UK Election 2024: Labour's Inevitable Win Amidst Tory Turmoil

As someone habituated to the sensory overkill and hyperbole of Indian parliamentary elections, it is easy to miss the fact that Britain too is in election season, with parliamentary elections due on July 4. It is not due to the fabled ‘English reserve’ though: there is no great enthusiasm for Labour, which, 20 points ahead of the Tories, is seen as inevitably winning.

One would have thought that with such a seemingly unassailable lead, there would be great enthusiasm for Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, but perish the thought. Starmer, focus-group politician that he is, has kept any symptom of ‘commitment’ or ‘ideology’ well hidden from public view, and is trying to be all things to all people: to big business, he promises stability, to the working class he says he is one of them, he cannot even commit on the issue of the relation between sex and gender. Starmer seems to have deliberately chosen the Mr Boring persona: and why not? Boris Johnson’s zaniness, which included rampant rule breaking during Covid, leaks of lurid peccadillos, tales of corruption and incompetence, has exhausted the electorate, his focus groups seem to have told him.

Starmer is after those who voted for the Tories previously but feel let down. A tightrope walker, he has maintained a studious ambiguity on Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza: such attacks, he avers, are part of Israel’s right to self-defence, he wouldn’t mind a ceasefire though, and supports, and then withdraws support, for Palestinian statehood. He supported Corbyn, but then he ejected him from the party once the anti-Semitism charges took wing. He opposed Brexit but would like a “closer relation” with Europe. He opposes the xenophobia of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, and of the Tories, but will be harder on immigration, even sending Bangladeshis he imagines coming across the English Channel on boats, back on a plane to Bangladesh.

No one knows what he REALLY stands for, if politicians can be said to stand for anything at all. He is against bigotry but is mouthing words out of a Hindutva playbook: concern for Hinduphobia, for example. Catch me if you can!

The Tories are in hara-kiri mode: having given the British people a succession of unpopular and unelected Prime Ministers, with Liz Truss’s brief but ruinous term standing out for the £30 billion hole it drilled in Britain’s finances in record time. Sunak, once popular for his ‘furlough’ scheme that is said to have saved 1.5 million jobs during Covid, comes across as totally out of touch with the lives of ordinary people: he offered evidence of his ’deprived’ childhood by stating that he grew up in a household without Sky satellite tv subscription!

Meanwhile, half a dozen Tory candidates put bets on the date of the election before it was declared. Many grandees such as Michael Gove have fallen on their own sword, preferring not to contest over the possibility of an electoral evisceration. Sunak seems among the few members of his own party who clings to the audacious hope of a Tory win: one candidate of his own party has even put a £8000 bet on himself losing! A party that gambled away the future of Britain, especially its youth, with Brexit and cuts to education, health and social services, is finding it hard to convince more than 19 per cent of the voters to back it again. 

The Reform Party too has cast a net for disaffected voters of the Tory right. There is a consistent 17 per cent of voters that will line up behind cheeky-chappie charlatan Nigel Farage, who claims he will get done what the Tories promised to, but failed. They find this serial enemy of the truth to be the only one telling the truth. Farage is flouncing: each time his latest lie is caught out, he pouts and harrumphs about elite conspiracies and bent mainstream media like a pound-shop Trump. But his ‘Reform’ party is showing in some polls as having overtaken the Tories, and is expected to win anywhere from 5-15 seats in Parliament, a poor cousin to the far right on the Continent. The right wing of the Conservative party, to placate whom David Cameron had offered the Brexit referendum and made it binding, broke away to join UKIP, became the Brexit Party, and today has morphed into Reform: its Chairman Richard Tice was a key Tory donor until 2019, and it is the party of choice for Tories called out for xenophobia to defect to, such as Lee Anderson. Farage himself was a member from 1978 to 1992, and is said to be keen to return some day as Leader of the Tories. 

The racists are out of the woodworks openly: several Reform candidates and party officials have been recorded making statements considered out of bounds in electoral politics, and have been forced to withdraw, though encouraged to contest as independents. Those who do not find Sunak ‘authentically’ British and used words to describe him that are banished from public life find in Farage their true representative. Pictures of party activists in ‘white power’ t-shirts and other neo-Nazi accoutrements are circulating. But this is not straightforward either: its opposition to low emission zones, to climate science, and to Muslims, and support to Putin and Covid and other conspiracy theories, has found a sprinkling of support outside its main demographic. In the tune of “some of my best friends are…”, Reform has fielded a handful of non-white candidates of Indian, Pakistani, African, Tamil, Sri Lankan, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu backgrounds. 

The two parties that do offer an alternative to the policies of the other parties, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, may well spring a surprise on July 4: the LibDems in particular are expected to win upwards of 60 seats, appealing to youth with their open support for reversing Brexit, and resonating with voters aghast at the positions of Labour and the Tories which seemingly gives Israel a free hand in Gaza. They have also openly supported LGBTQI+ demands, and pledged more spending on health and education, and also a green transition. In fact, there is much in common between the Lib Dem and Green party positions on a host of issues. But who trusts the Lib Dems after it previously reneged on the important question of university fees when in coalition with David Cameron, a government that oversaw damaging austerity which created fertile ground for Brexit and the resurrection of the far-right in post-industrial Britain?

But the Lib Dems and the Greens are not the only ones seeking disaffected Labour voters. George ‘the cat’ Galloway is looking to peel off voters disenchanted with Labour for his Workers’ Party. Labour’s status as the party of choice for Muslim British voters has suffered a collapse over Gaza. While concern for Palestinian rights is not limited to Muslim voters – Israel’s actions have provoked widespread revulsion seen in weekly pro-Palestinian marches in London and elsewhere – Islamophobia in public life and Israeli atrocities in Gaza rank high in their list of priorities. Galloway, positioning himself as a ‘socialist’ AND ‘socially conservative’ is looking to capture the so-called ‘blue Labour’ space: openly opposed to LGBTQI+ demands, he wants to fuse working-class and Muslim conservatism. They barely register in the opinion polls, but Labour will be wary of surveys showing largescale unease among Muslim voters and the electoral repercussions this might have in constituencies that have large Muslim populations. 

So there you have it: when everyone says they are for change while also expecting things to stay more or less the same, at a time when trust in politicians is low and plummeting, it seems “hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”, as the song goes. Meanwhile, when Labour and Reform want to capture Tory votes, and the Lib Dems, Greens and the Workers Party want to catch those who have lost love for Labour, when party leaders routinely say laughable things, and rush to the centre is, more alarming that it is reassuring, is it a case of “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, stuck in the middle with you”?

(Views expressed are personal)

Subir Sinha is reader in the politics and theory of development at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London