While political scientists hardly have a perfect record of predicting key votes in the past decade, the outcome of the United Kingdom’s upcoming General Election, now scheduled for 4th July 2024, does not at this stage seem in any doubt. While Rishi Sunak gets quotes from removal men, Keir Starmer supporters are busy finalising their “First 100 Days” plans.
Although this is the first election since Britain left the European Union in 2020, in many ways it feels like a return to the dreary slog of pre-2016 British politics. There are, though, a number of reasons why this is an important election within the contested landscape of Western European politics:
1) 2024 will be the first “post-2019” election
2019 was an epochal election. In giving Boris Johnson a large majority, the election of that year resulted in Britain leaving the EU. Equally importantly, it also saw the completion of a longstanding trend: the working class, long increasingly unenthusiastic about the Labour Party, asserted a significant measure of political independence from the party.
In the 2019 election, the working class, long increasingly unenthusiastic about the Labour Party, asserted a significant measure of political independence from the party.
Working class voters, it seemed, not only had somewhere else to go, but would exercise this independence even if it favoured the hated Tories. The 2019 election also saw the end of Corbynism. The second referendum position, that proposed a re-run of the June 2016 Remain or Leave-referendum in order to obtain a Remain outcome for which Corbyn advocated, decisively sunk his brand of “left populism”, with voters deciding to follow through with Brexit over the material improvements promised by Corbyn. While some sympathetic to Corbynism saw in this position the triumph of the dangerous Machiavel who would eventually come to lead Labour, the reality was that the second referendum platform represented the logical endpoint of a movement that was wary of both the British nation and democracy itself.
The election in 2024 plainly does not have the same stakes. There is no sense in which Starmer represents a new type of Labour politics. For those keenly looking forward to Labour returning to power, Starmer’s strength is that he represents a “return to normal” and a plausible, professional mode of governance. But the sheer vacuousness of Labour’s offer to the electorate is hard to ignore. The Conservative Party, meanwhile, has reached an impasse, unable to resolve the contradictions of Johnsonism in attempting to retain its new working class support without a plausible plan of how economically to improve the condition of many “left behind” areas of post-industrial Britain. With Johnsonism over and Brexiteer Thatcherism an unpopular anachronism, the emptiness of Rishi Sunak is all that remains. Comparing the two candidates, Starmer’s sole advantage is that he is not the incumbent with nothing to offer.
2) Britain is a post-member state
While 2024 is the first “post-Brexit” election, it is obvious that the situation in which Britain finds itself in relation to the EU has not changed overnight. If the process of European integration took decades, the undoing of that process will also take a long time. The effect of Brexit on the 2024 election, though, will still be profound. The EU represented the dominant mechanism for the political class to evade responsibility for governing. By claiming that “our hands are tied” by the multipurpose vincolo esterno of the EU, elites on the continental mainland are still able to dodge accountability for political decisions. Importantly, this option is no longer available to our politicians. Although there are still other ways to deflect or abdicate political responsibility – from NATO to the Bank of England or SAGE – there is now one fewer without the EU.
The incumbent Conservative Party is clearly not keen on governing, preferring to ban pit bulls or vapes so as to create a simulacrum of authority, in place of tackling harder questions that would require actual political legitimacy.
With Labour equally keen to engage in culture wars posturing, the British political class continues with the characteristic modes of governing of a member state of the EU while not being one; we have become the world’s first “post-member state”, that contradictory and emerging form, in which the potential for increased democratic accountability offered by our leaving of the EU is still restrained by our rulers’ desperation to avoid responsibility for political decisions.
We have become the world’s first “post-member state”, in which the potential for increased democratic accountability offered by our leaving of the EU is still restrained by our rulers’ desperation to avoid responsibility for political decisions.
Sensing this evasion, voters are unlikely to go easy on the Tories when they reach the ballot box; similarly to in the pre-2016 era, voter dissatisfaction will be channelled into a right-populist party—this time Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle Reform, rather than UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party)—since Labour remains fundamentally the same party as the one unwilling to seize the potential of Brexit over the past eight years. Britain as a post-member state retains the basic vulnerability of the member state to populist challenge, and is yet to develop a politics that can go beyond populism.
3) We still live in the Covoid – but the Omnicause is on the horizon
Although the dangers of Long Covid have been much discussed, the reality of “Long Lockdown” receives far less attention. “Long Lockdown” refers to the long-term effects of the unprecedented acceleration of social fragmentation and demobilization that occurred across lockdown, along with all the associated political and social-psychological (rather than respiratory) consequences. One way of framing this is that we still live in the “Covoid”: the long-term trends of the hollowing out of political institutions and associative life across Western Europe were given a shot in the arm (so to speak) by lockdowns. The combination of the pre-existing void and lockdowns was a demobilization at the time of supposed crisis. It can therefore be of little surprise that the British public now shows such an ambivalence to the (extremely unlikely) possibility of military mobilization: three in ten of those in the conscription age range for the First and Second World Wars state that they would refuse to fight if called up even if Britain were under the imminent threat of invasion.
The post-member state is a unique form in world politics, lacking the member-state’s horizontal intergovernmental mechanism for evading political authority, but also the vertical representative mechanisms for generating it. While unlikely to dominate this year’s General Election, it seems that this legitimation gap will be filled in due course by what the writer Mary Harrington has called the “Omnicause”: climate change. If social democracy, conservatism and liberalism are all exhausted political traditions in Britain, it is environmentalism that has the potential to unite the ruling class and key fractions of “knowledge workers” by providing much-needed legitimacy and policy direction.
The political legitimation gap will be filled in due course by what the writer Mary Harrington has called the “Omnicause”: climate change. If social democracy, conservatism and liberalism are all exhausted political traditions in Britain, it is environmentalism that has the potential to unite the ruling class.
Although climate change is thus likely to be a key part of generating legitimacy in the next decade, it can only create a partial sort of authority for the state, as it is grounded in moral exhortations rather than political processes of representing social interests. Challenging this moral legitimation process, there have already been a range of insurgencies across Europe against the political class, including those in the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Germany, and France. Populist Euroscepticism—despite its limitations—played a significant role in Britain’s ultimate departure from the EU, although it was unable to solve the deeper issues in British politics. While the Omnicause is on the horizon, it cannot fill in the void in British politics; the turn to environmentalism on the part of political classes across Europe is already inflaming populist rebellion, as it will here too.
Although this election is not likely to inspire voters faced with a choice between the Tory Blairite Sunak and the Labour Blairite Starmer, the populist rebellion of Brexit has nevertheless changed things fundamentally. On closer inspection, despite the surface appearance of a return to pre-2016 “normality”, there is in fact no way back to the politics of old; the Tories are exhausted in a way that Johnson’s popularity hid, and Starmer’s claims to technocratic maturity in government are obviously a threadbare suit on a New Labour zombie.
Labour will win this election only by taking advantage of other parties’ failures—the Tories in England and Wales (hemorrhaging votes to Reform) and the SNP in Scotland. More widely, the replacement of the EU by the Omnicause as a rallying point for the political class, the bureaucracy and the professional-managerial class is already showing its limitations—and its potential to create more political conflict in the UK than it has already done in the EU. The question posed by Brexit, the question of how we are going to hold our representatives to account, will remain unanswered at the core of British politics.
