The Daily - Why Britain Just Ended 14 Years of Conservative Rule

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

For more than a decade, Britain has been governed by the Conservative Party, which pushed its politics to the right, embracing smaller government and Brexit. Last week, that era officially came to an end.Mark Landler, the London bureau chief for The Times, explains why British voters rejected the Conservatives and what their defeat means in a world where populism is on the rise.Guest: Mark Landler, the London bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Five takeaways from the British general election.The Conservatives have run Britain for 14 years. How have things changed in that time?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitro-Eff, and this is The Daily. For more than a decade, Britain has been governed by conservatives who push the U.K. to the right, embracing smaller government and Brexit. Last week, that era officially came to an end. My colleague Mark Landler explains why UK voters rejected the Conservative Party and what a win by the British left means in a world where right-wing populism is on the rise. It's Wednesday, July 10th. Mark, hi. Welcome back to the show.

Hi there, Natalie. I want to start this conversation by just asking you to help us break down what exactly happened in the UK elections last week. Well, the top line was the Conservative Party, which has been in government here for 14 years, was swept out in a resounding landslide by the Labour Party. So remember, the Conservatives, often known as the Tories, are the right of centre party. Labour is traditionally the left-of-center party, closely allied with the trade unions. So what happened in this election is that Labour won more than 400 seats in the parliament compared to only 121 seats for the Conservatives.

And so that puts the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, into 10 Downing Street as the prime minister. It opens a new chapter in British politics after more than a decade of conservative rule, and it represents a resounding repudiation of the conservatives by a very angry electorate. This is just a massive shift. What caused that turnaround after a decade plus of conservative rule? What made the British voters reject the Tories in this election? There were really three underlying issues that accumulated in a way that simply turned voters against them. So I'd start with the economy.

It's the bedrock issue, the one that really underlies everything else. And that story starts back in 2010 when the Conservatives first come back into government. Our economy is stuck in a rut and we need change to get it moving. Let me tell you what I would do. At that time, they position themselves as the responsible stewards coming in in the aftermath of the global financial crisis to get Britain's house back in order, to put Britain back on a responsible course. Britain's budget deficit is so huge, says David Cameron,

that cuts of a massive £83 billion are needed. It'll be the most dramatic cutback of government spending since the 1920s. And so they embarked on this period that's known as fiscal austerity. They basically cut back funding for everything. They include 500,000 layoffs, cuts in welfare benefits and major cuts in the military. In a sense, it balanced the books, but it did so at a great cost to the economy and to public life in Britain. The report by the International Monetary Fund did warn that austerity measures may be jeopardizing growth. Britain ended up with a very slow growth economy, slow growth in wages that left people

feeling that they weren't growing any more prosperous, that they weren't growing wealthier, and sort of built up this accumulated sense that things were on the wrong track. And then there is this tumultuous event. Brexit. Brexit. Brexit. Brexit.

And that, of course, is Brexit. I will go to Parliament and propose that the British people decide our future in Europe. Recall in 2016, the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron called a referendum in which British voters were asked, do you want to remain in the European Union or leave? And there is this shock result. The British people have spoken and the answer is we're out. That Britain votes to leave the EU.

Is the UK economy standing at the cliff edge or is there a soft landing the other side of Brexit? And that adds yet another layer of drag on the economy. The EU was and is Britain's largest trading partner. Cutting those ties meant that suddenly trade became much more difficult, bureaucracy much more cumbersome, and a general sense among businesses both within the UK and outside the UK that maybe Britain wasn't as good a place to invest. So there's almost a sense of this as a lost decade. People feel that the British economy has been treading water and their own personal situations have not gotten any better.

So at the end of this lost decade, do voters start to question whether the Tories are, in fact, the responsible economic stewards they had said they were? Well, you might think this would be the moment that they would turn on the Tories. But in fact, the Tories managed to get themselves another term in the 2019 election. And they stumbled on through a couple more prime ministers. The economic crisis didn't really turn into a political disaster for the Tories until Liz Truss. Remind us who Liz Truss is. So Liz Truss is the prime

minister who came in right after Boris Johnson. And what Liz Truss did is she came in and she basically tried an ideological experiment on the British economy. She tried to pass very radical, very sweeping, and completely unfunded tax cuts. And it had the effect of spooking the financial markets, sending the British pound into a tailspin, and basically wrecking the confidence of both the domestic audience as well as international investors in the United Kingdom. And in a matter of weeks, Liz Truss managed to undo whatever reputation the Conservative Party had built over decades

for responsibly managing the economy. And she resigns on her 44th day in office. Wow. This incredibly brief tenure of Liz Truss was really the straw that broke the camel's back here after more than a decade of economic trouble. Yeah. The British voters were frustrated, to be sure, and discontent. frustrated, to be sure, and discontent. But not until trust came along did the party really forfeit its reputation for knowing how to manage the economy. After trust, I think a majority of voters in this country simply decided, we can't, if you will, trust these people with our economy. And what do things look like now?

trust these people with our economy. And what do things look like now? Well, one of the things that's very striking about the UK today is you have this very dynamic, vibrant capital city, London, which accounts for a disproportionate amount of economic activity in the country. And then you've got the hinterland, which in the UK can be a fairly depressing place. The Midlands, the North, this is the old industrial belt. It would be the equivalent of the Rust Belt in the American Midwest. And these are places that have really suffered during this long period of austerity. So if you go into some of these towns, you see boarded up storefronts, you see shuttered factories, you see a lot of people on public assistance, a lot of people who are not physically all that well. And it is true,

and it's a statistic that's often mentioned in this country, that if you take London out of the equation on a GDP per capita basis, which is a very common way of measuring wealth, the rest of England is roughly equivalent to the state of Mississippi, which is, of course, one of the poorest states in America. So that's one way of thinking about the Britain of 2024. It's a major contrast between London and the rest of the country. So it sounds like the economy is really struggling and people are starting to lay blame at the feet of the Tories. So that's one explanation for why the public turns on this party. What else is at play?

Well, there's a second issue, and it's not unconnected from the first issue, and that is the state of the National Health Service. Across the UK, hospitals are at breaking point. The beloved national public hospital network that tens of millions of Brits rely on every single day. They are running out of beds and the patients keep coming. This also has been a victim of years and years of austerity, of cost-cutting, or of very small budget increases.

The waiting room was rammed. Trolleys were just piling up in the hallway. What you see are incredible lines in emergency rooms at big public hospitals. Seven and a half million people in England now on a waiting list for hospital treatment. If you make an appointment for elective surgery, you're often put on a waiting list for eight months,

10 months, 12 or even 14 months. Wow. Even if you're a cancer patient, you might not get immediate treatment because the system is simply so overwhelmed. Staff shortages are now leading to fears for patient safety. And after years and years of chronic underinvestment... One junior doctor said she was quitting after just one year,

poor pay cited as the first reason for such a drastic move. It simply doesn't have the physical resources, the human capital resources, the doctors, the nurses. And so you just have this sense of a country that feels a bit hollowed out. We haven't got enough doctors. The governments aren't funding the NHS properly. And this really has to stop. This isn't, by the way, just true in the health care area, but it's most palpable and really most visible to citizens in the NHS. And part of the Tories' identity, right, is that they were the party of fiscal responsibility, that they were the best stewards of the economy. And it sounds like that really is no longer holding up in Britain and that they've actually become seen as the ones who are causing these very real problems, everyday problems, for the average voter. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that to the average voter, the mismanagement of the economy became linked to other things that affected the quality of their everyday lives. And then there's a final thing, and also very core to the identity of the modern conservative party. One of the major

arguments that the pro-Brexit people made was that this will enable us to cut down on mass uncontrolled immigration. And they failed utterly in that goal as well. The number of net arrivals in the country has gone up from 300,000 to 780,000. So rather than declining after Brexit, immigration soared. How did that happen? Why didn't immigration go down after Brexit if that was the big promise? Well, this is one of the interesting paradoxes of the whole Brexit period. This is the first time in nearly 40 years where the British government will be in control and will determine its own immigration policy. When Britain left the European Union, it did actually end freedom of travel for people from the European Union.

We are bringing an end to a free movement of labor, which of course is linked to our membership of the European Union. So what you saw much less of in London, for example, was waiters from Italy, Greece, Spain in restaurants. But what the government was doing, you know, rather quietly, was changing the immigration rules. Some important news today on long-term migration into the UK. In the year to June, there's been a surge in long-term immigration. So that rather than allowing relatively young unskilled workers from the EU, the country began being more open to much higher skilled people from other parts of the world.

Now, the jump is caused by a rise in non-EU migration with special factors at play. Overseas students coming back to the UK as COVID restrictions have relaxed. So while you see much fewer Polish plumbers, for example, you see many more Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani doctors. Special support to people from Ukraine and Hong Kong. And of course, you see many more Filipina nurses. And of course, the impact of the Afghan resettlement program. Many more graduate students from Nigeria or other parts of Africa. So immigration didn't decline. It's the nature of immigration changed.

Does that make people mad? Because I think we're used to seeing in the U.S., at least, that the frustration and resentment towards immigrants is usually related to the people who are coming in and are in more desperate situations, not folks getting angry about doctors or lawyers from abroad. It's a very complicated issue, and I'm glad you asked it this way, because it is in fact true that for many English people, going to a hospital and being treated by an Indian doctor does not arouse any resentment. They're grateful that they have a doctor who's able to see them. The problem arises more from immigration in the aggregate. The net migration to this country has increased massively. There's this sense that the borders have been thrown open.

How many more houses do we have to build? That immigration is out of control. Are they being schooled and educated and looked after by our social and health services? That's my main concern, how we're going to be able to cope, because we're not really coping now, are we? So there is this kind of nagging sense, on the part of many people, by the way,

it's not just people on the right, that immigration has gotten out of control, that this government had promised to sort of bring it under control, and instead the opposite seems to be happening. Basically, it sounds like there's a lot of people who wanted Brexit specifically to reduce migration. These are folks who felt betrayed by the Tories because they got the opposite result.

And that's part of a bigger thread here, right? This is a story about mismanagement of core issues for the British public. The economy's a mess, immigration's rising, the healthcare system is rife with dysfunction. So is it fair to see the results of the election as essentially a rejection of conservatism in the UK and of the ideals that brought us Brexit, which was so core to much of this story? I think it's certainly fair to see this election as a rejection of a party that failed at its most basic task, which was governing effectively and responsibly.

On the face of it, it looks like a triumph of the left. But when you dig into it, when you see how the voters voted, which parties did well, which did less well, you get a much more complicated picture about what it is that voters really wanted. We'll be right back. Mark, I wonder if you can explain why what looked like this huge win for the Labour Party is actually more complex. I mean, on the face of it, it would seem to be this sweeping endorsement of the left. Is that not what this is?

Well, you're right. On the face of it, it looks like a huge embrace of left-of-center politics. And in fact, the Labour Party performed very well in this election. But the key thing to understand is this is not the same Labour Party that ran in the last election in 2019. This Labour Party is far more centrist. And that's the result of a very methodical, deliberate plan on the part of the party's leader, Keir Starmer, who's now the prime minister, to pull the party away from some of its more leftist positions in an attempt to make it more acceptable to a broader range of voters. How drastic of a turn to the center are we talking about here, Mark? It was a fairly radical move on the part of Starmer. If you look at the old Labour Party, the party that ran in the 2019 election, this was a party that talked about renationalizing the entire

British electricity grid. This was a party whose leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was openly skeptical about the role of NATO. And in each of these areas, Starmer moved very deliberately. He pulled the national security policy much more to the center, made the party feel much more patriotic. He promised not to raise taxes on working people. He promised not to vastly expand spending until the country could afford it. So across every one of these areas, it's more than just rebranding the party. Starmer really repositioned it and turned it into a center-left party rather than a pure left-wing party. Starmer, it sounds like, basically turns labor into an alternative that wasn't all that different from the Tories, it just had much less baggage.

Yeah, that's exactly right. It's an exaggeration to say that labor is Tory 2.0. There are policy differences, but the fundamental pitch here is, if you elect us, we will do a better job than the Tories, but we won't give you a radically different government. And now, is that what's happened? I mean, is the Labour Party now the new standard bearer in British politics, this broadly acceptable centrist party that most people can get behind? Well, there's no question that in terms of seats, they are going to be the political standard bearer. But the interesting thing when you look to the actual raw vote is that the Labour Party didn't roll up

the kind of crushing landslide that you would expect given how many seats they gained. Labour only got roughly a third of the raw vote, which is actually less than they got in 2017 when they lost to the conservatives. Wow. And that speaks to the fragmentation of the electorate. You had in this election not two parties, but four parties that performed well. In addition to Labor and the conservatives, you had the liberal Democrats,

another centrist anti-Brexit party that did remarkably well. centrist anti-Brexit party that did remarkably well. And then perhaps most interestingly, you had this new anti-immigration insurgent populist party, Reform UK, that came out of nowhere and became a major factor. Okay, what's the backstory of that party? So Reform grows out of the Brexit debate. And basically, this is a party that's almost a single-issueage. He's been a fixture on the right in Britain for more than a decade. He was one of the primary campaigners for Brexit, and he fielded hundreds and hundreds of candidates in this election. And what they wound up doing was siphoning off a lot of the conservative vote. And how typical is it to see this many parties do well in UK politics? I mean, what do you make of the fact that these smaller, more obscure groups were able to do so well?

Well, it is quite unusual, and it speaks to a couple of things. One is that you have an electorate that, particularly among young voters, is much less loyal to the major parties. So in this election, Labour and the Conservatives together got only 57% of the vote. That's the lowest combined percentage for the major parties at any time in the post-World War II period. So that's the overarching dynamic. But there's something very interesting going on with votes on the right. In this election, you had a number of conservative voters vote for Reform UK as a way of registering their unhappiness with the Conservative Party, particularly on the issue of immigration.

They knew that those votes would help ensure that a labor party got into government, but they were less worried by that prospect. In the old days, with that old, much more left labor party, conservative voters would have been much more reluctant not to stick with their own party for fear of allowing the opposition to get into power. This new Labour Party, this more centrist Labour Party, did not scare them the same way. And in a funny way, that empowered them and enabled them to cast that protest vote for Reform UK. And that's really what split the vote on the right and allowed Labour to do so well. really what split the vote on the right and allowed labor to do so well. So you have these conservative voters who are still out there who want to punish the Tories, and now they feel like

they can because they're not as scared, right, about a labor victory because labor is just more palatable at this point. That's right. Labor has not threatened to raise their taxes. It hasn't threatened to blow out the budget. It hasn't threatened to do all the things a labor government might have done five years ago. And as a result, voting for Nigel Farage and his party seems like a less risky thing to do. So, Mark, this is a much more complicated picture for the Labor Party, which is now, you know, running the government. This is hardly a decisive win for them, an endorsement of their ideology. How do you think they're seeing it? Well, I think they recognize that because of all the issues we discussed, their relatively low raw vote total, the fragmentation of the voters,

the fact that other parties have done so well, that they need to produce results quickly, that they're dealing with an impatient electorate, a volatile electorate, fickle voters who are not going to cut them a lot of slack. They know that in less than five years, the conservatives managed to turn a landslide victory into a landslide defeat. And they don't want to suffer the same fate. So Starmer, I think, is going to try that within a year or two, he can say to voters, look, you elected me to be more competent. You elected me to turn around this economy. This is what I've done. Judge me on that. And then I think if he can pull that off,

he has a very good shot of getting a second term. Starmer wants to move fast here, but, I mean, it strikes me that all the issues we talked about, these challenges he's staring down, are pretty hard to turn around quickly. I mean, fixing the economy in the midst of global economic uncertainty, fixing a starved healthcare system, immigration. Yeah, I mean, you raise exactly the right point. Starmer's in this very difficult situation where he needs to show some quick wins,

but a lot of the remedies are long-term, and there's an added problem. He has no money, are long-term, and there's an added problem. He has no money. So he has to do all this with an empty larder, if you will, and that's going to be perhaps the biggest challenge of all. How do you show wins when you don't have many tools to work with? Right. And waiting in the wings, you have these smaller groups, right, including this far-right anti-immigrant party that, you know, is looking to see what happens and prepared to capitalize on any weakness, I'd assume. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Even though the Reform Party won only five seats in Parliament, one of those seats belongs to Nigel Farage, and he is going to be taking shots at the Labour government, pointing out every single shortcoming, with an eye to building up his party over time so that if Labour really fails in three, four, five years, reform might not just

be an insurgent party. It might actually be a party positioned to either play a kingmaker role or really be a dominant presence in British politics. Mark, that leads me to ask you how you're thinking about the stakes here, and not just for the UK, but for the world. I mean, what would it mean for the Labour Party to fail? I think failure would have a profound consequence for liberal democracies in the West. I mean, remember, France is currently dealing with a surging hard right movement in its parliamentary elections. The Germans dealt with hard right advances in recent

European elections. And in a matter of months, voters in America may elect Donald Trump. So I think that the failure of the Labour Party would reinforce a populist wave that appears to be building in many of these countries. And success? If the Labour Party can show that a centrist government can function effectively in a world as buffeted by all of these populist, more extremist trends, you could foresee a world in three years where Keir Starmer, a successful center-left prime minister, almost stands as a bulwark for the rules-based international order. And this would be particularly true if Donald Trump were as almost the leader of the liberal democratic world. That's a role I think that Keir Starmer could potentially inhabit depending on how events play out. There's a lot of caveats here in both the U.S. and in Britain.

There's a lot of caveats here in both the U.S. and in Britain. But I do think that Starmer has this potential to play a very, very significant role at an uncertain time in the West. Mark, thank you so much. Thanks, Natalie. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. Are you confident that President Biden has what it takes to win in November and serve the next four years? As I've said before, I'm with Joe. Yes.

I'm with Joe. Yes. Top congressional Democrats are indicating they are unwilling, for now at least, to push President Biden aside, despite deep concerns about his ability to win re-election. Was there more people saying Biden should step down or more people saying he should step down? You're riding with Biden. You're riding with Biden. House and Senate Democrats emerged from private meetings on Tuesday swearing allegiance to Biden. But the party remains deeply fractured. Biden has remained strong thanks to the backing of key constituencies, including the Congressional Black Caucus,

which has come out in strong support of the president's candidacy. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Nina Feldman, and Will Reed. It was edited by Brendan Klinkenberg with help from Paige Cowett. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Diane Wong, and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kittroweth. See you tomorrow.