Starming victory: Labour sweeps to power

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. I'm at the Red Lion, a pub in Westminster packed full of politicos. We're sort of diagonally opposite Downing Street, and there are loads of people here milling around, lots of alcohol being consumed, and everyone is here just for one reason really, which is that very shortly they are announcing the exit polls for for the general election, and we are waiting to see who's up and who's down.

9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Wow, it's going to be an absolutely fascinating night. The exit polls are predicting a massive landslide for Labour. 410 seats is the projection. That's 200+ up from last time. Absolute collapse for the Tories, down to 131 seats. Great night for the Lib Dems. And the Reform Party are predicted to get 13, which is a surprisingly good showing for a party that has almost nothing at the moment. This is going to be a really, really interesting night. In the end, Britain's general election was not just interesting, but momentous. The Labour Party ended 14 years of Conservative rule. Seat after seat fell for the Tories, including big names: former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, and Penny Mordaunt, tipped as a future Tory leader. To those disappointed at the result tonight, let me cheer you up. Democracy is never wrong. Tonight, the Conservative Party has taken a battering because it failed to honour the trust that people had placed in it. But the biggest scalp of the night was that of former Prime Minister Liz Truss, whose short and disastrous tenure in the top job The Economist famously compared to the shelf life of a lettuce. The former prime minister left the other candidates waiting to hear the count on stage for several minutes, culminating in an impatient, slow clap. Mistras lost by just a few hundred votes, but she had been defending a majority of over 26,000—another indication of how far Labour has come since its election loss in 2019. In the end, Nigel Farage's Reform UK party mopped up Conservative votes And on his 8th attempt to get a seat in Parliament, Mr. Farage finally became an MP. Reform now has 4 seats in all, and the party came second to Labour in many constituencies.

How many seats we're going to win, I don't know. But to have done this in such a short space of time says something very fundamental is happening.

The Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, danced as his party gained dozens more seats than in the last election. Labour also made dramatic gains in Scotland, where votes for the Scottish National Party collapsed. The Conservative leader, Rishi Sunak, held on to his seat but conceded defeat.

The Labour Party has won this general election. And I have called Sir Keir Starmer to congratulate him on his victory. There is much to learn and reflect on, and I take responsibility for the loss.

That loss was catastrophic. By the end of the night, the Conservative Party was down to just over 120 seats, less than a fifth of all MPs. Overall, Labour picked up around 34% of the vote. That's less than 2% up on the last election in 2019, but in Britain's first past the post system, the seats that count. And Labour should end up with a whopping 412 MPs in Parliament, giving it an extremely comfortable majority. We said we would end the chaos, and we will.

We said we would turn the page, and we have.

Today we start the next chapter, begin the work of change, the mission of national renewal, and start to rebuild our country. Thank you.

Today, Keir Starmer becomes Britain's new prime minister and Labour's term begins. It's been a long night of vote counts and poll watching. I'm joined now by Ed Carr, our deputy editor.

Hi, Rosie.

And Duncan Robinson, The Economist political editor and budget correspondent, and they've both been up all night and are here with me now. Hi, Duncan. Hello. Give me your reaction to last night's results, first off, Duncan.

So it's this strange mix of seismic but sort of completely expected. It was an earthquake that we all knew was going to happen. So the big fundamental story is that Labour have won a gigantic majority and the Conservative Party has been absolutely hammered with basically the worst defeat in their entire history, which is very, very long.

And for me, what's really interesting here is that this is like, as Duncan said, a really big victory, but there's something fragile about it. And there's some sense that this is not a joyous embrace of the Labour Party, but there's something delicate. And I think that sets up a very interesting question. Labour's run a cautious campaign. The question now is, Does it govern in a cautious way because it's anxious about this kind of fragility? Or does it actually think, now I've got this fantastically large majority, gives me opportunity to do pretty much anything I want, and am I going to seize it or not? And it seems to me that's the big question now, is how does Labour, how does Keir Starmer in particular, respond to this slightly contradictory mood of a huge majority but not vast enthusiasm. Right.

So comparing it to 1997, when it felt like, you know, the whole country was jubilant at this sweeping change, as you say, there's sort of something a bit more tentative.

I was around in '97. I'm that old. And when news came through of Tony Blair's victory, it was announced on tube platforms. People applauded in the Underground. There was jubilation. It doesn't feel like that this morning. I think that's kind of important. It does not chime with this enormous majority.

The other big story of the night, aside from Labour's landslide, was that Reform, the far right of the Tories, the offshoot of the Tories, did so well, picking up 14% of the vote, which is huge when they came from a very, very low base. We've seen in recent elections in France, in the Netherlands, in Italy, the right on the march. Where would you paint the on the right in Britain's election? What have we seen here?

So the main story on the right is that the right has split. So in Britain, historically, the reason the Conservatives are usually in power is because they've been really good at keeping their voting base all in one place and voting for them. Whereas Labour, there's always been other alternatives. There's always been Green parties or Liberal parties or the SNP or just other places for them to go. But right-wing voters in general in the past had nowhere else to go other than the Conservative Party. Now they do. The voters that they hoped would sort of come back to them basically just went to Reform. But we shouldn't think that this is a complete revolution in British politics. Reform are basically UKIP redux. So we all remember Nigel Farage running the UK Independence Party. It's basically the same story again, but with a tiny bit more electoral success. So in 2015, UKIP got about 13% and I think 1 MP. This time around, they've got 14% and 4 MPs. So it's not quite as seismic as people initially thought it was.

The interesting question to me on Reform is, as Duncan says completely rightly, those initial exit polls, it was a real shock to see how many seats they were expected to get. But what struck me was when Nigel Farage made his acceptance speech in Clacton, having got a very handsome majority, he made it very clear that he was coming after Labour as well as the Conservatives. We will now be targeting Labour votes. We're coming for Labour, be in no doubt about that. This is just the first step of something that is going to stun all of you. Thank you very much. And I was reminded of some of the continental European right-wing parties, particularly Marine Le Pen's party, who picked up a lot of support on the old left, working-class voters who feel that the cosmopolitan metropolitan elites who in Britain vote for Labour have become detached from the working-class vote. And so it'll be very, very interesting to see over this Parliament whether Farage can sweep up voters from— working-class voters from the left, as well as disaffected Conservative voters. And he's trying to create some sort of coalition there. And that is a coalition that Marine Le Pen has successfully managed to construct in France. It's got a very big mountain to climb, if you ask me, but that's his design.

It's going to be fascinating to watch. Let's think about Labour then. Their slogan was "Vote Change," which was sort of vague but quite useful. That's going to happen. What is Labour going to do differently, do you think?

So their overriding goal is to increase growth, and they do have a serious plan to do it. Now, there's no magic button in the Treasury that you can just push to get growth zipping along at 3 or 4% a year. But there are a few things that the British government can control and can fix to get growth going, and they have identified them. And the main one is the planning system. They do have relatively radical plans to make it easier to build Britain. And it's not just about houses, it's about building energy infrastructure, things like that. And that feeds into another strand where they do have a relatively clear policy, which is to do with the green transition. They are planning to invest a lot of state cash into helping Britain meet its net zero targets. And the final way that they are going to try and improve growth is for Britain to have a more normal, less emotional relationship with the EU and also a deeper one. And their argument is that sort of de-dramatising politics, that offering stability will help people invest in Britain again. And it is a relatively convincing one. Investment has suffered. Post-Brexit, just from there being a chaotic, unpredictable backdrop. That hopefully for the next 5 years at least isn't going to be the case. And so there's a perfectly plausible case that growth should improve at least a little bit.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And the bar isn't terribly high on this. The Conservatives have both had so many U-turns in their policy that it's been really messy, but also increasingly their plans for building and investment in infrastructure were sabotaged by the NIMBY faction. And Labour's lucky in its coalition, much more urban, much younger, much keener on the sort of building that Duncan was talking about. I think there's one spanner in the works here though, which is that the fiscal settlement that they inherit is very, very restrictive. In fact, too restrictive to be plausible. And so as they're trying to get growth in the economy, they face some sort of fiscal fiscal squeeze. Borrowing seems to me an unlikely way of doing that. They've pledged to be very orthodox. So that requires some tax rises, and they have left a little bit of room for tax rises, but not in any of the most efficient and obvious ways like income tax. So there's going to be a difficult corner to turn there, and they'll just have to weather that, I think.

Yes. Now, they've completely boxed themselves in on tax. So they're not going to touch income tax or VAT or national insurance or corporation tax, which is where the state earns the bulk of its money, which means they do have to hammer other areas. And those areas could be quite politically painful. So it could be tax-free savings, it could be rich people's pensions. It's a very easy pot for governments to dip into. And Labour governments have done that in the past, and it's very likely that they'll do it again. And so the way that they do those tax increases is going to be absolutely crucial for whether they sort of survive for the next 5 years and whether they win a second term.

The very pro-growth policy plus the requirement to raise taxes is a difficult mix to get right.

What sorts of things are we likely to see in the first 100 days when Zacchaeus Starmer is going to want to be showing that he's bold, he's got a plan, and he's moving forwards?

I think the things that will move first will be planning reform. That's the thing where they obviously haven't been sharing it with journalists, but that's the area where they say, we've got a plan, it's ready to go. Maybe not on day 1, but on day, you know, 10, 20.

So one of the first things Starmer is going to do is fly to Washington, where he'll be participating in the 75th birthday party of NATO. NATO hosted by Joe Biden. It's a great opportunity to meet all the other leaders, to appear prime ministerial, and generally to make the transition into the new role.

I mean, thinking about it, it's really been quite a week for the world that this election comes at the end of. You know, we've had the Biden debate, we've had the French right-wing do so well in the first round of the election, Hurricane Beryl, further evacuations in Gaza. I mean, there's so much going on. Do you think that Keir Starmer will present a sort of new type of Britain on the world stage, of which Britain appears to be an increasingly minor part, how do you think he's going to do?

I think there are two factors here. The first is that his programme is really a domestic programme. His big success, I think, begins in Britain with the growth agenda that Duncan was talking about. But events, especially in this turbulent world that you talk about, will interfere with that. He may see things like the NATO anniversary celebrations in Washington, the Blenheim Summit for Europe as an opportunity to try and sort of build up his capital, which will help him deal with those domestic things. But essentially, I see this as being a very domestically focused administration. That's where its success will begin and end.

I think the stereotype about Britain will improve. So Britain's reputation has been sort of hammered for the past 10 years. Become a sort of punchline on foreign news because odd things have happened. Leaving the EU was a very strange decision as well as a bad one. And then you had this sort of complete political paralysis. And because British politics is quite pantomime, Britain went from having a positive stereotype to a negative stereotype. And I do think we will shift slowly back to having a positive stereotype, especially among sort of people who are interested in the center left, because it's one of the few center left parties who are doing very well.

Britain went through something of a breakdown after Brexit, and the fights that often happen within parties happened in the public eye inside Parliament. With Macron having called the election in France, which now looks as if it will result with most probably no stable government at all, and with in America the confusion over whether Joe Biden is going to have his candidacy, and if he does stay on, the fact that as our podcast just come out, Boom, makes clear this generation of politicians from the 1940s, which both Donald Trump and Joe Biden came from, have this kind of grip on power. That sense that America's going through a kind of messy transition, unable to move forward. Well, I think the hope for Britain is now that you have a stable, sensible government that gets on with the stuff. There is going to be some sort of nervous breakdown on the right, but that'll happen in opposition. And that's where these things ought to take place. So I agree with Duncan, there may be a sense that Britain has sort of gone through its awful phase and you look around other countries and that it's still ongoing.

So as you mentioned there, Ed, our new podcast is coming up. It's called Boom and it looks at the generation that blew up American politics and continues to define it today. And the first episode will be available for subscribers in the Weekend Intelligence slot on Saturday. But back to today, we've been talking about transitions, we've been talking about Britain's oddities, and our colleague Catherine Nixie has spent some time thinking about one of Britain's real oddities, which is that Keir Starmer takes office immediately.

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

It is a very exciting thing to become leader of the Conservative Party, and particularly exciting, I think, to follow one of the most remarkable leaders that the Conservative Party has ever had. It shall be a a government rooted in strong values, the values of justice and progress and community, the values that have guided me all my political life. The people who bet against Britain are going to lose their shirts because we're going to restore trust in our democracy.

I am determined to deliver. Thank you. The first day in 10 Downing Street is a busy one.

Catherine Nixey is a Britain correspondent for The Economist.

One of the first things that Sir Keir Starmer will have to do is to answer what is arguably the world's most unpleasant multiple-choice question. Imagine that London has been destroyed by a nuclear bomb. Millions of Londoners are dead. And the question is, do you: A, retaliate? A) retaliate, B) not retaliate, or C) just wimp out and let the submarine's captain decide. And at some point this morning, possibly right at this moment as you're listening to this, in a room in Downing Street, Sakir Starmer will be answering it. The British Prime Minister's first day in office is odd. If you are the French president, you have maybe 1 or 2 weeks to prepare for power. If you're the American president, you've got over 2 months. If you're the British prime minister, you have probably more or less an hour. From the moment Rishi Sunak resigns this morning, Zakir Starmer will start a day that involves, but is definitely not limited to, popping to Buckingham Palace, kissing the King's hand, Taking calls from presidents and prime ministers across the world, including the American one. Starting to form his cabinet. Picking which office he's going to sit in. Picking who's going to sit in the office next to him, which apparently always causes fights. Starting to move house. And of course, he's going to have to write the famous letters of last resort, in which each British prime minister decides whether or not they're going to eventually nuke millions of people in the event that Britain is hit by a nuclear bomb. The first day in Downing Street is, as Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spin doctor, put it, a very stressful day. Britain being Britain, the first stage of any new democratic cycle begins, of course, with a trip to see the King. At some point this morning, probably at around 9:00 AM if previous elections are any guide, Rishi Sunak will request a call to be put through to Buckingham Palace. The call has to go that way. Rishi has to call the King. King can't call Rishi. He will go to Buckingham Palace and he will tell the King that he has lost the confidence of Parliament. Just a few minutes later, the cast changes in this great democratic show are very fast. Sir Keir Starmer will pull up to Buckingham Palace in a car, get out, and he will be granted an audience with the King for a ceremony known as the kissing hands ceremony. Although, as all prime ministers are warned by palace flunkies when they go into the The kiss should be perfunctory and not passionate. So Tony Blair was famously told that he should brush the Queen's hands with his lips, and he found that verb just so weird. He thought, brush them as in a pair of shoes? That while he was puzzling over what it could mean, he tripped over a piece of carpet and actually just landed squarely on her hand, enveloping it, as he said, rather than brushing it. Either way, the time between quitting and kissing is really brief. Usually mere minutes, almost always under an hour. But that's still far too long for the intelligence services, who, as one person I spoke to said, really like to know at any given minute of the day who is running the country, just in case somebody decides to fly a plane into Canary Wharf and you want to shoot it down. Then he said, that is a question for the PM. Once he's kissed the hand, then Starmer will officially have the keys to Number 10, as everybody always says. Except, as Alastair Campbell points out, he won't actually have the keys to Number 10 because there are no keys to Number 10. It's guarded 24 hours a day, and if you watch someone walk through the lockless Downing Street door, then you'll see that it's like in a haunted house. It kind of swings open before they get to it. When David Cameron infamously hummed a tune after his Brexit resignation speech, this was not, as his former communications director told me, from insouciance. It was in fact from pure fear that the door wasn't going to open and that Cameron would be left standing there outside. So he hummed a tune to fill the blank. And behind that door, Downing Street will have been really busy. You kind of have to think of it like a country house hotel. It's got to turn around for the new guests, and it's got to do it fast. The Downing Street turnaround plan allows 30 minutes for offices to be cleaned and cleared. If the previous inhabitant was a bit of a drinker, to take the bottles out. The general vibe inside Number 10 is also not unlike a shabby country house. It smells fusty because you can't open the windows because they're covered with nets in case of bomb blasts. The carpets are held together with gaffer tape, and for years, the first thing that visiting dignitaries from across the world would see when they entered that famous door was a massive tea stain on the carpet. Where somebody had spilt their tea. So while all the pot plants and the sofas are being rearranged upstairs, then downstairs, Sikir Starmer will be chatting to world leaders, choosing his office, picking his cabinet, and he will be being sat down in a room on his own with paper and a pen to pick his response to the nuclear annihilation of the UK. Prime Ministers are briefed beforehand by military Chiefs of Staff and by their Cabinet Secretary, who, as one of them told me, encourages them to be clear. Fairly obviously, if ever there was a time for legible handwriting and clear prose, then this is it. But it doesn't really matter how much advice they are given. As the former Prime Minister David Cameron observed, when it comes to writing the letter, you are emphatically on your own. Your prime ministerial career has begun.

Scaling requires infrastructure, talent, and policy certainty. The UK's Modern Industrial Strategy delivers all three and more through a 10-year plan. With £10 trillion in capital, world-class universities, and unrivaled market access, The UK is engineered for growth. Start your investment journey at business.gov.uk/growth. I'm interested in listening to that. One of the things that strikes me is this discussion about Keir Starmer as a person. We've touched on it a little bit, but a lot of people have talked about the fact that he's a solid, dependable, probably good motivations, but, you know, he's not the pop star politician that we've been seeing around the world, really. Do you think that matters?

Our colleague Matthew Holhouse wrote a very interesting profile of Starmer, or rather a description of Starmer's way of working. And in that, he described his method, which is to set a goal, and then to ratchet the pressure up in order to ensure that that goal's met. He doesn't force it immediately. He kind of constricts and gradually gets towards where he wants. And that's been his method with the Labour Party. My question, I think, and one that Matthew raised in that piece, is whether that can be transferred to an entire country. You can do a lot of things out of the spotlight when you're running a party. When you're running a country, events come along and events buffet you and push you aside. In this campaign, although we know, as Duncan said earlier, that the Labour Party wants growth, we don't have a kind of vision of how that growth is going down. We don't have a story or a narrative or a sense of the sort of bigger picture of how we're going to grow and what that means. And my concern is that when those events come along, he won't have this overarching story to say, I know this has happened, but remember, we've all agreed we want to do that. And we'll see whether this is right. But my concern is that this administration gets a bit buffeted, and Starmer's not a quick decision maker. He's not quick on his feet. He's not a great communicator. So when these events come along, and they will come, possibly very fast, will he be able to cue and keep to this path that he has identified as being really important?

Duncan, how do you think that Keir Starmer is going to do in these coming weeks then? Are we going to see him rise to the challenge of being the Prime Minister of Britain, a country that needs to be listened to?

Yes, I think he will, partly because he's got all those international summits, which are just relatively straightforward. They're not tricky. As long as you don't insult anyone, as long as your trousers don't fall down, you're completely fine. And the key to being seen as Prime Minister is just being Prime Minister. He is more of an administrator than a natural politician. And, you know, politicians come in two forms. They can either be sort of like technocrats or visionaries. And the best politicians are both. They can get really into detail, and they can also really do the vision thing. But if you had to pick one, then you do probably want a technocrat rather than a visionary. We've tried just having a big, big charisma guy in Boris Johnson who couldn't really do the detail very well, and it didn't go that well. And so he doesn't have all the skills of a Blair, but he does have enough sort of nous to do the job. That's my feeling.

Thank you so much to you both for joining me on this first day of the new Labour government. It's been great talking to you. I'm sure you need to get some sleep at some point. Thank you, Rosie.

One thing, last thing that struck me is that there was Stalmer making his grand speech to the world and the country about the new dawn. And just a few hours later, the heavens opened and it started raining. You know, it's not the mandate of heaven, as Duncan said at the time.

But a very fitting British mandate, surely.

Absolutely. Stalmer wasn't defined. Thank you.

Thank you, Rosie. Thank you.

Thank you. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impy and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is Jonjo Devlin, and our sound designer is Will Rowe, with help this week from Timo Seiler. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Larniuk. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Maggie Khadifa and Benji Guy, and our assistant producers are Henrietta McFarlane and Kunal Patel. With extra production help this week from Elna Schutz and Madeleine Wright. We'll see you back here tomorrow for the Weekend Intelligence and the first episode of our new 6-part series, Boom.

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