This episode explores the implications of the U.K. elections which took place on July 4. What does a return to centrism mean for British politics? And how do socio-economic transformations and fragmented cultural horizons play a role? Listen to also hear what the results could mean for transatlantic relations.
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Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to a new episode of "Democracy in Question?", the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute Geneva.
This is the third episode of season nine of Democracy in Question, and I'm really pleased to welcome Mark Leonard, Director and Co-Founder of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. He also holds currently the Henry Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the U.S. Library of Congress. Mark is a renowned expert on geopolitics, on EU politics and institutions, also on EU-Russia relations and foreign policy in Europe more generally. He's written widely on transatlantic relations as well as on China. He was the chairman of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Geoeconomics, and he's also been at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, D.C. as a transatlantic fellow and was a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences in Beijing. Mark Leonard is a regular commentator on his many areas of expertise, and he advises governments as well as international organizations. His articles have been published in Foreign Affairs, New York Times, Financial Times, Le Monde, in Foreign Policy, New Statesman, and The Economist, to name just a few.
He hosts a weekly podcast on current affairs and writes a syndicated column on global affairs with Project Syndicate. He's published several books, of which I'm just going to mention a few, “Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century”[i] in 2005. In 2008, “What Does China Think?”[ii] And that's the book he's writing a sequel to update it currently. And most recently, his book called “The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict”[iii]. Today, however, we're going to talk about a much less global matter, namely, what is possibly the biggest electoral upset of this year, the stunning victory of the Labour Party and the crushing defeat of the incumbent Conservatives in the United Kingdom parliamentary elections held last week.
The Tories won the 2019 elections with an impressive 80-seat majority but have lost more than two thirds of their parliamentary seats this time around. The Labour Party has more than doubled its share of seats compared to 2019, but not very much of their share of the popular vote. I'll ask Mark to comment on these results, which seem to reflect a massive anti-conservative vote rather than a strongly pro-Labour one. The past 14 years of Tory rule or we should say misrule, were marred by scandals and fiascos, political blunders, and many mismanaged crises, including COVID, as well as the undermining of democratic institutions. And that's something I'd like to focus on. Could this have long standing consequences for democracy in the United Kingdom? Why do Conservatives, together with Nigel Farage's far right party, still enjoy the support of almost 40 percent of the electorate, despite Brexit? We'll also address the role of socioeconomic factors, such as rising inequality or poverty, and I'll ask Mark whether factors like xenophobia or immigration also influenced these election results.
What could we expect from labor given high popular expectations, but the relatively modest reforms the new prime minister may be willing to carry out? A return to the European Union doesn't seem to be on the cards. But what are the prospects of transatlantic relations if Donald Trump were to be reelected?
Mark, welcome to the podcast. It's a real pleasure to have you and thank you so much for making the time for joining me today.
Mark Leonard (ML): Thanks, it's a real thrill. It's an amazing podcast and I feel very humbled given the brilliant people that you've spoken to in previous episodes, but very happy to join.
SR: Wonderful to have a fellow podcaster as my guest. Mark, the fourth of July seems to be a historic date for the United Kingdom. In 1776, the American colonies of Great Britain declared their independence and almost 250 years later the date may mark the beginning of the end of the Conservative Party as we know it, which has suffered the most spectacular defeat in its entire history. The Tories won 121 seats out of 650 in the House of Commons, the lower house of parliament, though, interestingly its share of votes hasn't declined. And that's something I'd like to understand from you. The Labour Party's landslide win of 412 seats more than doubles the seats it won in the last election, though it too has not improved its share of votes significantly. How do we interpret this result? Massively anti-Conservative, but not really as resoundingly pro-Labour as one might have thought, given the fact that it has a thumping majority but maybe a rather lackluster mandate?
ML: Well, I think the thing to understand about this election, like all British elections, is that it's a product of a rather unusual electoral system, the first-past-the-post electoral system, which has got enormous barriers to entry. It makes it very difficult for new parties to emerge. And it has been dominated for over a century by the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, who are the catch-all parties that operate within this system. Because in every constituency, each of the 650 constituencies, you need to get a plurality of the votes in order to be elected. That makes it very hard for new parties that don't have a geographically concentrated vote to get elected anywhere.
The Reform Party, interestingly, got rather more votes than the Liberal Democrats and got less than a tenth of the seats of the Liberal Democrats. Because their votes were quite thinly spread around the country, so they got 20 percent in lots of different constituencies, but there were very few where they had a majority.
You have these two dominant parties that are very difficult to displace and that have had to create electoral coalitions which allow them to get a majority of seats in the country. They're broad churches and they're struggling to hold together quite diverse groups of people. And the nature of British statecraft is the ability to create a platform which can unite very, very different people. The Conservative Party traditionally has been an alliance between capital, the forces of capital, and nationalism. Thatcher, Salisbury, all the great Conservative Prime Ministers managed to somehow find a way of uniting the interests of capital with the more sort of conservative petit bourgeois interests around the country.
The Labour Party has also been a broad church. People often talk about the ability to unite Hull and Hampstead. Hampstead is the kind of preserve of the thinking classes of left-leaning intellectuals, professionals, media, lawyers. Hull is a kind of post-industrial port in the north of England, where a lot of people feel very disconnected from London. Essentially, it's the ability of these two parties to hold together these coalitions and to create a majority which has determined how British politics has worked, at least for the last century or so. Typically, the Labour Party has not been very good at it.
SR: Since 1919, when universal voting rights were introduced, only three Labour leaders have won an election in the United Kingdom: Attlee, Wilson, and Tony Blair. Which means that over the course of the last century, the Conservatives have been much more successful in electoral terms. But the composition of the electoral base of both parties, the Tories and Labour, has also undergone some important shifts in recent years, hasn't it? And of course, the Conservatives seem to have been much quicker to respond to these changes.
ML: There have been as many Conservative Prime Ministers in the last five years as Labour Prime Ministers ever, almost. It's quite a dramatic thing. Obviously, not very long-serving ones because the Conservative Party got through them very, very quickly. But the Conservative Party has been a much more successful electoral machine over history. What was particularly interesting about British politics over the last 15 years or so, as the internet has come forward and we've seen the fragmentation and new political dynamics which you're seeing right across the world, is how that then translates into a first-past-the-post electoral system which is based on an idea of representation, which was already quite difficult.
So, you'd have the first breakdown of that parliamentary system with the breakdown of the class system because there was a very clear class base for the Conservative Party and for the Labour Party. You saw both with Thatcher and then with Blair an attempt to deal with a more volatile electorate and to assemble new political coalitions that weren't based on the traditional classes.
The Conservative Party, again, adapted much more quickly. You saw this extraordinary political coalition, which was built initially by Theresa May.She basically laid the foundations for an electoral coalition which was then cemented by Boris Johnson and which was very effective. It was a mixture of the Brexit-loving people in post-industrial Britain. A lot of people who had been represented by the Labour Party for generations, sometimes forever since voting was allowed in their different constituencies, but who felt increasingly disaffected from the metropolitan instincts of the Labour Party. They were worried about immigration. They felt that their post-industrial towns were neglected and that the Labour Party and Labour governments had not really heard them properly.
Johnson and the Conservative Party went in with a kind of idea of restoring a pride in place, a kind of nationalism and aversion to immigration. And they used an attack on culture. What was very interesting about Boris Johnson in particular is that he reinvented conservatism so that instead of it being about deregulation and a sort of Thatcherite legacy, it was a big state conservatism, which was about, he used this phrase of levelling up. So the idea was about redistributing resources away from London and metropolitan elites and helping people in these parts of the country.
So, he created a new electoral map where actually the average Conservative voter in many parts of the country was working class and was less well off than the average Labour voter. He had a sort of strange inversion of the normal sort of traditional political dynamics. But he did that without giving up on what they call the kind of gin and jag set. So, the kind of stockbrokers, the petit bourgeois sort of mainstays of Conservative support in the home counties and in the south of England. And partly because of his charisma and his ability to, and his sort of chameleon nature, he managed to unite these different groups of people. And Brexit actually, interestingly, was something where you had constituencies both in the kind of post-industrial north and in the sort of affluent south that had an aversion to it.
So that was an amazing achievement. And it looked, therefore, five years ago when the last general election happened, like the Conservative Party might be in power forever because they had an 80-seat majority and they had redrawn the map of England.
SR: Mark, this seems to explain, in part, the long period of Conservative hegemony, which was uninterrupted for 14 years. But as you mentioned, the party also had no less than five prime ministers recently, including the one that served for the shortest period in British history. How exactly then did the Conservatives lose their grip on power, suffering such a resounding defeat this time around? What were some of the main factors that have eroded their voter base? And how did the Labour Party make such a spectacular comeback?
ML: What was interesting is for various different reasons, which were completely unrelated to this genius political strategy, Boris Johnson ended up losing quite a lot of credibility because of the parties he threw during COVID, because of his personal character flaws, and lost the confidence of his fellow members of parliament, who then replaced him with people who had no sensibility for this electoral coalition and acted in a way that destroyed it.
So, what was interesting is the Conservative support collapsed firstly under Boris because of Partygate, and then went much further down during Liz Truss' 40-odd days as Prime Minister when she crashed the economy. And it never came back. And Rishi Sunak tried to appeal to these constituencies in some ways through immigration policy and Rwanda. But what he didn't do was embrace this big state conservatism, which actually aligned with the economic priorities of a lot of these people who had switched from the Labour Party.
So, the Labour Party has managed to now win back a lot of these people who had left the party. But its trick has been to somehow find a way of re-engaging with these people who felt frustrated and unrepresented by the Labour Party, but also linking it up with its other constituencies. It's also the party...it represents a lot of people from ethnic minorities and different backgrounds. And that's not been an easy process. One of the questions which you mentioned in your intro is Gaza and how that had an impact on the Labour vote. It wasn't totally dramatic, but it shows the difficulties of managing these coalitions.
You've got a strange coming together of demographic trends with a first-past-the-post electoral system, which is then overlaid by the additional volatility which you get from social media and the much more fragmented digital media environment.
SR: Mark, a more fundamental question. How has the spirit and the institutional architecture of democracy been affected by some of the more egregious episodes under Tory rule? Partygate you mentioned, but I think much more serious for me were Theresa May's attempts to bypass Parliament in 2018 when she launched the airstrikes in Syria, for example, or Boris Johnson's total disregard for the rule of law when he flouted international obligations or when he tried to prorogue Parliament for 5 weeks in 2019. Johnson systematically attacked courts and undermined liberal democratic values and principles. So, do you think these kinds of efforts and the rhetoric against Parliament, against courts, against accountability, will it have lasting consequences?
ML: There are a lot of things you talked about, kind of universal things about our age at the moment as we move towards a more majoritarian populist way of talking about things, and there's certainly been very present in Conservative Party rhetoric and the whole Johnson political strategy was essentially about running against the establishment and the institutions, obviously from within, after he'd been educated at Eton and Oxford and various other places. But they were kind of tribunes of the people and it was very majoritarian.
And we have a majoritarian political system in the UK. I mean, the kind of essence of the first-past-the-post system is its majoritarianism and the fact that Labour Party with barely 35 percent of the vote ends up with the vast majority of seats in Parliament. What is unusual about the UK is that there is no written constitution, that everything is based on convention and the kind of “good chaps” theory of politics. And I think a lot of people were quite distressed about what happens to a country based on the “good chaps “principle, when you don't have good chaps running the institutions.
The King's prerogative, the Royal prerogative, the Executive has far more power than it has in many other countries. And also, where a lot of the sort of countervailing institutions that might have held people to account, like the newspapers for example, were run by kind of oligarchic forces that were quite sympathetic to the project and therefore not providing very much accountability.
So I think it's definitely true that the political culture here has been impoverished over the last period. And actually some of the debates which have been taking place have been highly symbolic and not particularly real. For example, there's been a huge debate about Rwanda as a kind of immigration thing, but so far there have been more conservative ministers sent to Rwanda than migrants. So, it has cost a few hundred million pounds, which again is pretty small beer if you look at the size of the British economy. But if you look at the amount of media space that the Rwanda episode has developed, you'd have thought this was a really big part of the governance of the country and had a big impact on a lot of people.
So, I think that those are symptoms of a kind of impoverishment. But the institutions,have survived. I mean, in a way, part of the British system is that you have a lot of Executive power, that people come in, do slightly crazy things, overreach typically and then get thrown out. And it can take a long time. It took 18 years after Margaret Thatcher's election for the Labour Party to come back in. Then you had the Labour Party in power for a long time. And now you then had a coalition government. But part of the advantage of the first-past-the-post system is it's quite emphatic normally. So, you will have these swings from a large Conservative majority to a large Labour majority. And you get the kind of overreach that you get and then a kind of natural process of correction.
But within that thing, a lot of people have used the term elective dictatorship to describe the British system traditionally. Certainly, I remember when Thatcher was Prime Minister, it was a term you came across quite often. But that is how it's designed. But it's interesting that people tend to go for a new prime minister who's the mirror image of the last one. So, you've gone from highly populist, charismatic, loud political leaders to a much quieter, more subdued. It's not a coincidence.
SR: Let me ask you about another aspect of the elections. What role did economic grievances play and how is Labour going to deal with those? Because I think quite apart from all the Boris Johnson dramas, what has had an effect are very harsh austerity policies introduced already by David Cameron. And then the disastrous effects of Brexit, then the pandemic, high inflation, much higher than the rest of the average in the EU and the U.S., and a shocking increase in child poverty and malnutrition. The NHS has been bedeviled by chronic shortages. There's a rise in people relying on food banks, high home prices. Economic inequality under the Tories has doubled in the last two decades. So it's an odd kind of mix of ineptitude plus unfettered politics favoring the rich, which I think the Labour has to now deal with.
ML: Absolutely. So, all of the trends you described, I think, were the background to, were expressed through the decision to leave the European Union. It was, in fact, a kind of cry against this laissez-faire neoliberal approach, which had been obviously true of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher, but was actually more true than it should have been of the Labour Party after it was elected. Because what's happened is not so much that people have become impoverished, but it's more that people have stayed behind while the super rich, London and other people have gotten very rich. So, there's been a kind of asymmetry of the rewards from these neoliberal policies.
And that's one of the reasons why the Labour Party found it so difficult to understand them before, because if you look at the aggregate figures for everything, they're all very good. It's just that it is not very well distributed across the country. And that's also why the Labour Party was so wrong on freedom of movement and migration, because there were no attempts made to try and understand how many people were coming into the country. It was clearly good for the economy. There was an economic need. There was a need for the NHS and for other kinds of social services.
So, in aggregate terms, freedom of movement and migration have all been entirely positive for the country. But obviously the rewards, the economic rewards have been very unfairly distributed. A lot of ordinary people in different parts of the country have seen their own wages going down. But also, having large numbers of people come into communities when local authorities don't get any extra resources puts more pressure on schools and hospitals.
That has created a huge amount of resentment in different places. And then I think it got worse even as a result of COVID and the cost-of-living crisis after the Russia's invasion of Ukraine with energy prices going up. And that was coupled with the extreme ideology and incompetence of Liz Truss, which destroyed the Conservative Party's reputation for economic management and allowed the Labour Party to reposition itself.
I mean, one of the difficulties with our system as well is that the Labour Party had also lost a lot of trust from different people as a result of the Jeremy Corbyn experiment earlier on. So, you're having an odd thing in that you've got a Labour Party that's trying to detoxify itself after the Corbyn experiment because you had a kind of a strange correlation between the irresponsibility of the hard left under Corbyn and of the hard right under Liz Truss. So, this is partly an election for a more kind of centrist economic policy where people want to make sure that you don't crash the economy on the one hand, but you have had chronic underinvestment in public services and austerity starting in 2010.
SR: Let me come back to the Rwanda question, which you touched upon briefly, because this is this plan to deport asylum seekers from anywhere in the world to Rwanda. But that's sort of the most spectacular side of things, and as you said, it's received a disproportionate amount of attention in the media. But there are also little signs of xenophobia, like for example, the fact of not wanting to issue visas to the families of international students coming in. So, do you see the relative success of Nigel Farage and his far-right reform party somehow foreshadowing the strengthening of xenophobia similar to the far-right parties across Europe?
ML: I think every country has its pockets of xenophobia and its difficulty dealing with difference in its identity. The British story is somewhat different to the story in other countries because it is linked up with Britain's empire, and so you've had slightly different dynamics taking place here. What is interesting, if you look at all of the attempts by social researchers to track attitudes towards race and identity, there's a very clear and uninterrupted secular trend towards a greater embrace and celebration of diversity and a reduction in racism. And it's really dramatic, and every year actually the statistics have moved in exactly the same direction.
If you look at attitudes towards, for example, interfaith marriage or marriage between ethnic groups, there is a small hardcore of people who are racist and who see themselves as racist, but it's very small. Most people are very keen not to see themselves as racist.And if you look at the Conservative Party's leadership race last time, there was only one white man who was running for leader of the Conservative Party. Almost all of the great positions of state under Rishi Sunak were occupied by people who had an immigrant background at some point, and people were completely at ease with that.
There's a lot of support for the England football team, for example, which is very, very diverse, and it's very different from the German debates about diversity. So, when Özil says, "When I score, I'm German. When I miss, then I'm Turkish." It's quite different here, and in fact, one of the strange things in the Brexit debate was there was a sort of British exceptionalism where people actually thought that the rest of the EU was racist.
And a lot of people in ethnic minorities voted in favor of Brexit, partly also because what Nigel Farage and other people said is that we'll have less Albanians and Romanians and Poles coming over and we'll have more Indians and Pakistanis and other sorts of people and have family reunions coming in. So, it's a slightly complicated story.
I think there's a slight difference between migration and race as well. People in Britain tend to be much more positive about the Pakistani or Bengali family that is running a corner shop in the north of England than the Polish shops that are there because there have been decades or centuries of cultural engagement and traffic between these sorts of communities and they're settled for a long time. And a lot of our British cuisine, starting with tea and fish and chips and things like that are all products of this interplay which came as a result of empire.
The Labour Party, when it was doing its modeling before it opened the borders in 2004, thought that 14,000 people would come to the U.K. And within a couple of years there were one and a half million Poles. There was a vast difference between what they were expecting and what they prepared people for and what actually happened. And then no real attempts to manage it, to think about what the consequences were.
If you look at values, the way that values operate within our societies, typically what you get is people going from kind of traditional religious values to more kind of secular and cosmopolitan values in societies. And what happens is when you get to a state where the people who have the more traditional, nationalistic, inward-looking, security-focused values feel that they're going to become strangers in their own country, they tend to organize against it.And I think that's what Nigel Farage's different parties, UK Independence Party, the Brexit Party and now Reform, have been doing. They've been catering for those 20 percent of people who feel that they're becoming strangers in their own country as the country embraces diversity and becomes more ethnically open, etc. So, it's a rearguard action against Britain's cosmopolitan future.
The secular trend is clearly towards greater inclusivity and diversity, but the people who are not part of that are becoming more politically conscious and are organizing themselves more, and they tend to be older, and they tend to be concentrated in certain communities and are kind of finding a voice as a result of that. It's one of the reasons why Keir Starmer has been ultra-cautious on Europe and has not promised to overturn Brexit, for example.
SR:What kinds of policies do you think Labour under Keir Starmer will put in place? Because his turnaround on green energy was quite disappointing. On the other hand, just as you pointed out, Labour seems basically to want to make Brexit work. And he's not interested in opening a debate and rejoining the EU. So, what kinds of economic policies do you think would Labour now put in place? And what kind of transatlantic alliances do you expect, especially if Trump were to return to the White House?
ML: So, on economic policy, Labour is scared by the loss of credibility it had with the global financial crisis.So therefore, on the surface, their main goal re-establishing credibility and orthodoxy. So, it looks very, very conservative. The Chancellor used to be an economist in the Bank of England. She surrounded herself by lots of other people who value economic orthodoxy. So, it's very cautious, not promising to spend more than you can deliver.
But underlying that, there is also a recognition that the neoliberal roots of the new Labour project ended up creating the conditions for Johnson and for Corbyn to dominate the political spectrum. So, they want to make sure that they move away from that. And they're also aware that we're not in the 1990s anymore and that whether it's Bidenomics or dual circulation strategy in China or the EU thinking more about buying (in) Europe and European sovereignty, that we're in a world, where there's going to be a lot more friction, where everyone has industrial strategies, where the state has a large role in shaping the green transition and the adoption of new technologies.
And so, the Labour Party slogan which they developed is securonomics, which essentially is like Bidenomics but without a reserve currency like the dollar behind it. And that is something which is grappling with the lack of fiscal headroom that you have without the dollar and the reserve currency behind you, which is one of the reasons why there were these big hopes of having huge green investments, 28 billion pounds were going to be put into it. And then as the fiscal situation got progressively worse, the ambitions decreased. But their number one priority (is) to get out of that fiscal trap because they promised not to put up a lot of the main taxes, income tax, VAT, national insurance, which are between the three of them responsible for almost two thirds of British taxation. They're not going to put those up. So, their way out of that kind of dilemma is to go for growth.
So, their number one goal is to stimulate growth. They're doing that by removing a lot of the barriers to growth in the past. So, looking at the planning regime and trying to get people to build more, trying to remove some of the frictions between the U.K. and the EU, but they are worried about freedom of movement for domestic political purposes. So that creates a ceiling to how closely you can get bound into the EU.
In terms of what it means for foreign policy, transatlantic relationship, Europe, you have a sort of paradox. There's not a single member of the Cabinet who was not in favor of remain. Keir Starmer built his political career on the idea of having a second referendum. But they realized that the cost for the price for reestablishing trust amongst the British people was to not reopen those debates again. But emotionally, people feel very European, and very sad that we left the European Union. And if Trump becomes President, you will not have a kind of transatlantic strategy of somehow hovering between the European continent and the U.S. I think that you have a government that wants to put itself on the European side and be part of the European security order and be part of the EU's attempts to Trump-proof themselves.
So, I think that that will be quite a big change to what happened when Truss was in in number 10 at the time of Brexit when Trump was in power last time. And I think there is a really sincere attempt to reset relations with the EU in a way that doesn't cross these political red lines. So ,they're thinking quite creatively about how to do it. Talk of having a kind of wide-ranging European security pact between Britain and the EU. But they're thinking about security very much in 21st century terms. So, it's not just about military issues, but it's about supply chains and energy, and migration, and data, and all those other kinds of things. And they want to use that as a way of actually rewriting the core relationship between Britain and the EU.
I think there's also a kind of feeling that Britain needs to deal with a lot of the loss of soft power, which came about as a result of its disregard of international law and some of the things that it's done with Rwanda and things like that. So, they're also talking about trying to craft a different relationship with the Global South and developing a kind of wider set of relationships. But their core slogans on foreign policy (have) to do with “reconnecting Britain”. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has come up with this term of “progressive realism”, which he defines as being realistic about the world that we're in and not too much focused on illusions about how power works and how important different institutions are in different places. So, dealing with the world as it is, but trying to push it in a way that is a bit more progressive, that's a bit more internationalist.
And that's definitely the emotional starting point of most of the 400 or so Labour MPs. They're quite internationalist. They felt quite ashamed of British foreign policy over the last decade or so. But there are limits to how far you can go. But on a lot of the big questions like Ukraine and the role that the U.K.'s been on these issues, I suspect there'll be more continuity than change.
SR: Thank you so much, Mark, for these fascinating insights and large overview of not only the current electoral results, but also the British system and its unique features, which explains some of the extraordinary results we've seen this week. Thanks so much for being with me today.
ML: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
SR: Trying to make sense of one of the most spectacular electoral defeats of the Conservatives in modern British history is no easy task. As Mark Leonard explains, this isn't just a matter of taking numbers and statistics at face value. The first past the post system in the United Kingdom disproportionately helps the two large traditional parties, Conservatives and Labour in securing a much higher share of parliamentary seats than their actual share of the popular vote. Moreover, one also needs to consider some key changes in their voter base. Such umbrella parties represent a range of citizens, differentially affected by socioeconomic transformations and increasingly fragmented cultural horizons.
Public perceptions of British political culture were clearly shaped by many scandals during the 14 years of Tory rule, during which democratic norms and institutions were attacked by party leaders. Nevertheless, Mark is hopeful that the fundamental institutions and ethos of democracy in the United Kingdom have survived such threats.
The current election results are a testament to that resilience, regardless of the skewed logic of majoritarian representation. It's a sign, if you like, of the ability of democracies to self-correct. The return to centrism in British politics may also be seen as a response to discontent with the neoliberal agenda of the right, which generated glaring inequality and also poverty.
But it's also an indictment of new Labour's flirtation with neoliberalism around the turn of the millennium. That's precisely why Keir Starmer's incoming Labour Cabinet will likely set itself a growth oriented and fiscally sustainable policy. They will hopefully be socially sensitive, even if they seem far too modest at first glance.
The widely experienced negative effects of socioeconomic polarization can fuel resentment and anti-establishment protest voting as it happened with the Brexit referendum. It can also tap into anti-immigration fears manipulated by politicians as we can see in so many other countries around the world today. However, such egregious initiatives as Rishi Sunak's plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda have fortunately had little appeal. But as Mark pointed out, the greater acceptance of racial, cultural, or religious diversity in post imperial Britain compared to the rest of Europe should not obscure animosity towards other immigrants from Eastern Europe, for example.
Mark is confident that the secular trend for increasing openness and tolerance in British society is irreversible. Yet there are those who nostalgically do yearn for a more ethnically and culturally homogenous Britain, who have voted this time around for xenophobic. political forces such as Nigel Farage's Reform Party.
Paradoxically, this trend also forces leading figures in the new Labour government to set aside their own preferences and reframe from reopening the Brexit debate. Still, this should not preclude resettling the United Kingdom's relationship with the European Union, which is more urgently needed to be repaired than ever.
A possible Trump victory would of necessity change Britain's special relationship with the United States. If Britain manages to advance the agenda of progressive internationalism, even within the limits of what Mark called progressive realism, the victory of labor in the 2024 election will usher in a new era.
This was the third episode of season nine of Democracy in Question. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in two weeks’ time when my guest will be Yogendra Yadav, the Indian political scientist and political activist. He'll analyze for us the complexities of the recent Indian elections, whose surprising results he had predicted defying all forecasts by pollsters and the mainstream media.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed. And of course, let your friends know about this podcast. If you've enjoyed it, you can stay in touch with the work of Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.
[i] Leonard, M. (2005). Why Europe will run the 21st Century. Harper.
[ii] Leonard, M. (2008). What does China think? PublicAffairs.
[iii] Leonard, M. (2022). The age of unpeace: How connectivity causes conflict. Penguin Books.