While he has borrowed much of his positioning and tactics from Blair, the atmosphere of the campaign could not have been more different to the pre-millennium buzz enjoyed by his predecessor.
In 1997 the economy was comparatively robust (thanks in large part to his predecessor John Major), the state of the world, while always containing pressing problems, was not nearly as dark and foreboding.
Starmer and his MPs, at their various counts in the early hours of Friday, thanked the public for “lending” their votes. Unlike previous generations, few voters nowadays back parties for class or social reasons, or out of habit. They will transfer allegiance in an instant, as the Tories have discovered.
On Thursday, voters’ message to Starmer was: go deliver, be radical, deliver the “change” that you promise on your election posters. If you do not, we will go elsewhere – and that elsewhere could be the far right: a refashioned (possibly renamed) Conservative Party led by Farage or the likes of Priti Patel or Suella Braverman, more aligned to Trump or Le Pen (or any of the many far-right movements) than anything that has come before.
Why not? After all, everyone else seems to be doing it. Any country, it seems, is capable of acts of egregious self-harm. It’s just that Britain went through its moment of madness in 2016, one that is far harder to reverse than a mere electoral setback.
On a night of stunning success for Starmer, Labour and what he calls the politics of service, it might seem churlish to focus so much on threats. But it is worth dwelling on it, if only for an instant.
France’s far-right Jordan Bardella is likely to become the country’s prime minister (AFP/Getty)
In just six weeks, Reform has gained a 15 per cent share of the vote which is not that far below that of the AfD in Germany and is at a level of other parties of the populist-nativist extremes across Europe. Under another voting system, that party would have dozens of seats, not just five.
The second phase of populism is already more dangerous than the first. The new generation epitomised by Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Jordan Bardella in France is more politically astute than the first generation of showmen like Silvio Berlusconi or Johnson. No matter what lies ahead in a second Trump presidency, whoever succeeds him as Republican leader will be even more menacing.
Starmer knows all this. This is why the most significant line in his speech on Friday outside the door of No 10 was his promise to “end the era of noisy performance”. He wants to make a virtue of politics by increment, by delivery. It is as unsexy as it sounds, but he believes it is the only way to take on the populists. This will be extremely hard to deliver, given the shrill nature of British political and media discourse.
Britain is returning not so much to the left but to the middle ground, to grown-up politics. After the basket-case behaviour that we have seen recently, that is a supreme irony. If Starmer succeeds, he will be showing the way for his European colleagues who are now feeling the heat of their own chaos of the “upside down”.
Source link : https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-election-results-europe-starmer-right-wing-b2574761.html
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Publish date : 2024-07-07 05:00:00
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