The mandate Labour didn’t get in the election
The poorest countries will be badly hurt by America-First, but the threat to the democratic world will be existential. It believes in the rule of law, minority and human rights. It believes in international law, national sovereignty, and the rights of people to live free. The democratic world is now centered in Europe, not the United States.
Trump is opposed to the West and Europe. He is with Russia and Putin. He admires strongmen and their territorial ambitions. The “V.I.P. lane” is the norm. He is trying to enrich without embarrassment his allied big mining special interests in Ukraine and his new big tech and social media allies operating in Great Britain.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been resolute since his first speech raising Britain’s defense spending in his commitment to President Zelensky, Ukraine, calling out the tyrant and branding Russia as the aggressor. He set the parameters that he repeated without compromise in his deft meeting in the Oval Office and when he greeted President Zelensky the next day in London.
This chapter began when Vice President Vance endorsed the fascist AfD in the German elections. But get ready for the unceasing assault on the democratic world. Erdogan jailing his likely opponent crackdown in Turkey was not condemned by the United States of America. Get ready for Trump announcing that a “two-state solution” is no longer U.S. policy. And the White House announcing the State Dinner for Victor Orban.
But the British public understands the new world. The Prime Minister has uncharacteristically broad public support for his security agenda, embrace of Ukraine and opposition to Putin, separating from Trump’s America and having Britain lead the fight for the democratic values and world.
I watched Keir Starmer as a new Labour leader bravely take on Jeremy Corbyn, anti-Semitism and lead Labour to be a mainstream party with common sense. He sought to unite Britain during the pandemic. He also took the party back to its working-class roots and advanced bold new initiatives during multiple party conferences.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves was my closest ally in New Labour. And she had reached out to work together with my wife Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro on work and family issues. When I quit the Labour Party to help the Liberal Democrats, she stayed. I had worked to defeat Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, and I couldn’t stomach a party that romanticized those leaders and Hamas. She had to battle to win re-election in a party dominated by left populists.
But she said to me, “I’m too much of a social democrat to leave.”
Reeves understandably deferred to the Labour campaign and Party leadership on its strategy for the election, election program and policy priorities.
But it is clear by now that the new reality means a constant underfunding and death spiral of cuts and exploding childhood poverty.
The reciprocal tariffs lower than others is meaningless during a global trade war.
Trump’s first America and tariffs provide an unavoidable opportunity to stop this train. The Prime Minister gains a new voice and spirit as he embraces his bold new mandate.
Why doesn’t Starmer have a mandate from the General Election?
Britain last year faced an election climate no different than those taking place elsewhere in Europe and North America. In my polls for Climate Policy Strategy in November 2023, voters here were even a touch angrier than voters elsewhere. A stunning 71 percent said the country was headed in the wrong direction. That was shaped most of all by the 73 percent who said the “cost of living and inflation” was the top problem, 20 points ahead of the next problem. A majority of 54 percent chose “the NHS,” and then 34 percent worried about “energy supply and prices” and 28 percent “immigration.”
Elsewhere, that anger and want of change produced historically high turnout elections. Here, it produced historically low.
Let me draw on my experience in campaigns answering why. I learned from studying E. E. Schattschneider’s Semi-Sovereign People that winning campaigns have figured out what is the fight that will impact voters the most. The fight creates the choice in the election. The fight gets different groups to turn out or stay home. The fight creates the winning coalition. The fight decides what issues or policies will be prioritized and debated. The fight creates the mandate after the election.
My polls for Clinton led us to focus on “change versus more of the same,” “It’s the economy, stupid!” and “Don’t forget health care.”
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were relentless in reassuring that Labour could be trusted on tax, “tough on the causes of crime,” and trade union control of the party. We narrowed the differences on those issues where we were vulnerable. But that allowed us to highlight the major choice and offer. New Labour will reform and modernize Britain. That created our mandate.
Starmer visibly marginalized Jeremy Corbyn personally and changed party rules to show who was control of the Labour Party. He changed the rules as well to protect elected MPs and present the leadership as mainstream and ethical in contrast to Tory leaders. He and his Shadow Chancellor promised no increase in taxes on income.
But instead of using that reassurance to set out the fighting choices in the election, Professor Barry Richards writes, they offered “very similar solutions” on the “five issues of most concern to the British public” — “reform the NHS, grow the economy, relieve cost-of-living pressures, build more houses, and reduce immigration.”
Labour won its huge majority because of the hatred of the Conservative Party and its leaders, tactical voting along the liberal-left axis, and the anti-immigrant Reform Party running in every constituency.
But Labour’s vote of 34 percent was well below the polls when the campaign started. Labour’s vote barely exceeded the vote from five years earlier. Without a strong identity, Labour will be vulnerable to tactical voting in local and other elections. And most important, this change electorate produced a 2024 result with one of the lowest turnouts ever.
But that should have been a warning. The previous election when turnout dropped sharply was Tony Blair’s second election in 2001. Turnout dropped 12 points from 1997. That was the lowest voter turnout since 1918 when Britain moved to a universal franchise.
I was troubled by the result and wrote a memo to the Prime Minister. Blair unsurprisingly was pleased with Labour still holding a 165-seat majority. He also liked that Labour’s vote share with the middle class was nearly as strong as with working-class voters.
But I added, as I wrote in Dispatches from the War Room, “This new disengagement from the political process was most pronounced” with “unskilled manual laborers, men without a university education, and the younger blue-collar workers” who were worried about the growth of asylum seekers.
Those voters would move to the Conservatives in the next election, and then to U.K. Independence Party, then Brexit and now to Reform, the lead anti-immigrant party.
The low turnout in 2024 was led by those working-class communities. They thought the Conservatives had utterly failed on immigration, but Labour didn’t connect with them on other potential issues.
Will we look back on 2024 as an election where Reform replaced the Conservatives as the lead party of the right?
The election fights
The Prime Minister has an opportunity to create a new mandate. It starts with energy and the rapid transition to renewable energy as the leading post-Brexit British industry. He can lead the world on energy and battling climate change, as he is now doing on security.
When the West was cut off from Russian energy and prices spiked following the elevated prices after Covid, suddenly, energy prices and energy security became top issues for voters. And in Britain, both parties supported ambitious net-zero targets. Boris Johnson hosted the annual COP26 conference in 2021. He supported the transition from combustion engines to hybrids and soon, EVs. Both parties now also supported the growth of nuclear power.
Renewable energy is now seen as cheaper and more secure than fossil fuels. And critically, Starmer proposed freezing energy bills by implementing a windfall profit tax on oil and gas companies. That received the strongest response in the Red Wall industrial areas that defected from Labour under Corbyn.
With Britain out of Europe, it was important to know what industries you wanted the government to support in building a post-Brexit industrial strategy. From where would the jobs of the future come? A majority of the public at every moment to my surprise selected “the low-carbon energy technology sector,” including wind, solar, and green hydrogen.” The low-carbon sector led oil and gas by over 20 points in both the Red and Blue Wall seats. The latter were the more upscale and remain seats where the Liberal Democrats were more competitive.
