When new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer reflected publicly on his landslide victory last week, he promised to do more than simply shift Britain from a center-right course to a center-left one.
Taking up the challenge facing many wealthy democracies, he set himself much more ambitious targets: to defuse the anger and heal the divisions corroding British political life, and to restore voters’ trust in politics, politicians, and democratic government.
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The new British Prime Minister wants to use his landslide victory to reduce anger and division in his society. But does he have time to revive people’s trust in democracy?
Mr. Starmer has cause for optimism. He won an overwhelming parliamentary majority, and the leaders of the losing Conservative Party responded to the results with grace and respect. But at the same time, the popular mood in Britain is disillusioned, despondent, bitter, and angry.
A populist, anti-immigrant far-right party, Reform UK, took third place in the election, led by a close ally of Donald Trump. That will give added impetus to Mr. Starmer’s efforts to reverse what he called the “draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future” that afflicts Britain.
“Changing a country,” he said, “is not like flicking a switch.” It would “take a while.”
The question is, do Mr. Starmer and his fellow leaders have time to repair and revive people’s bedrock trust in democratic government?
A landslide victory in Britain’s election has set the stage for an audacious political experiment – one that, if it succeeds, could also impact America and other increasingly fractured Western democracies.
That’s because the new center-left Prime Minister, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, has cast aside the usual political playbook in welcoming his huge parliamentary majority.
Beyond a familiar focus on delivering on campaign promises, he has also set himself much more ambitious targets: to defuse the anger and heal the divisions corroding this, like other, Western democracies, and to restore voters’ trust in politics, politicians, and democratic government.
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The new British Prime Minister wants to use his landslide victory to reduce anger and division in his society. But does he have time to revive people’s trust in democracy?
“This wound, this lack of trust,” Mr. Starmer said in one of his first statements after the election, needs to be “healed.” And he said everything his new government did would aim to revive people’s confidence that “politics can be a force for good.”
As U.S. President Joe Biden, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and other politically embattled European leaders can attest, that is more easily said than done.
Yet the message Mr. Starmer will take from last week’s election is that while the task is daunting, and success uncertain, it could yet be achievable.
He will see both cause for encouragement and strong reasons for caution in the vote.
The good news goes beyond the result itself: a commanding haul of 412 Labour seats in the 650-member House of Commons, up from barely 200 in the last election, in 2019.
It is also found in the the response from leading politicians in the Conservative Party, which was ejected after 14 years in power and reduced to a mere 121 seats five years after its own landslide victory.
In scenes unimaginable in the current political climate in America and many other Western countries, both victors and losers responded with grace and mutual respect.
And respect, too, for the verdict of the voters.
“Yours is the only judgement that matters,” outgoing Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in his final remarks to the nation outside Number 10 Downing Street.
His Chancellor of the Exchequer – the British equivalent of Treasury Secretary – was more explicit. “Today, power will change hands in a peaceful and orderly manner, with goodwill on all sides,” said Jeremy Hunt. “This is the magic of democracy.”
But here’s the challenge facing Mr. Starmer: while British politicians may still cherish that “magic,” the popular mood has become disillusioned, despondent, bitter, and angry.
Some of this can be traced to the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008, the pandemic, and rising energy prices pumped up by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
But it has been compounded by successive Conservative governments.
They overpromised and underdelivered on the benefits of Britain leaving the European Union. They failed to deliver on pledges to “level up” the country by focusing on less prosperous areas in northern England.
During the pandemic, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s staff partied in Downing Street while ordinary Britons duly observed isolation and social distancing rules.
And in the past few years, Conservative politicians seemed to spend more energy arguing with one another than on governing, even as interest rates and inflation spiked, public services deteriorated, economic growth stagnated, and families struggled to make ends meet.
“There was a huge desire not just to put the Conservative Party out,” Britain’s last Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, wrote this week, “but to punish them. Labour was a credible instrument of punishment.”
Still, anger toward the Conservatives was not matched by much visible enthusiasm for Labour.
Voter turnout was down. And while Labour won the most Commons seats by far, its edge in the national popular vote was narrower. The party took 34%, compared to 24% for the Conservatives.
Most worryingly for both main parties was that third place, at 14%, went to the anti-immigration Reform UK party of Nigel Farage, a close ally of former U.S. President Donald Trump and the driving force behind Brexit.
Reform UK finished second in dozens of constituencies, mostly cannibalizing the traditional Conservative vote and thus handing victory to Labour. And next time around, Mr. Farage said, “we’re coming for Labour.”
The usual playbook would tell Mr. Starmer to prioritize immigration, to reduce the number of migrants crossing the English Channel in rickety boats that often sink. And there are early signs Labour will indeed clamp down on the people smugglers who are organizing, and making money from, the migrant arrivals.
But Mr. Starmer’s overriding aim is to address the popular mood that has made Mr. Farage’s message so alluring.
In his remarks on entering Downing Street, he spoke directly of Britons’ waning trust in government, and a “draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future.”
More significant, perhaps, than what he promised was what he did not. “Changing a country,” he said, “is not like flicking a switch.” It was going to “take a while.”
But by governing “especially” for those who didn’t vote for Labour, and by putting the country before his party, he said he hoped to restore trust in governance.
Too many people, he added, had lost confidence that Britain would be “better for your children.”
“So my government will fight, every day, until you believe again,” he promised.
That will be a tall order.
But the stakes are just as high, in Britain, as in the U.S. and a number of other Western countries: is it still possible to repair and revive people’s bedrock trust in democratic government?