Labour Wins U.K. Elections as Conservatives Collapse and Third Parties Surge
The results are in, and it’s a landslide. After 14 years in power, Britain’s Conservative Party has been expelled from office in the most dramatic of fashions—with its worst electoral result in decades.
Rishi Sunak, the man who pledged to restore stability after a ruinous period of high inflation and political chaos, has already tendered his resignation to the King. His successor—the former lawyer turned center-left politician Keir Starmer—will now lead Britain’s first Labour government for almost 20 years, having won as many seats in parliament as former Prime Minister Tony Blair back in 1997.
What went wrong for Sunak? Honestly, the better question is where to start. Sunak had come into office in the fall of 2022 promising a technocratic overhaul: a series of five Key Performance Indicator-style pledges (on the economy, immigration, and the national health service) designed to restore trust in government. When he called the election back in May, he had just about achieved the fiscal ones (including halving inflation) but was no closer to solving the others.
Instead, Sunak’s time in office was characterized by a lack of vision. Despite revealing himself as a critic of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s lockdown-mania (albeit one who served in Britain’s Covid government), Sunak’s time in power seemed to revolve around petty authoritarian interventions designed to improve the behavior of teenagers. Signature initiatives included criminalizing near-harmless nitrous oxide, championing a smoking ban similar to the one introduced by former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and consulting on banning the sale of smartphones to children under 16 (like the smoking ban, this never actually came to pass).
After surprising everyone, including many of his parliamentary colleagues, by announcing a sudden election, Sunak offered his next big idea: the return of national service, under which Britain’s teenagers would be forced to report for mandatory community work once a month. At a time of economic uncertainty and frustration, the prime minister seemed less like a great political reformer and more like a strict high school principal.
Goodness knows how it went down with the swing voters, many of whom, polls suggest, remain utterly exasperated at Britain’s creaking public services and stagnant economy. By the time the general election arrived, the Conservatives were
Article from Reason.com
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