Dem
47
GOP
53
Because all politics is global these days (see above), we've been wanting to get to some of the developments worldwide over the past month or so. We decided to do Britain today, and tomorrow we'll do a few more countries, like France and Japan. To further understand what's going on in the U.K. we asked our three British correspondents to do an update. Without further ado:
S.T. in Worcestershire, England, UK, starts us off... The June 2024 British election seems a long time ago and the question U.K. political watchers are asking now is whether a fundamental realignment in U.K. politics is taking place.
A reminder: In the 2024 election, Labour won an overall majority with 412 seats, out of 650 seats and 34% of the vote. Comparable figures for the other main parties were Conservatives 121 and 24%, Reform just 5 and 14% and the Liberal Democrats 72 and 12%. The wide disparity between seats and votes demonstrates what happens when a first-past-the-post system collides with a multi-party electorate.
The fact that Labour has lost popularity in the last 16 months is not a surprise; most U.K. governments become less popular after a honeymoon period. The size and speed of the decline has, however, been unprecedented. And even more astonishing is the fact that the main opposition party has not been the beneficiary of the decline. In fact, having posted their worst performance in nigh-on 200 years at the general election, the Conservatives have continued to head downwards. The main beneficiary has been the right-wing populist Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage.
Looking at the current opinion polls, Reform appear to be attracting on average around 30% of the vote, Labour just above 20%, the Conservatives in the high teens and the Liberal Democrats in the mid teens. This seems broadly in line with what is happening on the ground. Readers may remember that the local elections which took place in parts of England in May saw huge gains by Reform, and local by-elections since have seen the trend continue, with both Labour and Conservatives losing seats week in, week out (though it's worth noting that the Lib Dems and the Greens have to date been far more successful at retaining their wards, with the former also picking up seats). There has only been one parliamentary by-election this Parliament, which is rather hard to read—the sitting Labour MP resigned after a late-night fracas—but for what it's worth, that safe Labour seat was gained by Reform by all of 6 votes.
What do these figures say about parliamentary representation? Given so many diverse results in individual constituencies, it's often difficult to say, but MRP polls, which use a large poll sample and use sophisticated techniques to try to assess how each seat would vote, had an impressive performance at the general election. YouGov's most recent MRP poll suggests that with a 6% lead over Labour, Reform would be close to an overall majority. There are, of course, lots of caveats: no general election has to be held till mid 2029, MRP polls tend to be less accurate further out from an election, a lot of the seat by seat projections show very tight contests, and there is a strong possibility of tactical voting, particularly where there is a clear challenger.
Yet a right-wing populist party going from 5 seats to the verge of government in a single election, previously unheard of, appears to be a possibility. How on earth did we get here... and what happens next? G.S. in Basingstoke, England, UK takes up the story...
The Conservative MP (and grandson of Winston Churchill) Nicholas Soames once described former Prime Minister Boris Johnson as "the unchallenged master of the self-inflicted wound." That statement, however, was given in 2016, and so does not account for current Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's Herculean efforts to seize this title. A selection of such events might include:
- After cancelling it in July 2024, Sir Keir was forced to reinstate the winter fuel allowance (a payment given to poorer pensioners to help with the rising cost of fuel) after a furious reaction and a concerted campaign over the elderly having to choose either "eating or heating."
- After (justifiably) berating the Tories over sleaze and incompetence for so many years (parties in Downing Street during lockdown, Liz Truss' disastrous premiership, sexual misconduct allegations against MPs, etc), Sir Keir promptly marched into his own scandal when it became clear the Labour donor Lord Waheed Alli was providing undeclared gifts of high-end clothing for Starmer and his wife, as well as a personalized shopping service.
- After taking office, Labour "discovered" and announced a £22 billion black hole in the public finances, to the fury of the Tories, who declared that government finances were open for all to see during the election run up. After promising taxes would not be increased "on working people" or on the main corporate rates, Chancellor Rachel Reeves then sidestepped these promises by increasing National Insurance contributions (a form of social security payments)... on employers, not employees. Britain now enjoys the highest tax burden in history.
- This one is complicated but important, so please bear with your correspondent... Labour promised that if elected they would "smash the gangs"—this being a reference to the organized criminals using small inflatable boats to bring undocumented migrants to U.K. shores from France. Sir Keir's approach has not worked; there has been a 38% increase in such crossings since the same time last year. In the absence of any Florida-style holding camps, these migrants are often held in local hotels until their cases can be heard, at a huge cost to the taxpayer. Predictably, this has led to an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment.
Meanwhile, in July 2024, there was a tragic mass stabbing of young children by a U.K. national at a dance school in Southport. The police arrested the culprit almost immediately, but failed to release any information about him (a policy since changed). Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say, and the Internet was rife with conspiracy theories about the culprit being an undocumented immigrant, perhaps exacerbated by the killer being born in Wales to Rwandan parents. This unfounded speculation led to multiple anti-immigration riots up and down the country, which were put down through massive police force and rapidly accelerated trials for the culprits. In the background, however, were several prosecutions about Internet postings. The most infamous of these was the wife of a Tory Councillor, who received 31 months in jail for calling for the asylum hotels to be set on fire, a sentence that even some of her detractors considered harsh.
On the immigration backlash, Britain has recently seen an exponential increase in the number of Union Jacks and St. George's crosses displayed publicly in "Operation Raise the Colours"—the author can attest to literally hundreds being put up in the last 24 hours on a roundabout not half a mile from his house. While this may not seem unusual to our American friends, displaying our flag so publicly is not really the British way (some royal events excepted), and has been associated with nationalism and/or racism for some time now. The debate is polarizing and Labour seem stuck between a rock and a hard place, unsure about whether to embrace or distance themselves from the protests.
On the free speech issue, the debate has been skewed recently by the proscribing of the group Palestinian Action (making it a criminal offense to express support for the group), after members broke into a Royal Air Force base in June 2025 and sprayed various aircraft with red paint. Since that proscribing, hundreds of people have been arrested for wearing T-shirts with "I oppose genocide. I support Palestinian Action," including blind wheelchair users, 83-year-old priests and disabled RAF veterans. The Home Secretary's response has been to propose the tightening of rules on protest, including giving the police power to arrest those protesting repeatedly in one area. This intersection between the debates on immigration, free speech, patriotism and protest has become a real problem for the government.- Finally, in the hope of a "reset" and a focus back on Labour policy, Labour had their annual conference at the end of September. Unfortunately, this event was somewhat overshadowed by the then-Deputy Prime Minister and party Deputy Leader, Angela Raynor, being forced to resign two weeks prior to the event, after mistakenly paying too little tax on a second property she had bought. It did not help that she was, at the time, also the Housing Minister. The story was complicated, but suffice to say she had referred herself to the independent advisor on ministerial standards, who concluded that her oversights had broken the ministerial code. Angela Raynor at least remains an MP; perhaps she could have taken advice from former PM Boris Johnson, who resigned as an MP in a fit of pique and went off to join the lucrative lecturing circuit after being found to break a similar code.
All of these woes have added to a sense of a government that is unmoored and drifting, contributing to those opinion polls outlined by my compatriot S.T. The final irony, your correspondent wryly notes, is that if Sir Keir had taken the suggestion of one Donald Trump in 2016 and made Farage the next U.K. ambassador to the U.S., he'd be 3,000 miles away and not causing him such headaches. 3-D chess, anyone?
The upshot, concludes A.B. in Lichfield, England, UK, is that some opinion polls now show Keir Starmer as having the lowest approval ratings of any U.K. Prime Minister in modern history, lower even than 50-day wonder Liz Truss as her catastrophic period in office came to its conclusion. But... But... despite everything S.T. and G.S. have just outlined, it could be worse. Because if his approval ratings as PM are dismal, Sir Keir does much better in head-to-head polls against other U.K. party leaders. Starmer beats Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch in most head-to-head preferred Prime Minister polls by around 9-10%. Nigel Farage has led Starmer in seven of the ten similar polls taken since August of this year, but generally by very small margins, and the two that Starmer led in (another was tied) had the Prime Minister leading Farage by healthier 8% margins (Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey is rarely included in this type of poll, but he led Starmer in the only relevant poll taken since August, and crushes both Badenoch and Farage when a pollster remembers to ask the question.) A recent Ipsos poll, meanwhile, showed that Starmer was the most-trusted senior politician in the U.K.—that because 23% of those polled consider him trustworthy.
The latter poll shows the scale of the problem for our political class. Our Prime Minister is simultaneously the least popular Prime Minister in modern history and the most trusted senior politician in the country—as less than a quarter of voters trust him. Meanwhile, Farage's Reform UK party is leading in opinion polls with only 30% support, while another recent Ipsos poll showed that 62% of British voters see Reform as extreme. The upshot is that almost all of our current political leaders are unpopular and/or are considered untrustworthy.
The problem therefore isn't necessarily that the Prime Minister is suffering from catastrophic approval ratings just over a year after winning a massive landslide election, but that almost all of our parties and leaders are held in something approaching contempt by voters. Labour is widely held to have let voters down since winning election, and in any case won that landslide due to disgust with a Conservative Party that had given us Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, as opposed to enthusiasm for Labour. For all the gains they've recently made, the Liberal Democrats have never quite recovered from the reputational hit they took for going into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010-2015. The majority of voters believe that Reform UK is extremist and racist, though the party still leads in polls because the other parties are themselves so unpopular. The English and Welsh Greens are meanwhile led by a man who once told a reporter that he could enlarge women's breasts through hypnotherapy. No wonder nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales are looking attractive to many voters in those two U.K. nations (though the SNP in Scotland has had its own problems with scandals). The upshot is that deeply unpopular party leaders are slugging it out to try and win votes from a disenchanted electorate. These are not ideal conditions for a thriving democracy.
Thanks, gents! Ripping good stuff!
If any reader has insight into the situation in France, or in Japan, or in Argentina, we would welcome those. (Z)