Elon Musk has predicted that Britain’s establishment political parties will “get crushed” at the next election. He’s probably right – political revolution is in the air as Britain falls out of love with its ruling parties.
The 2024 general election was one of the oddest in recent history. Labour won an unequivocal victory but it was a loveless landslide.
Meeting the general public during the campaign, it was quite obvious that Labour’s support was a mile wide but only an inch deep – and the final vote count bears this out. Starmer’s party received fewer votes than his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, secured in both 2017 and 2019. In fact, Labour’s popular vote has fallen by millions and yet Britain’s eccentric electoral system delivered it a whacking 174-seat majority. Such is the electoral mathematics.
Voters’ real motivation was to punish the Tories at almost any cost. The public felt a sense of palpable betrayal by Sunak’s party. On virtually all the key issues – border control, mass immigration, the NHS, falling real wages – the Tories were rightly seen to be responsible for failure and broken promises.
The Conservative party brand had become so toxic that when the voters condemned it to the worst result in its history – losing a staggering 251 seats and returning only 121 MPs to the new parliament – few were surprised.
Such was the antipathy towards the Tory party many citizens voted them out despite being fully aware that the incoming Labour Party might well be just as incompetent – or even worse. And yet it could be argued that under Britain’s first-past-the-post system, voters acted entirely rationally – the only realistic option being the removal of one failing ruling party with another establishment party.
The series of Labour missteps since coming to office and the subsequent catastrophic collapse in the government’s popularity seem to prove the pessimists right.
In just a few months, Labour has presided over riots and public disorder, two-tier policing, a donations scandal, the voluntary surrender of the Chagos Islands, a flatling economy, the cutting of winter fuel payments to the elderly and continued illegal migration chaos in our open border on the south coast. It is hardly surprising that support for Labour in recent polling has fallen to well below 30 per cent.
What is unclear amid all this mess is whether Labour has any idea of how to improve the state of the nation in any of these key areas. It is quite likely that things will gradually deteriorate from now until the next general election, sometime in 2018 or 2019.
It is far too early to tell whether the new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch will succeed in rehabilitating the Conservatives or whether the Reform Party will continue to split the vote on the Thatcherite right.
What is clear, however, is that the general public is looking for a way out of the nightmare that the ruling parties have created – as well as the rigged electoral system which protects them.
Put simply, the public wants a party that sees Britain not as a charity or as a shop but as our home – the place where we build our lives.
Elon Musk is right – by the next general election, the British public will be ready to crush the ruling parties and replace them with something better.