Harold Wilson, the only Labor leader not named Tony Blair to win a British general election in the last fifty years, said that Labor “is either a moral crusade or it is nothing.” According to that scale, right now it would be little, because he has chosen the path of boredom, vagueness, generalities, prudence, monotony and the total absence of promises to try to put an end to what will be fourteen years of uninterrupted conservative government .
With the holidays over, the political year has begun with election fever and speculation that the British could go to the polls on November 14, nine days after the Americans. The decision corresponds to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who would thus buy time for the economy to improve, inflation to fall and asylum seekers to begin being sent to Rwanda. Their great hope is that a hypothetical Trump victory will act as a wave and push the undecided (17% according to the polls) towards the ultraliberal agenda of massive cuts to the welfare state, privatization of everything that can be privatized, protection of large corporations , of oligarchs and landlords at the expense of tenants, dismissals of officials, curtailment of labor and minority rights, criminalization of protests, characterization of environmentalists as extremists, restriction of voting for young people…
What the Tories need above all is a miracle, with the country’s seams torn, an unsustainable public debt, eight million on the waiting list for public health operations, a doctors’ strike and a general feeling of hopelessness summed up in the concept of broken Britain, broken Britain.
“Things can only get better” was the slogan with which Blair won in 1997, when the country was also tired of a long period of Tory dominance but the economy was doing well. The slogan of the current Labor leader Keir Starmer to call for change is much less exciting: “With us things will not get worse because they cannot get worse.” This is what it means to be a politician in a country in complete decline, dominated by apathy, in which a million people sleep on the streets, fully affected by the European insecurities caused by Ukraine, AI, growing inequality, political movements. immigration, the environment, the weakening of the nation state… Obama’s optimistic “Yes, we can” has become a pessimistic “No, we can not.”
Starmer is like the boxer who is clearly winning the fight on points and his tactic consists of avoiding a blow that will knock him out, which is what Sunak needs. If his rival says that he will lower inheritance and income taxes, he remains silent. If he grants new licenses for oil and gas exploitation in the North Sea, he forgets his environmentalist credentials and remains silent. If he insists on sending the migrants to Rwanda, he considers prosecuting their cases in other countries. Moderate, prudent, responsible, decent, technocratic, he does not want to scare the socially conservative voters who tipped the balance on the side of Brexit. Blair’s new Labor has evolved into gray Labour.
The polls endorse his strategy and give him between 17 and 22 points advantage, but he does not trust and fears a goal from his rival in the last minute that would deny him, if not victory, then the great absolute majority that seems to be within his reach. hand, especially with the implosion of the SNP nationalists in Scotland, where everything indicates that Labor will once again be the dominant force.
Sunak knows he has it tough. An eventual recovery requires flights to Rwanda to begin (a kind of political scarecrow to discourage immigrants from coming here), lower interest rates and inflation, and an improvement in the public health situation. But what happens does not depend on him, whose hands are largely tied, but on the decisions made by the courts and the Bank of England. Voters prefer Starmer as leader by 31% to 19%, and they also trust him more to manage the economy.
Sunak aspires to convince a sufficient number of voters this year that the worst is over, Labor is a danger that would ruin the finances, and the Tories have put things in order after the excesses of Johnson and Truss. Starmer, for his part, sells a realistic progressivism for times of austerity. Or, to put it another way, a magical realism with a lot of realism and quite a bit of magic.
