Magical realism and Britain's election
English original of commentary ahead of Thursday's vote, published today in Italian in La Stampa
It feels as if the script for the general election the United Kingdom will hold on Thursday might have been written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
A big defeat for the ruling Conservative Party already looked likely when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak surprised everyone on May 22nd by announcing a summer election rather than the October one that had been expected. The only thing that has changed is that after a disastrous six-week campaign the defeat looks like being even bigger.
The fact that a party that has governed Britain now for 14 years is heading for defeat is not in itself surprising. Democracy depends on accountability through the alternation of parties in power, and a decade and a half is a long time without such a change. The surprise is that the Conservatives, who looked impregnable when Boris Johnson won them the last election in 2019, are now on the verge not just of defeat but of collapse.
Opinion polls can, as we have learned so often, be proved wrong. But if they are proved wrong when results start to emerge late on Thursday night, it will be in the detail not in the main message. The Labour lead has remained so large that there is now no doubt that the party will win a strong parliamentary majority.
The open questions concern whether that majority will be the biggest just for decades, or perhaps even for centuries; and, equally important, whether the second largest party, which in the bi-polar British system forms “His Majesty’s Official Opposition”, is the Conservatives or whether they might even be overtaken by the centrist and previously tiny Liberal Democrats.
This is not happening because there is a huge wave of enthusiasm for the Labour Party, nor for the dull-but-decent former lawyer who will be their prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer. Labour will do well because it has made itself look like a safe alternative, not an exciting one. Meanwhile the Conservatives, a centre-right party that has for two centuries been thought of as Britain’s natural party of government, have lost all credibility.
That loss of credibility does involve Brexit, the decision to hold a referendum eight years ago on British membership of the European Union, and then to leave. But the important thing to understand is that the Brexit vote in 2016 was a sign that things were already going wrong for Britain, and the Conservatives then mistakenly chose Brexit as one of their major solutions. That solution has failed, while having wasted an enormous amount of government time and energy.
The true history of the 2024 election has to begin with the global financial crisis of 2008, which hit Britain especially hard thanks to the importance of the City of London. The crisis brought the Conservatives to power in 2010, in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and their first economic solution was to cut public spending, sharply.
This programme of fiscal austerity was a misdiagnosis of the disease: the financial crisis was the result of private excesses, not the public sort. The resulting recession was long and harsh, and enabled the far-right, anti-immigrant and Euro-phobic party led by Nigel Farage, the UK Independence Party, to compete for natural Conservative voters. That is why David Cameron, who was then the Tory prime minister, offered to hold a referendum and to abide by the result, so as to beat back the Farage threat.
Now, in 2025, average incomes in Britain remain lower than they were in 2008, after adjusting for inflation. Brexit was a false, expensive and highly distracting solution to British economic stress and decline, but now that it has failed to make anything better the Conservatives have no new answers to offer. Instead, the government has passed through five prime ministers inside eight years, and changed other ministers rapidly too, amid party civil wars and other chaos.
What this means is that Thursday’s British general election will represent a political earthquake, unless the opinion polls have gone completely crazy, but unlike what is happening across the English Channel in France, the British earthquake will at least initially be seen as welcome, destroying an old order and bringing in a new one.
The nature and stability of that new order cannot yet be clear – and probably will not be entirely clear even when the votes have been counted on Friday. What we can say is that a large number of old Conservative faces will retire from politics, either by choice or because they will have lost their seats; and an even larger number of new Labour faces will suddenly arrive on the scene.
What we can also say is that although the number of Labour MPs may more than double, from the current level of 206, the government that Sir Keir Starmer starts to form as soon as Friday will mainly be made up of experienced, now-familiar faces, for the new prime minister’s first aim will be to provide reassurance.
Britain will have its first female chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, but as she formerly worked as an economist at the Bank of England she is no radical. It is also likely to have its second* black foreign affairs minister, David Lammy, but as this amiable lawyer has now been an MP for 24 years he is no radical either.
More notable will be the possibility that a crushing defeat in Scotland for the separatist Scottish National Party, losing many seats to Labour, may prove to have set back the cause of Scottish independence by a decade or more. Much media commentary will focus on whether Nigel Farage’s new far-right party, Reform, manages to steal votes and seats from the collapsed Conservatives, giving him the chance to become a future Marine Le Pen or Donald Trump for Britain.
But those will be longer-term concerns, ones that look interesting but not really immediately relevant amid the rubble left by Britain’s political earthquake. The real, short-term concern will be what a newly dominant Labour Party will be able to do with the enormous power it will have gained. Seeking that answer will be a lot more interesting than was following the tragi-comedy of Brexit.
*In La Stampa I mistakenly described David Lammy as Britain’s first foreign secretary “of colour”, forgetting that James Cleverly had served in that role for 14 months until November 2023. My excuse is that the rapid turnover of ministers in recent Conservative governments had blurred my memory…
What poetic irony that 248 years later, that this election will, most probably declare Independence from the ‘mad King George’ years!
Thank you for the insight -
Happy 4th of July!!!
Always a great read, and an interesting insight on UK's development, especially since brexit; we as European's don't have much visibility to what is happening; moreover it has become more difficult to pass the chanel for a "walk" around this magnificent country.