The British General Election of 2024: Reflections From Two Years On

Back in July 2024 I took issue with the press' coverage of the British election, and especially the refrain it made of calling Labour's victory a "landslide." The word "landslide" implies a triumph when Labour's showing was quite weak (rather weaker than in elections Labour lost a short time earlier), but the Conservatives' happened to be still weaker, their vote collapsing as the two principal parties of Britain's two-party system lost out to third parties that captured a rare share of the vote. It seemed to me that this bespoke in part the British public's disgust with "politics as usual." This was more obviously the case with the Conservatives after a fourteen year period of government under five Prime Ministers who presided over the despised "austerity," and the combination of homicidal "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" indifference to human life and plain old bungling that was their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, though as Labour's weak showing implies it was also a matter of the party's being squarely back under a leadership that brazenly cast aside its promises of an end to neoliberal-neoconservative conduct in favor of a return to Blair-flavored neoliberalism-neoconservatism that the General Election Manifesto of 2024 made all too plain--to the relief of the sort of idiots with mainstream media platforms who approvingly speak of centrist politicians carrying Ming vases across polished floors, but absolutely hated by the public.

Meanwhile the most dynamic force on the scene looked like the alter-right party, the Nigel Farage-led Reform UK, which had me speculating that 2024 might be a repeat of 1924 as George Dangerfield described it in The Strange Death of Liberal England, except that this time it was the traditional party of the right that was getting shunted aside by a more dynamic rival.

Almost immediately after writing it I wondered if I wasn't reading too much into the event. Two years on I no longer think so. Both of Britain's major parties have gone on failing at the task of sustaining public support, with I imagine many Tories actually pining nostalgically for the comparatively halcyon days of Cameron, and Johnson, and even Sunak, as a Keir Starmer who had not long ago spoken clichés about wanting to end the cynicism people had about politics proving that people like him are exactly the reason why people are so cynical about it as at every turn he betrayed whatever hopes he managed to raise. (Indeed, betrayal is so much of a part of Starmer's record that I am reminded of Alexander Cockburn's precise and pungent description of Christopher Hitchens.) Meanwhile as they both continue to collapse the Tories continue to collapse faster, with, once more, Reform UK and all it stands for the greatest beneficiary of the situation.