The Significance of the British Elections on July 4, 2024
What happened in the UK last summer has a lot to tell US voters right now.
Rupert L. Chapman, III, Ph.D. is a retired Holy Land field archaeologist and Curator of Levantine Antiquities and the Secretary of the Middle East Desk at The British Museum.
Helen Chapman, PSM, is a Graduate of the University of Wales in History and served as a local government officer specializing in Electoral Administration and English Constitutional matters, including procedures and ethics.
I The Political Cycle
There is an observable cycle in the politics of democratic states. Political parties come into office with a fresh take on the place of the country in the world and the problems which need solutions. They proceed to implement those solutions, and the solutions may or may not work; they may themselves cause new problems which require new solutions. Over time the party begins to tire and run out of ideas, and the electorate becomes dissatisfied with them and votes for change.
This happened to the Labour Party in the 1970s, as the most extreme part of their membership, led by Anthony Wedgewood Benn, MP, in the House of Commons. (One of his acolytes was a young left-wing MP named Jeremy Corbyn, elected in 1983, of whom more later.) Their cadre included various local government leaders—Ken Livingstone, Leader of the Greater London Council, Derek “Degsy” Hatton, Deputy Leader of Liverpool City Council, and left-wing union leaders, notably Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson, Convenor of the autoworkers in the Longbridge Plant of British Leyland in Birmingham. By the late 1970s these left-wingers had produced a level of chaos within the country in general and the Labour Party in particular that was causing real damage to both and which the leadership of the Labour Party could not control.
The antics of the far-left wing of the Labour Party were not only out of step with the electorate in general but with the bulk of the Labour Party membership. While supporting the party’s Christian Socialist/Social Democratic agenda, the mainstream members were fundamentally deeply conservative in outlook. The left wing had alienated the bulk of the electorate and produced a profound reaction in the general public. Amongst the consequences of that reaction was the ousting of the essentially Churchillian “one-nation” Tories. The leader of the Party, Edward Heath, elected MP in 1950, had actually served in Churchill’s postwar government. Margaret Thatcher was elected as Leader of the Party.
Thatcher began the shift of the Conservative Party to the right, completely sidelining the “one-nation” Tories--now relabelled the “wets”—and introduced neo-liberal policies to the UK government. Her big idea was the privatization of everything, not simply the great industries, which the post-war Labour government had nationalized, but a wide range of public services which had hitherto served the country well. She ended the program which had given easy access to a university education for bright children from working class families, and her prolonged confrontation with the trade unions broke their economic and political power.
As Thatcher’s time in office continued, she became increasingly and obviously arrogant, until, at one point, she announced the birth of her first grandchild using the royal we. “We are a grandmother,” she said. Ultimately that was her undoing. She had become so unpopular in the country that she was brought down by her own party and replaced by John Major, a much less divisive figure.
By this time, the Conservative Party was deeply divided, especially over membership in the European Union, and there was a rising group of MPs who were well to the right of Thatcher, let alone of John Major. These MPs acted increasingly to undermine his leadership. Meanwhile, the Labour Party had elected Neil Kinnock as Leader, and he had set about the Herculean task of dealing with the left-wing extremists, Trotskyists in political outlook and policies, who had infiltrated the party. He led the party into a general election in 1987, in which Labour came second, and then again in 1992, in which they made further advances as the Conservative’s policies became increasingly unpopular. In spite of predictions that Labour would win this latter election, the Conservatives retained a narrow majority, and Kinnock resigned as Leader, to be succeeded by John Smith, who was highly regarded both within the Labour Party and the wider public. In 1994 John Smith died suddenly of a heart attack, and was replaced by Tony Blair.
Blair adopted the neo-liberal policies of the Thatcher years, and was widely seen as Thatcher-lite, but was moderate in many respects, and generally led a renaissance of the Labour Party. In 1997 he led the party to a landslide victory which ended the Conservatives’ long term in power.
In 2010 the incumbent party was still Labour, and they had taken the UK into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both of which were immensely unpopular. The general election of that year, to no one’s surprise, brought the Conservative Party back to power. David Cameron, faced with a party sharply divided on membership in the European Union. Further, a far-right insurgency in the form of the UK Independence Party led by Nigel Farage threatened to draw off Conservative votes as it sought to resolve the issue once and for all by holding an “advisory” referendum. Cameron found himself outflanked within his own party by Boris Johnson, and, when the vote went against him, resigned the Leadership, leaving Johnson to become Leader and Prime Minister. Johnson was opposed by the less extreme wing of the party, the remaining Thatcherites, and, when he won the leadership, expelled them from the party. This left the party in the hands of the most radical right-wing MPs, fanatical ideologues who operated in ways antithetical to the entire tradition of the party, which had for nearly 200 years prided itself on being pragmatic, not dogmatic. It also left them devoid of experienced people, competent people.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party, having rejected the party of Blair and Brown, chose Jeremy Corbyn, a relic of the old Bennite left, as Leader, allowing an anti-Semitic movement within the party to take power and push an agenda which was profoundly unpopular both within the party and outside it with the electorate in general. This allowed Johnson to win the 2019 election with an 80-seat majority, in spite of his own incompetence and that of his colleagues. In the wake of that loss, Corbin resigned the Leadership, and in the spring of 2020 he was succeeded by Sir Keir Starmer, KC.
II The Rise of the Pro-Russian Right-Wing Extremists and the Conservative Party’s Move to the Right
The rise of the violent far-right in the UK began well before the appearance of Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party. The British National Party was founded in 1982 on the ashes of the National Front, an overtly fascist organisation, which initially had no interest in electoral politics, and confined itself to street fighting and intimidation of anyone with whom they disagreed. By the late 1980s they were regularly contesting elections and won several seats on local councils. It isn’t the aim of this essay to give a history of the BNP or any of the other far-right groups in the UK (there are excellent Wikipedia articles for those who are interested). The point is that these groups entered electoral politics, and from that point the Conservative Party began to fear that they would lose votes to them. The penetration of these groups began in the constituency parties, and spread from there into the national party during the Leadership of Margaret Thatcher and greatly expanded after the resounding defeat of John Major’s government in 1997. The reaction of the Conservative Party to this defeat was to conclude that they lost not because of their increasingly right-wing policies, but because they had not been right-wing enough.
Here one must speculate, but there does appear to be a difference between the Conservative and Labour Parties. Whereas the Labour Party, which has a core ideology that has been characterised as Christian Socialism (arising out of Methodism) and Social Democracy, the Conservatives, prior to Thatcher’s adoption of neo-liberalism, had no central ideological doctrine apart from the writings of Edmund Burke. In consequence of this difference, the entryism of Trotskyites, which had so badly affected the Labour Party in the 1970s, stood out as a departure from the center-left social concerns of the Labour Party, and, combined with the inherent small-c conservatism of the Labour Party membership, led to the expulsion of the so-called “Militant Tendency.”
For the Conservatives, the rightward political shift appeared less a threat to the party and more a mere generational policy shift. Thus, the Conservative Party put up almost no resistance to the rightward shift, and under Boris Johnson the remaining Thatcherites were expelled from the party as not sufficiently right-wing.
III The Tendency of Political Parties to Double Down and Become More Extreme after Losing an Election
The significance of the pattern outlined above is that it isn’t confined to the UK alone, or, indeed, to political parties. There is an old saying which is generally acknowledged as true, that the generals always begin the new war by attempting to fight the previous one. In political economy it is usual to remark that Keynesian economics, which were developed to deal with the disaster of the Great Depression, continued to dominate policy in the West until the 1960s, when new problems arose, and it became apparent that the tools to deal with them could not be found in the old kit. What came next was the neo-liberal ideas of Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Referred to as “supply-side economics” it came to dominate economic policy as a tool to deal with the “stagflation” which developed in the 1970s.
The apparent success of those policies, based on such measures as Gross Domestic Product and the values on the world’s stock markets, appeared to be working for quite some time, until, suddenly, they didn’t, and in 2007-2009 we had a serious recession. But governments on both sides of the Atlantic stuck with the policies which had obviously and dramatically failed. Indeed, the Conservative Party in the UK stuck with the until July 4, 2024, as the situation in the country grew steadily worse, and some of the former members of that government who are considered to be leading contenders to replace former Leader Rishi Sunak are sticking to them still, arguing that the reason the policies failed is that they weren’t applied rigorously enough, rather than that they were applied in the first place.
It will probably take a number of years, and at least one electoral cycle, for the Conservative Party to come to terms with reality, oust the (now) old guard who cannot bring themselves to change their minds to align with reality, and choose new leaders who have new ideas, new tools to deal with a post-neo-liberal world. Meanwhile, the Labour Party, which has, quite rightly, concentrated on getting elected to office, without which preliminary step no policies of any kind can be implemented, has revealed little of their policy framework, and has made no promises they couldn’t keep. It remains to be seen what their new framework will be, although we can, I think, safely speculate that it won’t be the same as the framework of the Blair and Brown governments, let alone that of the Conservative Party governments which ran from 2010-2024.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the policies of the Biden administration have, without having been so proclaimed, resembled a rejuvenated Keynesian economics, and have very successfully dealt with the crisis which was produced by the Recession of 2007-2009 followed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The policy proposals of the Trump campaign, such as they are, would appear to resemble more the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, which, in the aftermath of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, dramatically worsened the Great Depression—not just in the United States, but also in the rest of the world. Smoot-Hawley also arguably contributed to the final disaster of World War II. Trump’s plans show no signs of either contact with reality or an advance in ideas for any sort of political agenda. Indeed, the authoritarian bent of everyone involved in this far-right political movement shows that none of them have learned anything at any point. That the Republican Party has followed the pattern of doubling down without changing ideas is clearly shown by the brilliant study of its history from Barry Goldwater through Ronald Reagan by Rick Perlstein.
IV The Electorate’s Desire for Competence
While it is blindingly obvious that the general public have acquired a powerful aversion to experts and expertise, and are intensely sceptical political and economic systems generally, it does seem clear that in the UK, at least, the major significance of the election of July 4, 2024, is that the electorate are also fed up with charismatic leaders and desire nothing more than competence and stability.
I strongly suspect that there is also a growing public awareness that the UK is no longer an imperial power, indeed a “great power” by anyone’s definition, and that it is time to break free of the dilemma which was so beautifully outlined back in 1962 by Dean Acheson: “Great Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role.” Thus, Great Britain must face the world as a power of the second rank, which yet has an important role to play in world affairs, but one which is closer to that which it had prior to its acquisition of its first empire in the 18th century. From all that has been written about the new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, this appears to be his and the Prime Minister’s agenda.
As to domestic policy, the new government’s agenda remains to be discovered. A priority, however, must be to end the ideology that, as Reagan put it, “Government isn’t the solution; government is the problem,” and replace it with the older idea that government can and should be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” While government can’t do everything, there really are many things that it CAN do, and should do. Not everything has to be done in order to generate income/profits, for there IS such a thing as society, contrary to the view expressed by Margaret Thatcher. And within any given society, organisations, up to and including governments, are formed, as the Declaration of Independence declared, to serve the interests of the people as a whole, and not any particular individual or group—and that they derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed—and that the people as a whole have the right to withdraw their consent, their recognition of that legitimacy, through free and fair elections.
The neo-liberal view that organisations only exist to make a profit is a vicious idea, which pits each individual against every other individual in the nightmare that haunted Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes notion of the “state of nature”—which, in fact, wasn’t the natural state of humanity, but the result of the breakdown of the natural state, which is human cooperation—must die, once and for all.
The significance of the election for the United States must be, first and foremost, that it is possible, in a democracy, to “throw the bastards out,” to bring in completely new leadership, to replace old ideas with fresh ones (or, in some cases, with ideas which are better and perhaps even older). Trumpism is not inevitable, and Margaret Thatcher was fundamentally wrong – there IS an alternative.
Rupert Chapman and Helen Chapman
Devon, UK
Bibliography
Perlstein, R.
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