Early July British Labour organization won the election, ahead of the Conservatives by 10 percent points. The Labourers achieved a second in their history—after Blair's first 1997 victory—the consequence measured by the number of seats earned, bringing to the lower chamber of the British Parliament 411 deputies, which in the number of 650 deputies The home of Commons gave them an overwhelming majority of 174 votes.
Today, according to Poll of polls portal Politico, the Labour Party's average polling advantage over the Conservative organization has reached only 2 percent points. In turn, the More in Common poll of the beginning of last week, conducted after the selection of a fresh Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, gives conservatives a small, 2% advantage over the Labourers.
During the first months of the rule, the social evaluation of the Labour Prime Minister, Sir Keira Starmer, besides broke rapidly. According to Yougov's research, 44 percent of those surveyed were affirmative in early July, the same negative. Starmer is much worse in more fresh research: 61 percent of respondents are negative, only 28 percent positive. Even in the media close to the current leadership of the Labour Party, questions arise about what is actually the long-term strategical plan of its governments and what doctrine behind them.
The budget presented by the taxation firm Rachel Reeves faced a somewhat tense reaction from the markets and criticism from various sources, from tiny entrepreneurs to farmers, in which interests would hit fresh rules for the calculation of inheritance taxation on farms. On Saturday, protesting farmers arrived in tractors for the Welsh Labour organization conference in Llandudno. They demanded to meet Starmer. The gathering did not happen, and farmers are announcing a protest in London next Tuesday and an agricultural strike – which could mean rising prices and food shortages, for which the government will surely be blamed.
Free and another controversy
How did the Labour organization get into this situation? No uncertainty her government has made many mistakes in the first months and has unnecessarily entered a number of mines.
Perhaps the largest of them was the alleged free affair (freebies controversy). It all started in September erstwhile the media reported that Starmer had not reported in time to the registry the benefits of gifts that his wife, Victoria, received in the form of costly clothes (values of about £5,000) in which she performed in the run alongside her husband – from the Labour organization donor, media manufacture entrepreneur and associate of the home of Lords, Waheed Alli. Following this followed further reports of various admissions by Starmer, inactive as opposition leader, gifts: from Baron Allego's funded glasses worth nearly £2.5 thousand, to free tickets to Arsenal matches, Coldplay and Taylor Swift concerts. In total, Starmer had since the 2019 election to accept gifts from various donors worth over £100,000.
He was not the only Labour organization politician who could number on akin generosity of sympathizers. Another prominent names from his government appeared in the media: the mentioned Rachel Reeves, wellness Minister Wes Streeting, Education Minister Bridget Phillipson, whose Lord Alli organized a birthday organization for £14,000. Labour organization politicians defended themselves as not breaking the law, and everything was reported to the registry of benefits – and even if not, it was only by oversight. However, key figures from the government announced that they would no longer accept clothes from donors.
Because even though the regulations were most likely not violated, it was politically weak. After all, the Labour organization was to be positively distinguished from the 1 seen as corrupt, or at least flew with the richest and sitting in their pockets of the Conservative Party. The free-of-charge scandal looked bad especially against the background of the first decisions of the fresh government, specified as the withdrawal of heating subsidies in winter for all persons of retirement age and the maintenance of taxation and kid benefit limits. They are now entitled to the first and second children, but no longer to the 3rd and subsequent—except in exceptional situations, as a consequence of rape.
In the opinion of kid poorness Action Group, dealing with poverty, the abolition of the limits would bring out 250 000 children in the UK. However, this would cost £1.3 billion. Labour organization leadership has long been in the position that the abolition of limits is desirable, but only if the budgetary situation allows it – first it is essential to guarantee the economical growth that will finance it. However, the case was controversial in the party, which is hard to wonder.
While good arguments can be found for the fact that subsidies for seniors – and this is simply a statistically rather prosperous group, mainly through housing assets – are not a fair social policy, children's poorness can be a origin that undermines society's improvement opportunities. In the vote to keep the limit to 2 children against their own government, 7 organization deputies, including the Treasury Chancellor in Corbyn's shadow office John McDonnell, voted in the rights of members of the Labourers' parliamentary club for six months.
On the right side, Starmer's government met with criticism for, among another things, the decision to impose VAT on private schools, which will be passed on to students' parents in 1 form or another. There were dramatic stories in the press about parents who worked 2 jobs and owed themselves to give their children good education, now incapable to afford it. Or about the children forced to leave the good school and the friendships that they had in it, or about the state sector, not being able to accept students pushed out of private. The government argued that only 7% of students from far richer families than the average are taught in private schools, and VAT gains on schools are to be invested in improving the quality of public education available to all.
The government was surely not helped by a series of racial-ethnic riots that swept the country after the killing of 3 girls by a knifesmith in Southport close Liverpool, fueled by a disinformation run on social media.
First months' work
By the next election, the memory of many of these controversies is likely to blur. The beginnings of Starmer's regulation will be remembered alternatively by the changes that have been initiated. And despite all the problems of the government, rather quite a few them were initiated.
Already on the first Monday after the election, the fresh energy minister, Ed Milliband, abolished regulations that virtually prevented the construction of land wind turbines. Work has besides begun on the establishment of large British Energy – a public institution dealing with energy production and distribution and investments in renewable energy. GB Energy is to be 1 of the leading tools for the green transformation of the British economy. Its objectives are besides intended to be served by the National Wealth Fund – a state-owned wealth fund to invest private and public funds in green, generating growth and the most forward-looking sectors of the economy, thus implementing the government's industrial strategy. The fund is expected to invest £1.8 billion in port infrastructure, £1.5 billion in the construction of factories, including electrical cars, £2.5 billion in green steel production, 500 million in green hydrogen production.
Parliament is already finishing work on a bill to let the gradual renationalisation of passenger rail crossings. It prohibits the alleged zero-hour contracts – which do not give a warrant to the employee, whether he will work and be paid for 40 or 8 hours in a given week – and dismissal of employees in order to replace them with cheaper ones, specified as those provided by the employment agency. The task strengthens trade union rights and facilitates a flexible approach to working time for working parents. The rights of tenants in the real property marketplace is intended to strengthen another passed bill.
The budget late presented by Kansler Reeves assumes a £70 billion increase in public spending per year. According to the Financial Times, “one 3rd of this amount is to be allocated to investments, 2 thirds to finance current public services, most will go to schools and wellness services”. This increase is to be financed, inter alia, by an increase in social safety contributions paid by employers, by tightening the rules on the taxation of assets of non-residents, higher capital gains tax, fresh rules on household inheritance and agricultural assets.
Government of crisis management or national renewal?
From the political point of view of the endurance of the fresh government, 2 key questions are: how much will all of these activities boost economical growth and improve the quality of life? Forecasts here are not optimistic for the Labourers. According to George Eaton, according to estimates by the Budgetary work Bureau, the government agency providing economical analyses, next year the changes from the first budget of Reeves will give the British economy an injection which will translate into GDP growth of 2%. However, in the remainder of the Labour Party's word of office it is expected to stay at 1.66 percent per year. Even worse are the forecasts of an increase in the standard of living, which are to stay at 0.3%. – which would be the worst consequence for Labour governments since akin statistic have been conducted.
Critics accuse Reeves that her budget is not growth-oriented enough. tiny businesses complain that the planned increase in minimum wage, combined with planned changes in labour law and higher social safety contributions, will hit their business model, forcing either a simplification in employment or an increase in the prices of products and services offered. Trump's trade policy is simply a large unknown and it will hit the British economy. All of this does not necessarily make a good climate for growth.
The biggest problem for the fresh government is that it covers power at a time erstwhile it seems to accumulate the negative effects of the strategical decisions that British elites have taken over the past 40 years: from the desindustrialisation and financialisation of the economy from the time of Thatcher, by basing growth on the inexpensive work of migrants in Blair's time and the austerity of Cameron and May's rule, to the economical absurd brexit.
The last 15 years of Tory regulation were mostly lost to the British economy. According to Tom Hazeldine, between 2007 and 2022 the productivity of the British economy grew at only 4% per year, almost twice as slow as German (11%) and Canadian (12%), more than 4 times slower than Australian (18%). The level of investment is among the lowest in OECD countries. Real wages, adapted to inflation levels, never returned to 2008 levels. Which means that the next yearbooks that have entered the labour marketplace since the second half of the first decade of the 21st century, statistically, have never experienced real wage increases.
The stagnation is accompanied by an increase in regional inequality, manifested by the focus of the most productive economical sectors in respective centres, headed by London, and the curling of others. In the 1980s, the productivity of the London economy was 120 percent of the UK average. In 2024, 170 percent of Starmer's government's destiny depends mostly on whether it will only manage this crisis, whether it will find a strategical answer to it, or whether it will be able to find a fresh model of development, capable of providing well-paid jobs for a broad population.
Starmer and Reeves seem to anticipate specified a improvement engine to become a green transformation, supported by a Bidenomical industrial policy. The problem is that the government has a clear problem communicating this vision. As “New Statesman” wrote in October: even if Starmer's government's politics are bold and extremist in a good way, the accompanying vibe is surely not. Starmer, trying to avoid controversy and satisfy everyone, frequently does not satisfy anyone and gives the impression that his cabinet is drifting without strategical vision. Secondly, the OBR forecasts show that government policies can actually bring affirmative results for economical development, but they will actually become visible only around 2032/2033 – so they could aid the Labour organization win a 3rd word but not a second term, due to the fact that the next elections gotta take place in 2029 at the latest.
First and final term?
In the country, especially among young voters, there has been a long increasing feeling that something is profoundly incorrect with the full British social agreement. “ Britain is simply a mediocre country, ” says Aris Roussinos in UnHerd. [...] The more the British economy dies, the more the cost of surviving the state falls on a shrinking mediate class, the younger part of which is already overwhelmed by student debt and property prices. So her increasing desperation crystallizes abruptly into rage against the British state." In the beginning of the decade, these emotions moved young graduates to the left, creating social facilities for Corbyn's successes. Today, Roussinos believes that it can consequence in a turn towards more or little Trumpic right-wingness.
The majority of 174 votes in the home of Commons seem to be an iron capital of the Labour Party, unsettled during a single term. But the same was said about the majority that Conservatives provided in 2019 by Boris Johnson. After 5 years, small was left of his coalition. According to the study How Labour Won, prepared by a close Starmer think tank Labour Together, in 2024 only 45 percent of their voters 5 years ago voted for the Tories. The same study besides states that "the Labour organization Government has been carefully employed by voters for the trial period and will receive immediate announcement as shortly as voters admit that it is moving distant from their priorities".
The authors of the survey point out that the time erstwhile voters' vote was influenced by their class recognition has long ended. Electorates are becoming little loyal and increasingly transactional. Only 10% of British voters powerfully support any party. Although the majority strategy minimizes the effects of this process, the British political scene is increasingly fragmented: in 2024 only 54 percent of the votes were cast into the 2 main parties, which is the lowest consequence in history.
The July elections were besides highly disproportionate. The Labour organization has provided itself with a gigantic advantage in the home of Commons, with the support of not more than 1 3rd of voters (33.7%), with low standards for British attendance, not exceeding 60%. In total, about 20 percent of those entitled to vote voted for the fresh government. In absolute figures, the Labour organization lost over 560,000 votes, compared to the 2019 election considered disastrous for it.
Up until 51 constituencies, the majority of the Labour organization was little than 5 percent points. In subsequent elections, the organization may lose its districts both as a consequence of the shift to the left – to the Greens, candidates for independent, liberal democrats – and to the right, to Nigel Farage's Reform. If we add to this a favourable economical situation for the populist right that Trump's triumph creates, the giant majority may not be adequate to supply the lazers with more than 1 term.
