Climate skeptic Nigel Farage has established a beachhead in British politics, at the cost of delivering a supermajority to the green socialist Labour policy.
Labour leader Keir Starmer is now Britain’s Prime Minister. But nobody knows what will happen next.
British Labour, which champions hard green policies, except on days when they don’t, has won a landslide victory in today’s British national election, but only because climate Skeptic Nigel Farage split the Conservative vote.
This election has upended British politics. A strange new landscape is revealed
Rafael Behr
Fri 5 Jul 2024 13.47 AESTTribal loyalties and political certainties are falling away, but the Conservatives have been felled by a determined coalition
Elections do not change countries overnight. They reveal changes that were hidden – or visible but neglected – beneath layers of political complacency and cultural habit. The seismic event that has delivered Labour a vast haul of seats tells of tectonic pressure that started building long before Rishi Sunak’s rain-sodden campaign launch six weeks ago, in what already feels like a distant land.
Although opinion polls made a Conservative defeat look inevitable, there is a difference between forecasting regime change and waking up in a Britain that has dispatched scores of Tory MPs to political oblivion and chosen Keir Starmer to be prime minister with a commanding majority.
To what extent the results express a positive endorsement of Labour and its leader is hard to measure. The imperative to punish the Tories for years of political malpractice was palpable on the campaign trail in a way that exultant Starmer fandom was not. But contempt for an incumbent government and enthusiasm for the only available replacement are never exactly matched. The volume of Liberal Democrat gains in some former Conservative strongholds is partly an endorsement of Ed Davey’s party, but swing voters in those constituencies knew that evicting the local Tory would help propel Starmer into Downing Street. They were happy to take that chance.
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The same cultural faultline shows up in the handful of seats that Reform has won and many more where Nigel Farage’s party has pushed the Tories into third place. On terrain prepared by the 2016 leave vote, Reform has embedded itself as the natural repository for dissatisfaction with the status quo. Farage himself, finally achieving penetration of the Commons after seven failed attempts, will act as a beacon of anti-Westminster, anti-immigration, nationalist reaction. He will exploit his new parliamentary berth much as he used the platform he had as a member of the European parliament, sabotaging the institution from within, feasting on the privileges it affords him while denouncing the whole system as rotten.
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Obviously there were many other issues at play than climate policy, though cost of living rises caused by failed Conservative green energy policies were a significant factor.
But let’s focus on climate policy. What are Keir Starmer’s plans for Britain?
OK, Starmer is not keen on climate policy. Or is he?
Seems pretty keen on climate change right? Or is he?
Whatever Starmer does, he has to restore growth, provide lots of factory jobs for the unions, implement the Woke agenda, without upsetting some of his more socially conservative supporters, and provide lots of subsidies for energy and jobs, without creating a debt blowout which could collapse the British economy.
Meanwhile Farage, who took 14% of the national vote and threatens a real political breakout in the next election, will be doing what Farage does best, calling out every mistake and misstep, reminding voters why his is the party of lower energy bills, and an end to wasteful government spending.
This is going to be an interesting five years in British politics.
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