Stop, Look, and Listen #27 (UK General Election Special)
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.
The UK General Election took place last week, as I’m sure most readers are aware, and my reading and listening (and general attention) were primarily focused on that, and so this instalment of Stop, Look, and Listen will be entirely on this topic:
The underlying dynamics of UK party politics
On the Zer0 Books and Repeater Media podcast, Adam Jones interviewed Phil Burton-Cartledge, author of The Party’s Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak, about how the party’s longstanding stagnation owes to its failure to reproduce its electoral base.
Dan Evans wrote in The Guardian about how, despite Keir Starmer and other senior Labour politicians’ working-class backgrounds, their politics far more closely embody those of the professional managerial class, with a romantic but also paternalistic view of the working class.
Taran Khan wrote for the LRB Blog about the campaigns of independent candidates of Leanne Mohamad and Faiza Shaheen in the suburban London seats of Ilford North and Chingford and Woodford Green respectively, and how these tapped into wider disgruntlement not only with Labour’s approach to Gaza, but also a broader array of local concerns that the main parties have failed to address.
Labour’s economic programme
Speaking ahead of the election, James Butler talked to William Davies on the LRB Podcast about the scale of the economic challenge facing the incoming Labour government, and the question of how far new Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s economic programme marked a break from Osbornomics towards something more like Bidenomics.
While in The Guardian, Daniela Gabor warned that Labour’s likely reliance on private financial investment to rebuild the country’s infrastructure will result in the state underwriting private control of public assets, disempowering and offloading future costs on the citizenry.
Delphine Strauss has written for the Financial Times about the party’s ‘New Deal for Workers’, and the potential it has for genuinely enhancing workplace rights, but also the risks that employers’ efforts to navigate it could have counterproductive impacts on their employees.
The election results
This article for The Guardian by Ashley Kirk, Alex Clark, Carmen Aguilar García, and Pamela Duncan provides a statistical breakdown of Labour’s landslide victory, including the extent but also fragility of its gains, the scale of the swing against the Conservatives, the way Reform cannibalised much of the Brexit vote, the strong performances of the Liberal Democrats and Greens, and the major setback for the Scottish National Party.
Ben Ansell reflected on the election result for his Political Calculus newsletter, arguing that the result captured above all the scale of discontent with the outgoing Conservative government, but also revealed the shortcomings of First Past the Post in an era of multi-party politics, as well as the skill of voters in tactically navigating it.
Rob Ford wrote for The Guardian about Labour’s strategy in shifting away from its core vote to focus on voters in far more marginal constituencies, the scale of the victory it brought about, and the risk that it also carries of leaving the party vulnerable in former safe seats as its popularity with both urban middle-class and minority voters declines.
Looking forward…
In the final instalment of the Past Present Futures podcast series on ‘UK General Elections’, David Runciman and Robert Saunders sought to make sense of the paradoxical results of this latest election in their historical context, as well as questions of where this fits into a broader picture of contemporary global political turmoil.
Writing for the London Review of Books, James Butler noted the lack of enthusiasm accompanying Labour’s landslide victory, and the scale of the challenge facing a Starmer government with a diagnosis of the country’s economic problems unmatched by its solutions and at odds with its stance on migration, as well as ongoing party management problems.
Butler also spoke after the election with John Lanchester, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, and Tom Crewe on the LRB Podcast, discussing the scale of damage done by 14 years of Conservative rule, the prospects of Labour achieving its stated objectives, the aptness or not of comparisons with Harold Wilson’s Labour government of the 1960s, and whether there are grounds for optimism.
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