Trouble beneath the surface
by Sebastian Millbank, Artillery Row:
Labour’s triumph obscures worrying signs of division and chaos brewing in British society.
[…] The fractures facing Labour, as I recently discussed in the pages of the Critic, are far more serious than their immediate electoral prospects may suggest. One of the rare bits of bad news for Labour from the locals has been the loss of Oldham council, where, in a repeat of Rochdale, Starmer’s support for Israel and an unaddressed pattern of child sexual abuse by Muslim men saw support tumble amongst both the white working class and the Muslim community.
New divisions are at work in Britain, ones that fall along the toxic faultlines of race, culture, class and religion. Even Labour’s most dramatic gains may spell future trouble. The party has done extraordinarily well amongst Brexit-voting regions and populations, such as Hartlepool and Thurrock, and has even taken traditional Tory stronghold Rushmoor, home of the British Army, for the first time in the council’s history. Like Boris’s 2019 incursion into Labour heartlands, the acquisition of new voters is not a sign of an epochal swing, but rather of an unstable British politics, in which voters are increasingly disconnected from party loyalty, and mistrustful of politicians.
Starmer, like Boris, has managed to appeal to voters discontented with a globalisation that has ravaged British industry and seen millions of workers imported into the country even as wages have shrunk and growth slowed. But his lead on the question of migration, largely the product of Tory failure and loss of credibility following illegal migrants being dumped into working class communities, is extremely fragile. His criticism of a migration-led Tory growth policy is welcome, but he has refused to rule out employing it himself and has made no concrete promises on issues of migration and national sovereignty and security in the economic realm.
These new voters have embraced Labour, but they may abandon the party as swiftly as they did the Tories after the triumph of 2019. The signs of trouble are already here, and if Labour imitates the arrogance and complacency of the Conservatives, and ignores their new voters, the party’s time in office may be nasty, brutish and short.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
