For a while, it seemed as if the United States and the United Kingdom were partners in a shared delusion. Just a few months after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union, in 2016, Americans upped the ante by electing Donald Trump as President. In liberal circles, memes capturing the end-times mood circulated. One read “BRITAIN: Brexit is the stupidest, most self-destructive act a country could undertake. USA: Hold my beer.” It was kind of cozy, for a time, like when a friend joins you in abject failure. A narrative of parallel disaster held through the election of Boris Johnson—also charismatic, also orange—as Prime Minister, in 2019, and a succession of scandals within the Conservative Party. Misery loves company.
On the Fourth of July, however, the U.K. took a decidedly different path. This week, in the U.K.’s first general election since 2019, the British public voted to abandon Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party in favor of a center-left Labour government. Labour’s leader, Keir Starmer, a mild-mannered former prosecutor, won, as predicted, in a landslide. Previously, the Conservatives held three hundred and sixty-five seats in the House of Commons; by Friday afternoon, they had just a hundred and twenty-one—the worst defeat in the Party’s history. Labour gained two hundred and fourteen seats, for a total of four hundred and twelve, a staggering number that will give the Party broad powers to enact policy change. On Friday morning, a jubilant Starmer addressed a crowd of supporters. “Change begins now!” he said.
What is happening? Viewed from across the pond, or even from across the Channel, the U.K.’s election looks like an anomaly—a liberal bulwark against a wave of right-wing populism. In France, Marine Le Pen’s party made significant gains in a first round of voting last weekend. In the U.S. Presidential race, Trump’s base has helped him maintain a stubborn lead over President Joe Biden in the polls. But in the U.K. the wipeout win for Labour came as a surprise to almost no one. Polls have predicted big losses for the Tories since Sunak called the snap election in May, in a rain-drenched press conference. (The contest here, unlike in the U.S., took place over an efficient six-week period.) As Andrew Rudalevige, who teaches government at Bowdoin College, and who has spent the last year in the U.K. as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Politics told me, fourteen years of Conservative rule gave the election “an air of inevitability.” The Tories have “been in power so long that it’s very hard for them to make promises about the future that diverge from their performances in the past.”
And the past performances were grim. Rudalevige named a number of factors that have contributed to the Conservatives’ decline, including the fact that the Party has had four unpopular Prime Ministers in five years. (Liz Truss’s forty-nine-day tenure was the shortest in British history.) Since the Brexit referendum, the economy has stalled, and immigration has soared, despite claims that leaving the E.U. would do the opposite. Housing costs have risen, and waitlists for the fragile National Health Service are at an all-time high. Stories about people dying in hospital waiting rooms populate the BBC. Among the young, there’s a sense of cynicism and despair. “These have also been some of the most difficult years in recent history, not just in the U.K. but in Europe more broadly, and the bills are finally coming due,” the Georgetown professor Jeffrey Anderson, who studies transatlantic relations, told me.
Despite the high stakes, the election has almost universally been characterized as boring. Sunak and Starmer, at forty-four and sixty-one years old, respectively, are young by American standards, and well informed. In a televised debate last week, they spoke competently, if not exactly rivetingly, on taxes and immigration. Sunak has “this technocratic air, which is not that different from Keir Starmer,” Rudalevige told me. “One’s sort of more tech bro, and one’s more lawyerly, but they have some commonalities.” Even as Sunak vowed to stop “woke nonsense,” his over-all tone was noncorrosive. There were none of the personal attacks or lapses that marred the American debate the following night. “There have obviously been efforts to ramp up the culture wars in the U.K.,” Rudalevige told me, “but it doesn’t seem to be a very authentic fit with British political culture. It doesn’t seem to hit the same way.”
Everyone wants change, and the fallout for the Conservatives has not only benefitted Labour. A month before the election, Nigel Farage, seeing an opening, slipped into the race as the head of the far-right, anti-immigration Reform U.K. Party. (Unlike Trump and Johnson, Farage is slim and light on his feet, like a populist Pink Panther.) This past Sunday, I travelled to a Birmingham convention center to attend a Reform rally. Inside, a few thousand people were seated beneath huge Union Jack flags. A Reform bus, bearing the words “To Save the United Kingdom You Must Vote For Change,” was parked not far from the stage, and members of the Party were seated on top. Farage arrived to thunderous pump-up music and plumes of sparklers. Onstage, he railed against the BBC, from which he wants to strip funding, and Channel 4, which had recently released a report showing a Reform campaigner making racist remarks. Farage called the Channel 4 report “the biggest put-up job and smear campaign I’ve seen in my entire life.” Later, two candidates for Reform defected to the Tories over concerns about the Party’s racism and misogyny. “Have we had a few bad apples?” Farage asked the crowd. “We have.”
Afterward, I spoke to some of the attendees. Many people were at pains to tell me that Reform was not, in fact, racist. “That’s the Achilles’ heel of this party,” a middle-aged man named Paul, who, earlier, had got into an argument with a group that was protesting the rally, told me. “That’s not really what it’s all about.” Adrian Blackman, a sixty-eight-year-old retired caterer, told me that he liked Farage’s “honesty, and his loyalty to his country.” “At the end of the day, we’ve had Labour and Conservatives for so many years, and there’s never any change,” he said. He was attracted to Reform’s tough stance on immigration. “We’ve got to take back our country. We’ve got to look after our own,” he said. When I asked him about the American election, he added, “I quite like Donald Trump. I know he’s a stained man, and he’s had his troubles himself, but I think he’s strong and I think he believes in his country, the same as Nigel does.” In the end, Reform took fourteen per cent of the vote—higher than many expected. Because of the U.K.’s first-past-the-post voting system, however, this translated into just five seats, including Farage’s first win, in the seaside town of Clacton. It was a good night for smaller parties over all: the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party also made gains.
The morning of the election, the sky was clear blue. All day long, the BBC, whose coverage is restricted to uncontroversial facts while voting takes place, posted stories about pets at the polls. (Lola, a twelve-year-old Bengal cat, loitered outside a voting station in South Yorkshire.) As night fell, pubs in liberal North London began to fill with expectant young people; some were planning on staying up all night to watch the results. At the Three Crowns, in Stoke Newington, the BBC’s election coverage was projected onto a big screen. Someone had baked a strawberry-and-elderflower cake, and decorated it with the words “Good Riddance Tory Twats.” A musician named James Riley-McGilchrist, who had booked a table for friends, was unimpressed with both parties. “I think we all know that Labour’s going to be a massive disappointment, right? If anything it’s just the Schadenfreude of saying goodbye to the Tories.” Still, he was ready to be less cynical. “Everyone’s just, like, ‘Things are getting worse,’ ” he said. “But that’s really unhelpful when it comes to actually making change.”
Demetrios Mammas and David Beer, two American students studying in London, were commiserating about their homeland at a table in the corner. “I’m a lot more hopeful about this one than the U.S. election,” Beer said. He had watched the U.S. debate at 4 a.m. London time. “I regret staying up,” he said. “With Keir Starmer, at least you know there’s a level of competence,” Mammas said. In the U.S., he continued, “the question is existential. Like, your question is, Do you preserve democracy or do you engage in a cult? And I don’t think it’s the same situation in the United Kingdom.”
The clock ticked toward 10 p.m., when the first exit polls would be announced. Down the road at Dalston Superstore, a queer bar that was hosting “Rishi Sunak’s Leaving Drinks,” a line of people zagged down the block. (“Come back after ten!” a bouncer shouted.) In the Three Crowns, people were on their feet and counting down. “Ten, nine, eight . . .” When the first poll appeared onscreen, predicting a big win for Labour, the crowd erupted in cheers. A prosecco bottle popped open. Thirty-one-year-old Vicky Hellon was buzzing. “I feel more excited that the Tories are out, and maybe slightly apprehensive about which way Labour will go,” she said. She was planning on staying a few more hours. “I’d like to see some Tory tears.” ♦