Britain's 2024 General Election: Some Thoughts

I suspect even the essentially sympathetic will not look on the fourteen years of Conservative government that began in 2010 and (seem almost certain to end) in 2024 as a particularly proud period in that party's history. The Tories stepped in just a little after the 2007-2008 financial crisis as, struggling with a "Great Recession" that never ended, Britain (along with the rest of the world) went from one crisis to the next in a generally deteriorating world situation that saw the resurgence of great power war, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In presiding over all this they delivered to the public austerity, a referendum on withdrawal from the European Union that began as a bluff and ended as a bungle, pandemic management consistent with what might be expected of a Prime Minister reported to have said "let the bodies pile high in their thousands," and even a good old-fashioned fiscal-monetary crisis as ill-thought-out tax cuts for the rich sent sterling crashing, while, as things fell apart, making grandiose pronouncements about a "Global Britain" a truly global power again.

It is telling of this chaos that the Conservative Party had five leaders, and in them Britain five Prime Ministers, within the slightly over six year span between July 13, 2016 and October 24, 2022 (a rate of turnover without precedent, certainly when circumstances are taken into account).* It is equally telling of this period that after the first of those Prime Ministers slunk away in shame after his bluff was called, and many might have hoped never to see his smug, sanctimonious face in the news again, the last of those Prime Ministers made him Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs--after the Monarchy and the Prime Minister, his face Britain's face to the world.

The polls only confirm how implausible it is that a party with such a recent history should stay in government. Indeed, perusing the numbers Esther Webber suggests that the "natural party of government" in Britain "is facing a defeat so dramatic it might not survive" (emphasis added)--with this all the more striking for the sheer tepidity of the opposition. The Keir Starmer not leading the Labour Party is, after all, no champion of those who have spent the last fourteen years--indeed, the whole era since Thatcher entered 10 Downing Street--anguished by the country's course. Rather he posed as just left enough to squeeze Jeremy Corbyn out of the leadership before kicking his "ten pledges" to the curb with a brazenness astonishing even for a career politician, as he set about pulling all the stops to reassure the country's elites that he was a safe alternative to the increasingly bankrupt Conservative Party--a neoliberal in economics, a neoconservative in foreign policy, a rightist dictator in his own party who will not only keep the party left in line but expel it (as he did Corbyn). Indeed, if Starmer can sound more leftish than a Blair who could scarcely bring himself to even use the word "worker" by throwing around the rhetoric of the "one percent" as if he were some Occupy Wall Streeter and putting in a good word for Old Labour here and there, that is because the swaggering neoliberalism of the hosannas-over-globalization-singing late '90s is totally unsalable today. However, Starmer's rhetoric has shifted rightward as of late, while when one looks beyond the "mere rhetoric" of even his most leftish statements to the substance of what he says, they may, like Thomas Scripps, feel themselves looking at a candidate who makes Blair "look like a left-wing stalwart of a bygone age."

The result is that, again, the most likely outcome of the coming election is a change of government--combined with a great continuity of policy, in a world where "business as usual" seems ever less plausible amid metastasizing polycrisis. Alas, what can be said of Britain seems sayable about a good many other places these days--while at least as far as anything emanating from political Establishments is concerned, "business as usual" is as good as things are likely to get.

* The Duke of Wellington's 23 days in office in 1834 before handing over to Robert Peel, for example, are a very different thing from the hijinks of the last decade.