Leftwards

Get used to the name Keir Starmer. The leader of the Labor Party is the next prime minister of the United Kingdom.

Last month, in elections for the European Parliament, support for the right-wing parties surged. The trend continued in France last week as voters threw their support behind behind the right-wing National Rally party of Marine Le Pen. The outcome was largely expected.

This week, in British parliamentary elections, it is the left-of-center Labor Party that is headed for a breathtaking landslide victory. According to the exit polls (extremely accurate in the case of UK elections), the Conservative Party is condemned to its smallest ever representation in Parliament.

There are no surprises here either. Every poll predicted the Conservatives, in power for 14 turbulent years, were headed for a rout. A large number of constituencies traditionally held by the Conservatives were overrun by the Labor Party. Even the Scottish National Party (SNP), dominant in Scotland for a generation, lost seats to the Labor surge.

Exit polls predict Labor will win 410 seats against the Conservatives’ 131. Liberal Democrats will win 61 seats while Reform UK will get 13. The SNP will get only 10.

Labor’s landslide victory gives the party outright control of Parliament and ensures the party will remain a dominant force in British politics for many years to come. This echoes Labor’s dominant win in 1997 under the leadership of Tony Blair.

This week’s results could not have been imagined in 2019, when Labor suffered such a crushing defeat the party ended up with its smallest share of parliamentary seats ever. At that time, the Labor Party was led by doctrinaire Jeremy Corbyn and presented voters with the traditional left-wing agenda spiced by such shocking proposals as withdrawing the UK from NATO. Corbyn was recently expelled from the party for his antisemitic views.

This time around, the party is led by a centrist who chose to stay away from divisive items in the old Labor platform, especially proposals to raise taxes to fund social spending. With the Conservatives clearly headed for repudiation at the polls, Starmer kept his party’s platform as bare as possible, promising to increase spending on social services without raising new taxes.

Neither the right-wing shift among voters in continental Europe nor the leftward shift among voters in Britain reflect any profound change in ideological disposition. It is not productive to read the results in search of ideological trends. The old Right-to-Left spectrum has become useless as an instrument for understanding electoral outcomes.

Instead, both the right-wing drift in continental Europe and the left-wing drift in Britain draw from the same well of voter disillusionment with how things have gone.

In continental Europe, voters are disenchanted with the failure of governments to check the tide of immigration from the Middle East and Africa. They are disenchanted with the stagnation of Europe’s industries, which they blame on costly carbon mitigation policies. Voters complain about inflation eating away at their purchasing power. They blame the general lethargy on sitting governments.

Right-wing parties have offered voters little more than populism, certainly not any comprehensive program of government. Marine Le Pen in France has not spoken much on anything beyond banning Islamic veils in public and (like Trump in the US) relaxing environmental regulations that have made producing anything more expensive.

In the UK, there is growing disillusionment with the country’s post-Brexit policies. The Conservative Party led the way in pulling Britain out of the European Union. Today, many Britons suspect Brexit was the wrong way to go. It harmed British competitiveness and made trade with continental Europe more tedious.

There is in the UK a general sense of drift. The economy has been comparatively stagnating. With that stagnation, the quality of social services has declined. Government does not have the robust revenues needed to restore the National Health Service to its former glory or to rebuild crumbling infrastructure.

This was the same sense of drift experienced over four decades ago when high youth unemployment created an angry “punk” counterculture and when crumbling public services brought on a semblance of decay everywhere. The angry voters of that time kicked out Labor and installed Margaret Thatcher prime minister. Thatcher, once in power, privatized everything, producing a revival of the British economy.

Much of what ails the European economies these days is due to the breakdown in supply chains caused by the pandemic. It is also due to accumulated improvements in the fast-growing non-European economies, especially those in Asia. Improved ability to aggregate capital produced in economies such as China and India a greater capacity to compete against European firms.

The relative economic stagnation of European economies is popularly understood through the prism of contending electoral parties. It is the parties that offer what seem to be solutions to the general malaise. It does not matter if the proponents of “change” are leftwing or rightwing parties. What matters is that they appear to voters to be representing a way out of the malaise.

What might appear to be a rightward lurch in continental European politics and a leftward shift in British politics are really two representations of a single phenomenon: a preference for the parties in the opposition as a way of articulating discontent with the way things have been run by the parties in power.