Britain's Devastating Electoral Slip.

Slip-Sliding Away: Labour may now enjoy a dominant position in Britain’s political landscape, but only by virtue of not being swallowed by it.

THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY’S “landslide victory” is nothing of the sort. As most people understand the term, a landslide election victory is one in which the incumbent government, or its challenger, by the sheer force of its political appeal, sweeps its opponents from the field. Like the victims of a real landslide, the victims of an electoral landslide are buried by the decisive mass and unstoppable momentum of the voters’ mandate.

This is NOT what happened in the United Kingdom on 4 July 2024.

A much better way of describing what happened to the Conservative Government of Rishi Sunak is to utilise that very Kiwi word “slip”. The ground upon which the Tories had erected their political dominance simply slipped away from under them. Undermined by years of economic austerity and ideological polarisation, and jolted by politically irrecoverable corruption and incompetence. One minute the Conservatives were there, and the next minute they were gone, leaving Labour perched precariously on the slip’s edge. Labour may now enjoy a dominant position in Britain’s political landscape, but only by virtue of not being swallowed by it.

The raw numbers say it all. In 2019, the British Labour Party experienced its worst electoral defeat since 1935, attracting just 32.1 percent of the popular vote. At around sunrise on Friday 5 July 2024, when all the votes had been counted, the British Labour Party’s share of the popular vote had risen to 33.7 percent. But, thanks to the extraordinary unfairness of the UK’s First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system, Labour’s one third of the vote had left it in possession of two thirds of the seats in the House of Commons.

Sir Keir Starmer is not the UK’s new Prime Minister because he won a landslide victory, but because the Conservative Party, quite simply, collapsed.

A Labour victory by default does not, however, satisfy the British Establishment’s requirement that UK governments be presented as positive expressions of the voters’ will – rather than a by-product of their bitter disillusionment and disgust. Uniformly, the British media have employed the landslide metaphor to legitimate Labour’s huge parliamentary majority. The British people have been told that they have handed their new government a decisive mandate, and that it is now their duty to let Starmer and his colleagues get on with the job.

Exactly what that job is is difficult to express with any clarity. It is important to bear in mind that the now governing party is not the Labour Party of Clement Attlee, or Harold Wilson, or even the “New Labour Party” of Tony Blair. What the British people have elected, wittingly or unwittingly, is “Changed Labour” – a political party which, according to its leader, is “unburdened by doctrine”. In the light of Starmer’s extraordinary admission, the only job which the Prime Minister and his new “Cabinet of all the talents” will be temperamentally equipped to get on with is the preservation of the status quo – which is a godawful mess.

As he sets out to clean up the mess that is contemporary Britain, Starmer has made it very clear to whatever remains of Labour’s beleaguered socialist factions, and even to the lack-lustre social-democrats of Blair’s New Labour, that he intends to be guided by the principle of “country before party”. This determination to lead a government that is at once non-ideological and unaccountable has raised no discernible hackles. Indeed, when openly enunciated by Starmer on Election Night these sentiments drew loud cheers from his audience of Labour activists. The acclamation of Starmer’s youthful supporters would appear to confirm the party’s full and final surrender to the political logic of technocracy. “Changed Labour” is an understatement.

But can a government of technocratic professionals possibly hope to win the support of the two-thirds of British voters who cast their ballots for other parties? Starmer may be reasonably confident of the Liberal Democrats’ backing in the years to come, ditto the Greens’. Not that he will need it. Not when his majority is greater than the seat tally of the Lib-Dems and Greens combined. It would be advantageous, however, if Starmer could point to a clear “progressive” majority across the UK, one that was broadly supportive of his government’s direction of travel. Fortunately, the combined vote share of the three progressive parties comes to 52 percent – a narrow majority, but a majority nonetheless.

Ranged against Starmer and his allies will be the 38 percent of voters who cast their ballots for the Conservatives (23.7 percent) and the UK Reform Party (14.3 percent). Of the two, it is Reform, Brexiteer Nigel Farage’s latest political vehicle, that constitutes the gravest threat to Starmer and his “changed” Labour Party. In spite of their leader’s claims, not all of Labour’s 411 MPs are unburdened by doctrine. Indeed, a great many of them hold rigidly ideological positions on immigration, gender, race, and the Israel-Gaza War. Farage and his colleagues (all four of them) will highlight the perceived extremism of Labour’s “identity politics” to drive a wedge into those same working-class constituencies that fell to the blandishments of Boris Johnson in 2019. Constituencies in which Reform polled impressively in 2024.

Farage has made no secret of his intention to “come after” Labour voters. He is confident that Starmer’s commitment to unscrambling a chaotic status quo, without upsetting the City of London and/or the Bank of England, can only result in the dangerous disillusionment of those many millions of Britons hopeful of being governed better, and with more compassion, by Labour than they were by the Tories. Though he doesn’t look like a fan of The Who, Farage’s message to the British working-class will be: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

And what of the biggest losers, the Tories? Down an astonishing 251 seats, reduced to a diehard rump of 121 MPs, and having lost nearly all their best and brightest leaders (and Liz Truss) in the “slip”. Where does the world’s most successful political party go now? And who will lead it there?

Looking back through the long career of the Conservative Party, it is clear that its remarkable ability to navigate the turbulent seas of British history is attributable largely to a clutch of colourful and proudly unorthodox navigators. Robert Peel, who broke his party to feed his people. Benjamin Disraeli, who, in forging “one nation” Toryism, bequeathed his party an enormously successful electoral formula. Stanley Baldwin, the successful industrialist whose death duties did for a feckless aristocracy more effectively than any cloth-cap socialist’s general strike. Winston Churchill, the narcissistic, grandiloquent turncoat who saved his country from fascism. Margaret Thatcher, who dared to unleash the atavism that lies in Toryism’s dark heart.

That person may not yet be seated in the House of Commons. But if and when the latest saviour of Conservatism finally takes their seat on the Opposition benches, they will be recognizable principally by how fully they embody the sentiments of G.K. Chesterton’s remarkable poem “The Secret People”:

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,

Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.

It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,

Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.

It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest

God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.

But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.

Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 8 July 2024.

The Empire Strikes Back.

From The Periphery To The Metropole: Beyond its personal dimensions, Rishi Sunak’s rise speaks to the extraordinary dynamism and diversity of global capitalism. Brexiteer though Sunak may be, his rise to the prime-ministership of Britain will strike many Brexit voters as yet further proof that, like the guests at the Hotel California, they can check out any time they want, but they can never leave.

WITH RISHI SUNAK’S “CORONATION” as Britain’s third prime minister in as many months, numerous imperial ghosts have been awakened. Sunak’s personal history is inextricably intertwined with the history of the British Empire’s rapid and reckless dissolution.

Beyond its personal dimensions, however, Sunak’s rise speaks to the extraordinary dynamism and diversity of global capitalism. Brexiteer though Sunak may be, his rise to the top will strike many Brexit voters as yet further proof that, like the guests at the Hotel California, they can check out any time they want, but they can never leave.

Global capitalism will always have the last laugh – eh Liz?

Born in Southampton, Sunak is no less “British” than his hapless predecessor. All of us are, however, an inextricable part of our parents’ stories, and Sunak’s parents’ story is about East Africa.

For the peoples of India and Africa the Indian Ocean has always been a mighty highway. Backwards and forwards across it travelled all kinds of cargoes and all kinds of people. Under the tutelage of successive empires, this easy commerce, and the cultural enclaves it created, thrived. It was only when the last of these overlords, the British, cut and ran, that East African cosmopolitanism began to fray.

Substantial Indian minorities in the newly independent former colonies of the British Empire sat uneasily alongside the African nationalist majorities who found themselves governing nation states whose borders owed more to the compromises of competing imperial map-makers than they did to the economic and cultural history of the regions they were carved out of.

Descendants of the tens-of-thousands of indentured Indian labourers imported by the British to build their imperial infrastructure, and of the Indian entrepreneurs and fortune-seekers who accompanied them, the Indians of East Africa had every reason to follow the retreating imperialists back to Britain. Among those who made their way to the Empire’s enfeebled heart were Yashvir and Usha Sunak, from Kenya and Tanzania respectively, Rishi Sunak’s parents.

Decolonisation and the struggle for independence have become a staple of the contemporary Left’s love affair with identity. Its lazy historiography casts all but the white villains of the imperial story as heroes. But, the thing to remember about empires, and the complex human societies they nurture, is that those positioned below the imperial rulers are by no means all inclined to cry: “I am Spartacus!” Certainly, empires can keep people down, but they can also lift them up. Imperialism creates winners as well as losers.

Rishi Sunak’s parents were never losers. Professionally-trained, English-speaking, confident in their ability to negotiate the labyrinthine class structure of British society, Sunak’s mother and father did everything within their power to ensure that their clever son’s abilities were fully revealed to those most likely to value them. Trees that fall in the forests of Winchester and Oxford are more or less guaranteed to make a great deal of noise.

From the dreaming spires of Oxford, the transition to the gleaming towers of London, was relatively seamless. Like so many who climb their way to the top of a social pyramid (as opposed to being born there) Sunak made a close study of those whose ranks he planned to join.

For all their sneers, the British upper-classes have never forgotten that cash-money is always trumps. A coat-of-arms is no substitute for a seven-figure bank-balance – not least because a nine-figure bank-balance can always buy you one!

To fully appreciate the role of money in a globalised capitalist world there is no experience more educative than working for a hedge-fund. And assuredly, there is no more telling proof of how much a hedge-fund manager has learned than arranging to marry a billionaire’s daughter.

Interestingly, among the last hedge-funds with which Sunak was associated was called Theleme Partners. The name is instructive. It is derived from the Greek word for the human will. “Thelema”, derived from the same word, was (and maybe still is!) the name given to a belief system combining occult knowledge with esoteric philosophy. Among its most famous devotees were the British “magus”, Aleister “The Beast” Crowley, and the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard.

The first rule of Thelema sounds about right for a hedge-fund manager: but, maybe, just a little bit alarming for the Prime Minister of Britain.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 October 2022.