I’ve been struck by how rundown British towns and cities have looked during the election coverage. The roads, the buildings and the people bear the marks of 14 years of Tory rule that saw deep cuts to funding for local government, the privatisation of essential public services and the entrenchment of deep poverty in working-class neighbourhoods. The North/South economic divide is stark.
The UK looks like a washed-up empire, summed up by the pathetic image of Tory leader Rishi Sunak in the rain.
Where once its politicians discussed the fate of continents, now they obsess over who can use which toilets. The country that used to be an economic powerhouse and attract people from around the world is now insular, out of the European Union, with the weakest growth in the G7, paranoid about immigrants and unwilling to fund its public services properly. Its education system has been turned over to “academies” (what we call charter schools) and results have plummeted. The National Health Service is creaking on the brink of collapse.
The Tories have presided over all of this decline, with a set of policies that are eerily like those of the coalition Government here in New Zealand.
The same recipe of austerity, spending cuts, under-investment in infrastructure, privatisation, tax cuts for the well-heeled and benefit cuts for the poor is being implemented by our new Government.
These policies have been delivered by a succession of increasingly out-of-touch leaders whose wealth and privilege alienate them from ordinary people.
The Tories only have themselves to blame for the shocking state they have left the country in, and the walloping voters have given them as a result.
Let’s hope we don’t see what 14 years of such policies would do to our Aotearoa.
But New Zealand Labour should not look to emulate its UK cousin if it wants to return to power any time soon.
UK Labour had been soundly defeated for four successive elections. A halfway decent opposition would have beaten the Tories years ago. Now, UK Labour is essentially winning by default – not because it offers solutions or inspires hope but because it is the only credible alternative. New Zealand Labour will need to do better unless it is prepared to wait as long for the country to get fed up with National.
With this huge majority, Labour now has a duty to act. It ran on a very minimal platform but British voters will rightly expect it to use the power it’s been given to turn the country around. That’ll mean investing in the hospitals, schools and infrastructure that the Tories ran down, and giving people in poverty a decent income to live on. And paying for that will mean a wealth tax.
It’ll require boldness from Starmer. He has got to power by being as quiet as possible while the Tories imploded but he’ll have hundreds of new MPs who don’t want to be one-termers. They will be demanding he governs with vision and hope, which have been sadly lacking in Downing Street for so long.
UK Labour needs only to look to its New Zealand counterpart to see what happens when voters give a party a strong majority and then decide it hasn’t delivered on the faith they placed in it.
This is not only important for Labour’s longevity as a government. There’s a real risk that a failure of the centre-left to deliver in government so soon after the failure of the centre-right will see voters head to the far right, as we are seeing in France and elsewhere.
A check against extremism would be replacing the UK’s antiquated and unfair First Past the Post voting system. It is FPP, not voters, that has delivered Labour such a disproportionate share of seats. In reality, Labour’s vote is on par with the Conservatives and Reform combined and less than Jeremy Corbyn got in 2017. A proportional system would be a bulwark against a similarly disproportionate result for the far right in the future.
As Darren Hughes – former New Zealand MP and now chief executive of the UK Electoral Reform Society – says, moving to a proportional voting system is about “ensuring that every vote counts and every part of the country matters to whoever is in government”. Better for Labour to fix it now, and look magnanimous in victory, than regret it when it eventually returns to opposition.
All those concerns may seem a world away as Starmer and his team celebrate their victory, but they have been given a historic opportunity to rebuild Britain. Let’s hope they take it.
