Kier Starmer enters No. 10 as UK Head of Government.
On July 4th 2024, the British people voted overwhelmingly to remove the Conservative Party from office after 14 years of Conservative and Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government. The country had had enough of the chaos, incompetence and self-serving greed, sleaze and corruption of a party of entitle rich people united only by the single slogan - "What's in it for me?"; a party that had always put self and party interest and factional infighting above the national interest, comprised of people who thought the rules were for ordinary people and shouldn't apply to them; people for whom compassion is for softies and morality is the size of the bottom line on the balance sheet.
Source: House of Commons Library
Dave, Boris and the entitled Bullingdon Boys at Oxford.
Theresa May - left to clear up Cameron's mess.
Boris Johnson's notorious referendum bus lie.
Finally, May agreed to resign the party leadership in return for the Euro-sceptic faction not voting against her in a confidence motion, and Boris Johnson was duly imposed on the Nation. Almost his first act as Prime Minister was to lie to the Queen to ask her to prorogue parliament to prevent it opposing his Brexit agreement. This was duly overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds that his lie to the Queen made prorogation invalid so Parliament must be recalled.
Johnson then called a general election which he won on the slogan 'Get Brexit Done!', which would prove to be 'Get Brexit Bodged' as the agreement he signed included the exact same arrangement over Northern Ireland that his faction had opposed when May was PM.
Then we had the COVID-19 pandemic during which, while families were prevented from attending funerals of family members and even the Queen sat alone at her husband’s funeral, Boris Johnson and his cronies were breaking the rules they imposed on everyone else, in their entitle disregard for any rules they found inconvenient. He then repeatedly lied to parliament about rumours of partying inside 10 Downing street - for which he and other colleagues, such as Rishi Sunak, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, received fix-penalty fines - and which were proven to be correct by an enquiry.
Boris partying while the Queen sat alone at her husband's funeral.
The Queen sits alone while entitles Tories party.
Baroness Michelle Mone - at least £70 million profits from PPE contracts.
A decision was then taken to not try to recover the billions of pounds handed out to Tory chums, including that to a Tory Peer, Baroness Mone, and her husband. True to form, the Tory Party and its backers had seen the pandemic as another get-rich-quick opportunity and a chance to help themselves to another large wad of tax-payers money, while doctors and nurses were literally dying for the want of proper PPE.
Johnson then lied to parliament again, claiming he knew nothing of allegations of sexual misconduct by a colleague he had promoted, which was shown to be untrue. In the end, embarrassed by his repeated and habitual lying to parliament, dozens of ministers resigned in protest over his conduct, forcing Johnson to stand down as Tory Party Leader and PM. He resigned as an MP the day before a Commons Select Committee on Parliamentary Standards convicted him of misleading parliament - an offense which would have seen his suspension from the Commons and probably facing a 'recall' in his constituency.
Liz Truss - Ignored advice and crashed the economy. The 46-day Prime Minister.
Her disastrous 'mini-budget' duly crashed the economy, exactly as she had been warned by the Office of Budgetary Responsibility that she had ignored, as interest rates went through the roof, the pound collapsed on the money-markets, and people's mortgages increased sharply on top of a massive rises in fuel bills that had already pushed many families into fuel poverty. Truss's tenure as PM ended after just 46 days, making her period in office the shortest in British political history, and her rival for the leadership, Rishi Sunak, was selected unopposed by Tory MPs. The Tories had imposed yet another unelected Prime Minister on the country and had reduced us to a laughingstock on the world stage.
Scandal soon followed as it was revealed that his multi-millionaire wife, was avoiding tax by claiming to be resident in India, while actually living with him when he was Chancellor of the exchequer and now PM. But that was quickly smoothed over when he discovered that she had been living with him all along and would now be taxed on future earnings as a UK resident (though would not be paying tax on previous income). Meanwhile, on top of the wreckage caused to the economy by Truss's incompetence, Brexit was also causing the economy to suffer with interest rates high, the tax burden at a record high and the cost of living pushing millions of families into poverty and dependent on food banks, and the cost of housing too high for young people to buy even a low-cost starter home.
Nadhim Zahawi - avoided paying tax on income from sale of shares in YouGov when Chancellor of the Exchequer
Finally, with a reformed Labour Party some 20 points ahead in the opinion polls and the economy flat-lining, Sunak decided to call another unnecessary general election to try to secure a personal mandate, and promptly fought an election campaign which rivaled that of Theresa May for its incompetence - leaving the D-Day memorial in France early to come back for an interview with ITV, repeatedly lying about Labour's alleged plan to increase taxation, based on invented figures that a senior Treasury civil servant, Treasury permanent secretary James Bowler, had repudiated and publicly warned him not to use.
Then his party became engulfed in another sleaze and greed scandal that had become a regular feature of his party, as news broke that his close colleagues had placed large bets on the date of the election the day before he announced it - the criminal offence of fraud, as they were trading on insider information - and his reluctance to take action against them as candidates in the election. In a last desperate attempt to save the day, as the opinion polls were forecasting almost annihilation, and having decide their best bet was to tell yet more lies, the Tories enlisted their top liar, Boris Johnson to try to save them!
Sir Jacob Rees Mogg - epitome of an entitled Tory, hard at work in a Commons Brexit debate.
This is evidenced from the pattern of voting where the party best placed to defeat the Tories won seats that were once considered safe Tory seats and a record number of government ministers and former ministers lost their seats, including Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg (the leader of the Euro-sceptic faction).
An analysis of Labour's share of the vote in constituencies where they were in second place to Tories in 2019 gave them 40-50% of the vote share. In areas where the Liberal Democrats were in second place to Tories, Labour's share of the vote fell, giving them an overall-vote share of some 35% (the lowest share for a winning party in UK electoral history, but a near record number of seats.
Britain now has a Labour Government with 160-seat majority having just been elected by a landslide of 411 seats compared to the Tories near-wipeout 121 seats. Labour is now the majority party in England, Scotland and Wales for the first time since 1997.
Well, that's my potted history of the last 14 years of Tory government and analysis of why they lost so heavily last Thursday. The following is an analysis by Stephen Barber, Professor of Global Affairs, University of East London, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
UK election: Tory downfall is democracy rectifying its mistakes
Stephen Barber, University of East London
Democracies are no better than other forms of government at avoiding catastrophic mistakes. But they are much more effective at rectifying them. While the 2024 British general election might have seemed a long time coming, as the country meandered from one failure to the next, the utter scale of defeat for the Conservatives is testament to the ability of a democratic system to reject, reverse and renew.
It also places a singular challenge on the desk of the new prime minister, Keir Starmer. He will be judged by his ability to restore probity to government and address the damage suffered by the country.
It is easy to see this election in the tradition of other big defeats like 1997 or 1979 or 1964. A powerful theme of “time for a change” was at play and the governing party seemed to have run out of steam. It can even be interpreted as sending a powerful message to Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party that voters wanted to inflict punishment for incompetence, economic mismanagement and sleaze.
But this one is more than that.
The now former governing party, returned with a majority of 80 in 2019, has been beaten to within an inch of its life. A generation of politicians long criticised for treating public life with contempt, have been ejected from office and parliament.
Step back, and this election can be seen as democracy rectifying the catalogue of its own glaring mistakes. Since the calamitous Brexit referendum eight years ago, Britain has suffered economic decay and a cost of living crisis (briefly exacerbated by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous so-called “mini-budget”).
Liz Truss really got Britain moving…away from her party.
Denigration of public services from education to the NHS to the armed forces, crises in housing, the climate and inequality have been left unchallenged. Damage has been done to the country’s international reputation and relations strained with the UK’s closest allies in Europe.
Boris Johnson
Parties can fall
For so long in opposition and even during this campaign, Starmer’s party has danced to the populist tune of the government and its media cheerleaders. The challenge for his new administration as it takes power is to recognise that this election is a watershed, a rejection of this catalogue of mistakes, and an expectation of political renewal.
The more existential question is whether this election is also a watershed moment that will permanently change the shape of British politics. Could we be witnessing the demise of the Conservative party and the end of its hegemonic position at the centre of public life?
It happened to the previously dominant Liberal party a century ago when it split down the middle and was replaced by a new emerging Labour party. Such a shift is rare, of course, and requires some sort of major disruption.
In the years following the first world war, Labour’s rise was fuelled by an extension in the franchise so significant that it makes the proposed votes for today’s 1.5 million 16 and 17-year-olds appear trifling. Indeed the Representation of the People acts more than doubled the electorate by giving the vote to women and the 40% of (working-class) men who were also previously disenfranchised.
There is nothing quite so seismic heading Westminster’s way today (though plans for automatic registration could add millions of voters). But the potential for comparison should not be dismissed.
Post-Brexit realignment, realigned
Party identification in the electorate, which has been in decline since the 1960s was turned on its head in 2019 when Boris Johnson’s Tories won a swathe of red wall seats in the Midlands and the north of England. For the first time, Labour voters were wealthier than Conservative. Labour, of course, went down to its worst defeat since 1935. There was talk of a new political cleavage, where class divisions had been replaced by leavers and remainers.
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That this has all been reversed in the space of one parliament demonstrates the incredible fluidity in the electorate today. The more than 70 seats that have gone to the Liberal Democrats show the determination of the electorate to vote tactically to remove Conservatives in spite of an electoral system that has historically kept them in office.
And then there is Reform. Nigel Farage’s rag bag of a party has proved to be the ultimate protest vote for disenchanted Tory voters, attracted to the open acknowledgement that few if any seats could be won but the higher the vote, the harder the beating for the Conservatives.
As it happens, millions more voted Reform than was reflected in their seat share. While there are some leading Tories who would still welcome him into the fold, Farage perhaps overplayed his hand during the campaign making the Conservatives defensive of a rival, hell bent on their destruction. Time will tell if the Conservatives can resist the onslaught but for now the psychodrama of the right will be a political sideshow to the main event: an innocent new government and a refreshed parliament.
Britain’s parliamentary democracy facilitated this catalogue of mistakes which have proved so damaging to the country over recent years. But in this election it has also proved highly effective at beginning the work to rectification. If Starmer gets a moment to catch his breath, he might reflect upon this as the key reason he has been handed such a decisive majority.
Stephen Barber, Professor of Global Affairs, University of East London
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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