Britain appears to be on the verge of a political earthquake. This week’s General Election looks likely to produce by far the biggest Labour landslide in history, while the Tories face the real prospect of annihilation as a political force.
‘We are the masters now,’ the Labour MP Sir Hartley Shawcross famously declared after his party’s sweeping triumph in the 1945 contest. If the opinion polls are correct, Sir Keir Starmer will enjoy not just mastery at Westminster but complete domination of the British political landscape on a scale never seen before in this country.
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally movement emerged as the overwhelming victor on Sunday
Disillusion
Yet Labour’s unprecedented supremacy will be tempered by two factors. One is the lack of public enthusiasm for the Starmer project, as shown by the leader’s poor personal ratings and the lack of excitement on the campaign trail. The other is the harsh reality that the shift in British politics to the Left is so out of kilter with most of the rest of Europe.
The timing of Labour’s imminent win could not be worse. Our country is about to be ruled by a party that clings to all the soggy pieties of traditional social democracy, just at the very moment that this consensus is being comprehensively rejected by European voters.
The increasingly powerful brand of Right-wing populism that is now on the advance across the Continent is the very antithesis of Labour’s programme, with its attachment to state planning, cultural diversity, net zero emissions and light border controls.
Indeed, the sort of policies that Starmer now espouses – especially on national identity and mass immigration – have generated precisely the kind of disillusion and hostility that has been at the heart of the Right’s dramatic rise.
That is certainly true of France, where Marine Le Pen’s National Rally movement emerged as the overwhelming victor from Sunday’s first round of elections to the National Assembly, gaining a third of the share of the vote and leaving her party on course potentially to win an absolute majority after next weekend’s second round.
Such a result would have seemed unthinkable only a few years ago, when Le Pen was regarded by much of the public as a pariah and her Front National party (as it was known in France) as a band of dangerous, bigoted extremists. But two vital changes have enabled her to break free from such ostracism and enter the mainstream.
The first is that she has cleaned up her party’s act through the adoption of more centrist economic policies, the expulsion of hardliners – including her own father and founder of the Front National, the notorious anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen – and the installation of a youthful, charismatic new leader, Jordan Bardella.
The second is that large swathes of the French electorate have become alarmed at the impact of mass immigration, which has increasingly come to be seen as a threat to both public safety and cultural identity.
It is not just in France where the anti-immigration, Eurosceptic Right is in the ascendant. This trend can be observed throughout the continent, where the Left is now in charge of just four of the 29 member states in the European Union.
The Right’s tightening grip was graphically demonstrated in the recent elections to the European Parliament, which saw the uncompromising Freedom Party top the poll in Austria, the Flemish Nationalists come first in Belgium, and the controversial Alternative for Germany finish ahead of the Greens, the Social Democrats and the Liberals.
In a similar vein, the PVV party led by outspoken anti-Islamist campaigner Geert Wilders became the largest in the Netherlands after last November’s General Election, while Giorgia Meloni, whose victory for her Brothers Of Italy party in 2022 was built on the electorate’s fury at bullying by Brussels and unceasing waves of immigration, has shrewdly consolidated her powerbase to become one of Europe’s leading politicians.
The PVV party led by outspoken anti-Islamist campaigner Geert Wilders became the largest in the Netherlands
The timing of Keir Starmer’s imminent win could not be worse. Our country is about to be ruled by a party that clings to all the soggy pieties of traditional social democracy. Pictured last Thursday
Explaining European voters’ shift to the Right in such large numbers, Ms Meloni said recently that ‘clearly Europe’s answers to citizens are not working’.
She is right. There is a widespread sense of betrayal at what the globalist progressives have inflicted on the European nations through their ideological fixations, like their creed that ‘diversity is our strength’ or their belief that independence is a menace to humanity.
‘National sovereignty is the root cause of the most crying evils of our times,’ declares a plaque at the visitors’ centre for the European Parliament. It is precisely that kind of mentality which shows that the EU has no grasp of the natural human impulse towards patriotism.
Patriotism
Yet elitist Europe’s answers are also Starmer’s answers. On so many fronts, he is proposing to indulge in just the kind of activities that now repulse many European voters, such as the move towards the abolition of petrol and diesel cars, or the replacement of gas boilers with expensive heat pumps.
While European citizens want their institutions to take pride in their heritage, the advent of a Labour government here will mean yet more indoctrination about ‘decolonisation’, as well as the introduction of a new Race Equality Act that will require more ethnic monitoring exercises and more dogmatic training courses in ‘unconscious bias’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘critical race theory’.
In Labour’s brave new world, correct thinking must prevail; those who express fears about the loss of social cohesion in their neighbourhoods must be re-educated rather than respected.
In 2011, a few years before the Brexit referendum, a YouGov poll demonstrated that 62 per cent of British people agreed with the following statement: ‘Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition, it sometimes feels like a foreign country, and this makes me feel uncomfortable.’
Isolation
Just as EU member states are beginning to assert their autonomy, Sir Keir will take Britain in the opposite direction, giving our courts and quangos an ever greater say in our governance and embarking on the process of reversing Brexit, starting with the Single Market. Enabling the EU ‘to take back control’ will be one of the themes of Starmer’s premiership.
Inclined to the worship of Brussels and keen to signal its virtue on topics such as multiculturalism and immigration, the Labour Party has long claimed that Tories and Eurosceptics are ‘isolated’ on the international stage.
It is a rich irony that it is becoming ever more clear that Europe’s leap to the Right will be the real cause of Britain’s isolation.
As he pursues the same destructive, Left-wing approach that has so badly discredited the European political establishment, Starmer will soon face his own backlash.
Having been so wilfully opaque on the campaign trail about his plans for office, he has no mandate from the public to drag Britain further into the quagmire of tax rises, debt, free movement of people, racial divisions, asylum abuses and urban crime.
He will have gained office, not through any public yearning for socialism but because of anger at the Tories. That will just make the indignation against his premiership all the greater. Things can only get bitter, to misquote Labour’s anthem of 1997.
Frank Furedi is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent and director of European policy think-tank MCC Brussels.