Immigration, Gaza, and the new Labour Government

A quick reaction to the British elections.

Britain has voted, and one of the West’s major democracies has a new left-wing government. Journalists, essayists, and other commentators will no doubt scrutinize the election in detail, how the Labour Party won a huge majority, and what Keir Starmer’s victory means for Britain, for Europe, for America, and for the West. Here, though, are some initial reactions.

First, and most obviously, this is a huge victory for Starmer’s Labour Party. Britain’s constitution gives more or less unlimited powers to a Prime Minister with a majority in the House of Commons; Labour (at the time of writing) seem to have won 412 out of 650 seats. Sir Keir can, if he wants to, attempt to reshape the country more or less as he pleases.

The (until yesterday) ruling Conservative Party seems set to go into the next Parliament with 121 seats in the Commons. This is an historically low number for a party which sees itself as “the natural party of government.” Britain has come a long way since 2019, when Boris Johnson won an election promising to deliver Brexit. The problem for the Conservatives is that this was pretty much the only promise they kept over fourteen years in government. Yesterday’s electorate was not in a forgiving mood.

Immigration, yet again

Britain looks generally poorer and shabbier than when the Conservatives took power (as part of a coalition with the Liberal Democrat Party) in 2010. There is visibly more homelessness in the cities, where crime is also absolutely rife. Britain’s prisons are full and squalid, and the police seem not to control the streets. Above all, though, the Conservatives have run at every election during their time in office on a pledge to reduce immigration (both legal and illegal). And, each time, the numbers have gone up.

Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak presided over the largest surge in immigration in British history. The University of Oxford has estimated that 1,218,000 immigrants came to Britain in 2023 alone. That is an almost unfathomable number in a country of 67 million people. More than for any other reason combined, the Conservatives have been punished for their failure to manage immigration.

The Conservatives hemorrhaged votes to the insurgent Reform party, whose leader Nigel Farage has been returned as an MP for the first time. Farage, who was one of the prime movers of the 2016 vote to leave the European Union, ran an aggressive campaign which undermined the Conservative vote across England. For a few hours last night, after the exit poll predicted 13 Reform MPs, it looked like his wildest dreams had been exceeded. As the count wore on, a somewhat more sober total of five Reform MPs seems to be the spoils of his victory. But the real story is the damage done to the Conservative Party. 

Digging a little deeper, though, two major trends stand out. One was low turnout. Around 60% of eligible voters appear to have cast their ballots yesterday. This hurt both the major parties. Those Conservative voters, disgusted by failure to deal with record immigration highs, who didn’t want to take the risk of voting Reform simply stayed home. 

Shockingly, Starmer’s Labour Party garnered significantly fewer votes in absolute terms than it did under the much more Left-wing Jeremy Corbyn, who led the party to historic defeats in 2017 and 2019. You read that right: Labour won a huge number of seats, despite losing voters. This appears to be mainly a function of low turnout, but also of the second major trend: the fraying of the major parties’ electoral coalitions.

Sir Keir Starmer at the WEF. Credit: World Economic Forum / Benedikt von Loebell, via Flickr

In the relatively wealthy south of England, liberal middle class areas which had previously voted Conservative deserted to the center-left Liberal Democrat party in droves. The Liberal Democrats appear (at time of writing) to have won 71 seats, a vast increase on the 11 Liberal MPs elected at the 2019 election. It remains to be seen whether the pro-EU vote has coalesced around the Liberal Democrats. Paradoxically, if anti-Brexit Brits have flocked to the Liberals’ standard, then this may reduce pressure on both Labour and the Conservatives to reopen the only partially healed wounds of the 2016-2019 Brexit debates within their own parties. The Conservatives face a war on two fronts, then: they have lost vast quantities of voters to both their anti-immigration and to their cosmopolitan rivals. To rebound over the next few years, they will somehow need to offer each of these groups something that they desire, but which will not repel the other group. Good luck to them!

Britain Fracturing…

The Labour coalition, despite an historic victory, shows signs of great strain. A not insignificant number of traditionally Labour voters went for Reform in 2024, for the obvious reason – immigration. The far left, angry at the ejection of Jeremy Corbyn, also abandoned the Party to vote for Corbyn (who, somewhat surprisingly, retained his North London seat as an Independent) and for the Greens.

Perhaps most worryingly, a handful of urban seats with large Muslim electorates abandoned the Labour Party over Sir Keir Starmer’s anti-Hamas stance on Gaza. Five such constituencies abandoned the Labour Party on this issue: four electing Gaza-inspired independents, one a Conservative. In several other constituencies, a Gaza-focused candidate narrowly lost. Most dramatically, an independent candidate, Shockat Adam, unseated the Labour veteran Jonathan Ashford. Ashford had enjoyed a majority of over 22,000 votes – a huge majority given Labour’s 2019 defeat – but was defeated this year! What changed? A hint might be this: The newly elected MP declared explicitly “this is for Gaza” as he won the seat. Not long ago, all British parliamentarians would run on the welfare of, well, Britain. Now it seems that the loyalties of some of these districts might lie elsewhere.

One of the disturbing aspects of this election has been the proliferation of sectarian religious manifestos and groupings. Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh manifestos were very foolishly endorsed by candidates from the major parties. This is not an auspicious omen for the long-term stability of Britain. The center-left and stridently feminist Labour MP Jess Philips was shouted down by anti-Israel opponents while she attempted to give a victory speech at the count in Birmingham, going on to describe some of the vicious and aggressive behavior she (and others, particularly female volunteers) had encountered during the local campaign. This is a topic we should consider more deeply in the future. 

…but the Union holds

One piece of good news for those who hope for the long term stability and survival of Britain is that the Scottish Nationalists – whose politics are a noxious mixture of anti-English resentment and militant ultra-progressivism – suffered a huge defeat. Going into the election with a commanding majority of Scottish seats, the SNP has been reduced from 48 (of 59) Scottish seats to 9. The SNP, whose recent leaders include Nicola Sturgeon (who is dogged by corruption allegations leveled against her husband, who was Chief Executive of the party) and Humza Yousaf (who resigned after attempting to impose an ultra-progressive gender law on Scotland), had hubristically claimed that this election was a “de facto referendum on independence.” Oops. Scottish secession seems off the cards for now.

A New Era

Where does Britain go from here? An exhausted government which failed to grapple with key issues has been replaced. Starmer has the opportunity to do much better, but he too must be aware that unsustainably high immigration and the visible economic degradation of the country must be addressed in the next five years. This is not an insurmountable task! Elsewhere in Europe, a center-left party has approached immigration with some success – Denmark’s Social Democrat party has worked hard to reduce immigration and to tackle the ghettoization of immigrant communities. Does Starmer dare follow? To do so would remove the appeal of the Farage insurgent populism, and could bury the Conservative party. He must be a little tempted.

It won’t be rosy for Starmer. His popularity is shallow. His coalition of middle class progressives, identitarians, and the working classes have increasingly divergent interests. And there are the worrying rumors of dangerously shortsighted anti-Islamophobia legislation and the progressive legalization of physician-assisted suicide. Countries like Canada and the Netherlands suggest this is not so much a slippery slope as a moral cliff-face.

The Conservatives will pick a new leader soon, after Rishi Sunak’s resignation. They too will need to work out where they stand on a whole host of issues: owning their failure in government, and attempting to offer a convincing explanation as to how they might be trusted on immigration in the future. But for the Conservatives, grown complacent and weak through fourteen years in power, a bleak period in the political wilderness awaits. There has to be a price for the total failure of a government, and this is it. It is richly deserved.