. Most likely, this revolt from below will sweep away Sunak and his Conservative Party. later this year. But without a set of ambitious policy proposals for Starmer and his new team to bet their fortunes, and without a plan to counter stagnant wages in the UK and the corrosion of important public sector institutions, it is entirely conceivable that their honeymoon will be short. After all, Starmer’s approval ratings are also underwater (though not as smart as Sunak’s) and Labour’s burgeoning clients have at least as much to do with public antipathy towards the Conservatives as they do with proactive aid to Labour. .
Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and part-time professor at the University of California, Davis. His paintings have been published in publications such as The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, he holds a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from the University of Oxford and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism and now lives in Sacramento, California.