Henry Nicholls/Press Association via AP Images
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks to employees during a visit to Leonardo, a defense contractor in Luton, England, May 2, 2025.
LONDON – American progressives have looked longingly at Britain as the one Western nation where a left-of-center government has a large working majority and a mandate for dramatic change. Under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the Labour Party holds 403 seats in the 650 member House of Commons.
But that large representation is misleading. It’s the quirky result of the collapse of the Conservative Party in the July 2024 elections, combined with Britain’s “first past the post” electoral system, which gave Labour a huge parliamentary majority based on just 34 percent of the national popular vote.
Starmer needed to earn his mandate by channeling the popular desire for drastic change. Instead, he bungled it by excess caution on every major front, and a reversion to neoliberal fiscal policies and small-bore policy adjustments that don’t add to improved life conditions for ordinary Brits.
The result was a shocking set of gains last week for Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party. In last week’s local elections, support for Labour cratered, the Tories collapsed, and the Reform Party surged.
Reform not only snatched a supposedly safe Labour seat in a House of Commons by-election. The party also gained 677 local council seats and now controls ten county councils, including large ones such as Kent.
For two decades, Britain has underperformed every other major economy in the West. Since 2008, its annual GDP growth rate has been less than 1 percent.
One consequence was a backlash against the EU, whose free-migration rules were blamed for taking local jobs. In a move that was too clever by half, Tory Prime Minister David Cameron tried to co-opt the far right in 2015 by sponsoring a plebiscite on Brexit, then opposing its passage.
The gambit backfired. After Brexit narrowly passed in 2016, Cameron resigned, followed by a succession of clownish Tory prime ministers. Though the referendum was not binding, the Tories stalled for several years and finally led Britain out of the EU in 2020.
As most economic commentators had warned, the result was to weaken Britain’s economy even further. Multinational corporations and banks that located in the U.K. for easy access to the continent suddenly faced all manner of barriers. Traditional British exports to Europe suffered as well.
In these circumstances, the Tories were thoroughly repudiated in the 2024 election. The British economy needed a massive overhaul, to move away from its excessive reliance on finance and toward its underdeveloped strengths in technology. Britain also needed major reinvestment in its public systems, from the National Health Service to its crumbling public infrastructure and failed privatizations such as British Rail.
But this would require significant tax increases on capital to finance public needs. Despite having the world’s second-largest capital markets, Britain has kept taxes on capital extremely low, and Labour does not propose to change that. Our friend Damon Silvers has calculated that if Britain had a tax system comparable to Canada’s, it would have another 100 billion pounds to spend annually on public investments.
Instead, Starmer embraced a program that focused on budget balance at the expense of social supports. He began by cutting the winter fuel allowance. In March, the government unveiled sweeping cuts in Britain’s social security system, including unpopular proposals to narrow criteria for disability support and other health benefits.
Starmer has also ducked the pressing issue of how to rejoin Europe, even if not as a formal member of the EU, on the model of Norway and Switzerland. Recent polls show that about 55 percent of British voters now say that leaving the EU was a mistake, compared to just 30 percent who still support Brexit.
The swing to Farage doesn’t mean Brexit is untouchable. It just means that large numbers of voters want transformative change, and they aren’t getting it from Labour.
But if the results of last week’s election were a painful wake-up call for Labour, they were catastrophic for the Tories. In last week’s local elections, Reform captured 30 percent of the votes for local council seats, compared to the Tories’ 15 percent. The Tories lost 676 council seats and lost control of all of the 16 councils where they had been the majority.
As the traditional center-right party, founded in 1834, the Tories are hemmed in from the center by the resurgent Liberal Democrats and from the right by the Reform party. If anything like last week’s results are repeated in the next general election, the Tories would be wiped out and Britain would have a four-party system, with Reform on the far right, the Liberal Democrats in the center, and Labour and the Greens as a divided left.
But the Tory collapse is small comfort for Starmer and Labour, which has until the next general election, which is not required until 2029, to find a more compelling set of policies. The early signs are not encouraging.
Once again, a feeble center-left party that delivers little for struggling citizens hemorrhages support to the far right. How many times, in how many countries, do we need to learn this lesson?
