Explaining Labour’s Victory in Britain

Britain’s left-wing Labour Party won a landslide victory in Thursday’s national election, returning to power after 14 years under the leadership of the Conservative Party.

Labour has made many promises in its bid to win the race, and keeping them will be a mammoth task that will require tackling Britain’s biggest problems, including the cost of living, immigration and rebuilding the country’s services, such as healthcare and transport systems. A mix of bad policy and world events beyond the government’s control has left the UK economy struggling, with stagnant wages and a lack of investment in public services.

The party’s exact approach to these issues is still crystallising as it begins to understand how it intends to use its newfound power.

After the truly chaotic transition of three Conservative prime ministers in less than four months, Labour’s message of stability resonated with voters who voted to elect Labour members to a majority of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, bringing its leader, Keir Starmer, into the prime ministership.

Starmer is a bit of a cipher, his platform this campaign has often been vague or unexciting, and the British public is decidedly lukewarm about him as a figure. But he has managed to rehabilitate Labour’s image among more moderate voters, and the main thing he has in his favour is that he is not a Conservative.

“(The Conservatives) are suffering from 14 years in power,” Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at Nuffield College, Oxford, told Vox. “And at this point it’s very, very difficult to win another election anywhere.”

Labour’s campaign slogan is simple: “Change”. But it’s not enough now to simply be an alternative to the Conservatives; Labour must actually deliver on the major policy issues that worry people to create the stable government it needs to stay in power.

Britain’s multiple, overlapping crises have been developing for years and a change of leadership will not resolve them immediately.

Consider the devastated public services in the U.K. When the Conservatives (also known as the Tories) came to power in 2010 under the leadership of now Foreign Secretary David Cameron, the world was reeling from the 2008 financial crisis. The U.K. was hit particularly hard, with much of its economy reliant on the financial sector.

To pull the country out of its dire financial straits, the Cameron government chose to withdraw investment from social services such as the National Health Service (NHS), education and transport, particularly rail. This choice has echoes to this day and has meant long waits to see a doctor, crumbling public schools, stagnant wages in the care and public services sector and, as a result, workers striking in protest at pay and working conditions.

And while the economic and cost crisis is not unique to the UK, some Tory decisions have made it particularly difficult. The decision to leave the European Union, first voted in a referendum in 2016 and pushed through by Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2019, has had a negative impact on trade, jobs and the cost of living. One independent study estimated that the UK’s real GDP is now around 2 to 3 per cent lower than it would have been if it had remained in the EU. The decision to leave the EU is now deeply unpopular.

As Ansell said, the Conservatives have recorded “the worst economic performance in the UK since Napoleonic times”, which makes Labour’s promised change – although ambiguous – seem attractive.

Scandals and political shifts have also not helped the Conservatives. Johnson fell from grace after a series of scandals known as Partygate, in which he allowed or attended social gatherings during the Covid-19 pandemic while the rest of the country was in lockdown. After he was ousted in 2022, Liz Truss, Johnson’s foreign secretary, won the party and national leadership. She lasted a full 44 days after her tax cuts for corporations and the ultra-rich were so disastrous that they sent global bond markets into a panic for weeks. The current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has followed suit, positioning himself as the adult in the room who can fix things.

But his signature policy stance was to “stop the boats”, referring to the rise in illegal migration in small boats crossing the English Channel from Europe. To do this, his government pursued a policy of detaining and deporting illegal migrants to Rwanda. As well as effectively undermining the right to asylum, this plan proved ineffective; no one was sent to Rwanda, although some migrants were detained under the scheme, costing the government an estimated £8 million a day. It is also worth noting that asylum seekers make up only around 11 per cent of the UK’s migrant population.

And while migration overall hit record levels in 2022, most voters do not see migration as one of their top three issues – and people’s feelings about migration are sharply divided. In some ways, the Conservative government has suffered from a crisis of its own making, with its Rwanda policy and the Illegal Migration Bill – introducing draconian policies that have not succeeded and that voters see as costly.

All this dysfunction culminated in the Tory defeat. (Before the election, The Economist backed Labour for the first time in almost two decades.)

Labour’s hallmarks in the post-Second World War period were the creation of the NHS and the introduction of a national minimum wage. The party now has three overlapping major issues to address: the economy and the cost of living; problems with government services; and migration policy. However, as the election manifesto emphasises, Labour’s policy proposals are, in most cases, not particularly detailed or elaborate. In the short term, the party is likely to focus on trying to form a stable government, in order to prove that it should stay in power.

In the short term, Starmer and Labour have promised to immediately reverse the Rwanda policy after winning power, focusing on the people-smuggling rings that operate and profit from dangerous boat crossings. Labour says the government will allow illegal migrants to apply for asylum again and has promised to sort out the backlog of asylum cases that have not been processed because of the Illegal Migration Act.

On the economy, Labor has promised to invest in industry and create a business-friendly environment, without specifying what that means. In terms of managing the cost of living crisis, Labor could raise the minimum wage or encourage cities to adopt a “living wage,” as Oxford has done, a local standard that takes into account the different costs of living in different areas.

Labour will opt to “improve the UK’s trade and investment relationship with the EU by removing unnecessary trade barriers”, although it will not rejoin the EU or the single market. Negotiations on farming and livestock deals aim to cut food costs, while professional services agreements will help British professionals work in EU countries.

Labour has also promised to “save the NHS” and build the health service for the future. But that will require public investment, with Starmer’s party promising the service will always be publicly funded. That means money coming from somewhere, and raising individual taxes is not an attractive option at the moment, given the economic challenges facing many voters. In the short term, Labour is promising to cut waiting times, bring in the private sector to help cope with high patient volumes and improve relations with healthcare unions.

How exactly Labour intends to achieve its goals remains an open question. Labour has no really strong, bold new economic policy; it has no grand, flashy ideological framework.

And on one of the main factors dragging down the British economy – Brexit – Labour plans to negotiate farming and livestock deals with the EU to cut food costs, and hopes to secure professional services agreements to help British professionals work in EU countries. Still, many of the economic problems associated with Brexit could remain.

On migration, apart from the rejection of the Rwanda plan, there is not much disagreement between Labour and the Conservatives.

“The current government is already putting a lot of emphasis on enforcement,” Ben Brindle, a researcher at the Oxford Migration Observatory, told Vox. Labour’s approach is to “continue to do a lot of the things that the current enforcement operation is already doing” to stem irregular migration. And when it comes to student and skilled migration, net migration is likely to fall anyway because of policies already in place, not because of Labour’s actions.

Labor has proposals to address the housing and transit crisis — including easing building restrictions in the near term to allow for more housing, infrastructure and transit services, which could help stimulate the economy.

“We’re using a planning system that was created in 1948 that’s incredibly rigorous and means we just don’t build anywhere,” Ansell said. “We’ve got a housing crisis. We’ve got a transport crisis, we’ve got a public infrastructure crisis and an energy crisis — all because we can’t build. That gives (Labor) a narrative. It also gives businesses the expectation that there’s actually going to be a lot of infrastructure or investment, and probably for quite a long time.”

Ultimately, however, Labour believes that building a stable government, especially after years of post-Brexit uncertainty, is a useful framework – but potentially part of its mandate. The party’s manifesto is based on the idea that it “can stop the chaos” that has helped exacerbate external problems into domestic crises when it is in power.