The last time a British general election was held in July was 1945, World War II had just ended, and Labor’s Clement Atlee made a splash with a beating of the glorious Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Rishi Sunak hopes that in six weeks the same thing will happen, but in reverse. Maybe England is doing well in the European Football Championship, maybe some British tennis player is successful at Wimbledon, and the voters thank the Government for it. Maybe the students (who tend to be more left-wing) and the Scots (who don’t want to know anything about the Tories) don’t vote because they are on vacation. Maybe the price of food and electricity will finally come down. Maybe the aliens will arrive…
It seems a bit of a twisted scenario, but, twenty-one points behind in the latest poll, the Conservatives have nothing left to cling to. Four other deputies (and there are more than seventy), convinced of defeat, announced yesterday that they will not stand for re-election. There are few who trust in the miracle, the majority believe that the electoral call is a political euthanasia to end the pain.
The first day of the campaign served to lay the foundations for the respective strategies. Sunak undertook a two-day tour of the four nations of the United Kingdom with the message that the economy and immigration have begun to improve (official figures record a decrease of one hundred thousand people compared to the previous year) thanks to the Government’s plan, and that the international situation (conflict in the Middle East, war in Ukraine, Russian aggressiveness, Chinese ambition, North American isolationism, rising protectionism, globalization fatigue…) means that it is not the time to take risks with a change of helmsman.
Labor leader Keir Starmer, for his part, traveled to Gillingham, in the southeast of England and Tory territory, with the message that the time has come to turn the page and end the chaos of the last years of Conservative Government. His tactics are like those of a boxer who is clearly winning on points and only has to avoid a KO. He protects his face with his gloves, sticks close to his opponent’s body and dances around him, out of reach of his fists.
A relief for the Tories is the decision of the eurosceptic Nigel Farage not to stand in the elections for the ultra Reform party, which takes away votes from their right flank. But even so, the outlook looks bleak for Sunak. He has called the elections for July because there is no money to lower taxes, and he believes that things – rhetoric aside – are only going to get worse.
