Great Britain before the general election: Country at a political turning point

Taxes, migration, transgender – there is hardly a topic on which the Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Labour challenger Keir Starmer do not duel in the BBC debate before the general election. But it is a question from the audience that receives the most applause in the studio. “Mr Sunak, you were a decent Chancellor of the Exchequer, but you are a mediocre Prime Minister,” begins the voter, and in the next breath accuses Starmer of being a puppet of important Labour Party members. “Are you,” he asks both of them, “really the best choice to become the next Prime Minister of our great country?”

Neither Sunak nor Starmer have provided an answer. The audience question resonates like the leitmotif of an election campaign that seems to have inspired very few of the 66 million Britons.

Ahead of Thursday’s general election, the country seems exhausted and full of doubts. Exhausted by the rising cost of living and the turmoil under a Conservative Party that has consumed five prime ministers in fourteen years in power and provoked a crisis on the financial markets under Liz Truss in 2022. And full of doubts about whether Labour leader Starmer can give the country the boost it needs when he moves into the government seat at Number 10 Downing Street on Friday, as is widely expected.

Resignation has spread

The death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 was a turning point. Now the country is also facing a political turning point. But anyone travelling through Great Britain these days will encounter resignation rather than confidence. A shocking number of voters generally consider politicians to be liars and say they will not take part in the election this time.

The search for the reasons for this can begin with the moral failure of the Conservative Party. Sex scandals and lobbying scandals solidified the image of a self-righteous political class. The tip of the iceberg was the affair surrounding illegal parties at Boris Johnson’s official residence at a time when the government had imposed a draconian corona lockdown on ordinary Britons.

During the election campaign, a betting scandal made headlines. Sunak’s employees may have used insider knowledge to bet money on the timing of the general election. Once again, the impression arose that those in power in Westminster were more concerned with their own advantage than with the well-being of the country.

Disappointment about Brexit

What is the Conservatives’ political record? The question is directed at David Cameron, who is appearing before foreign journalists in a London club shortly before the election. Cameron ushered in the Conservative era with his election victory against Gordon Brown in 2010, resigned after losing the Brexit vote in 2016 and recently returned as Foreign Secretary.

The 57-year-old seems less dynamic than he used to, but he is still not plagued by self-doubt. He stresses that the Conservative Party has created jobs and that on average the economy has grown faster than in many continental European countries. He attributes the fact that the country is now struggling with loss of prosperity and record-high debt and taxes to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Cameron does not mention Brexit in his assessment. 70 percent of Britons now believe that Britain is in a worse economic position because of its exit from the EU. In 2019, almost half of the population believed that Brexit would bring advantages or at least turn out to be a zero-sum game.

It’s not just the economic promises that are slow to materialize. During the referendum campaign, a Brexit bus toured the country with the catchy message that instead of sending 350 million pounds a week to Brussels, the money would in future go to the National Health Service (NHS). Today, the state health service is more inefficient than ever, and a record number of patients are waiting months for treatment.

The Tories have also failed to keep their promise to limit migration thanks to the end of the EU’s free movement of people. Instead of Poles, Romanians and Spaniards, Indians, Nigerians and Filipinos have come. Regular migration of workers has roughly doubled since Brexit, and the already overburdened health care system would hardly be able to function without immigrants.

During the election campaign, almost all parties are calling for a reduction in migration. But Brexit is only a marginal issue. The Conservatives can hardly present any advantages of leaving the EU. Labour is afraid of a new edition of the European debate and only wants to negotiate minor issues with the EU, such as a veterinary agreement.

Only the Scots and the right-winger Farage disturb the peace

The silence is only disturbed by the Scottish National Party, which describes Brexit as a disaster, and Nigel Farage’s up-and-coming right-wing party Reform UK. Farage sees salvation in an even more radical break with Europe: he wants to cancel Sunak’s Windsor Agreement to settle the Northern Ireland dispute, withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and drastically reduce immigration.

Voters in the structurally weak areas of central and northern England had hoped that Brexit would lead to investment in the dilapidated infrastructure. But on a regional train near Nottingham, a commuter says that hardly a day goes by without delays. Her son’s school doesn’t have enough money to buy glue sticks, it’s almost impossible to get an appointment with the family doctor, and the streets in her neighborhood are like a field of potholes. “It seems that nothing in our country works the way it used to.”

The optimistic “Cool Britannia” of the 1990s has become “Broken Britain”. Starmer denounces the poor state of the infrastructure. But both Labour and the Conservatives are failing to mention that there is no money for the necessary investments and that an austerity program will probably be necessary instead. The think tank Institute for Fiscal Studies speaks of a “conspiracy of silence”.

Stability as an asset?

Fourteen years after Cameron’s election victory, the Conservative Party has lost its credibility, and voters are looking left and right for alternatives. The United Kingdom, with its old-fashioned majority voting system and traditional parliamentary system, is thus presenting itself as a vibrant democracy.

Even if Farage’s reform of the UK is likely to make significant gains, the conservatives’ heir is the sober centrist Starmer. He has broken with the left-wing populism of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. Labour is already hoping that the prospect of political reason and stability will make Britain more attractive as a location, while in France and other EU countries the rise of right-wing nationalists is causing uncertainty.

Starmer and Sunak may not have offered the British people the most inspiring choice. And yet the BBC debate pitted two politicians of integrity and ability against each other. They fought hard, but at least they were trusted to govern in the interest of the common good. When the two candidates for the American presidency crossed swords on CNN a day later, Britain suddenly seemed like a perfect world.