On 22 May Rishi Sunak called a snap general election in the United Kingdom. In his election announcement, delivered on the steps of Downing Street behind a thick curtain of British rain, Sunak pledged to ‘restore pride and confidence’ to the country. ‘I will earn your trust,’ he said, addressing the public directly, and ‘prove to you that only a Conservative government, led by me, will not put our hard-earned economic stability at risk.’ Sunak’s audacity was almost admirable. Here was a Conservative prime minister inviting voters to believe that a party other than his own had been running Britain for the past 14 years. But the Tories’ record cannot be so easily glossed. In addition to the near-constant state of political churn Sunak and his colleagues have imposed on Britain since they came to power in 2010 – Brexit, the botched Covid response, the repeated prime ministerial oustings – the Conservatives have a dismal social legacy.

The austerity regime initiated by David Cameron in the wake of the 2008 financial crash deepened health inequalities and lowered life expectancies for people living in the most deprived British towns and cities (1). Funding for local councils, which administer many of the UK’s key public services, fell in real terms by 40% between 2009 and 2020. Overall, child poverty rates have plateaued, but relative poverty rates among large British families – those with three or more children – have risen by more than 10%, a trend linked to the effects of rightwing welfare reforms (2). The UK has become a ‘poor’ nation marked by pockets of wealth, the Financial Times observed in 2022. And, indeed, no objective assessment of British society could conclude that it is better off today – richer, fairer or more secure – than it was a decade and a half ago.

Conscious, on some level, of these facts, Sunak sought to dress up his election gamble as an act of political selflessness. ‘I’m guided by doing what is right’ for the UK, he said in May, not by ‘what is easy’. In fact, his decision to dissolve parliament was a defensive manoeuvre, aimed less at securing a fifth consecutive term in office for the Conservatives – any possibility of that vanished 18 months ago, following the radical, market-jolting mini-budget of Liz Truss – than at rescuing his party from an electoral abyss. In the run-up to the vote, held on 4 July, the pollsters were emphatic: the Tories were heading for defeat. One survey, published at the start of June, indicated that Labour could win 422 out of Westminster’s 650 seats, handing the party’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, the largest Commons majority of any British politician since Stanley Baldwin in 1924 (3).

In theory, Sunak could have held out for another six months. (British parliaments can sit for a maximum of five years; the last UK election occurred in December 2019.) For the Tories, there was even a sliver of good news in June: Britain’s core inflation rate hit the Bank of England’s target rate of 2%, down from its peak of 11.1% at the end of 2022.

But Sunak’s prospects were never going to improve. The outlook for Britain’s economy remains bleak, marred by persistently weak growth and low productivity. In 2023 the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a London-based thinktank, estimated that, cumulatively, austerity had cost the UK public sector £208bn in lost investment since 2006 (4). Between 2010 and 2019, British public spending fell from 41% of GDP to 35%, one of the steepest drop-offs, anywhere, in recent European history.

Austerity an attritional experience

Speaking to the New Yorker in March, former Conservative chancellor George Osborne sought to retrospectively justify the deficit reduction measures he enacted alongside David Cameron on the grounds that they fortified Britain’s national finances for the external shocks – Covid and Ukraine, for instance – that were to come (5). ‘There’s no counterfactual,’ he said. ‘It’s like “apart from the assassination, Mrs Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?” ’ Experts disagree. By stripping back the state so aggressively, Conservative policies ‘created the conditions’ that allowed Covid to inflict ‘so much more damage in the UK’ than in most of its Western European neighbours, Professor Martin McKee, one of Britain’s leading epidemiologists, wrote in 2023 (6). 
For British voters, austerity has been an attritional experience. Even before Sunak’s election announcement, there was a palpable sense of exhaustion in the country; a feeling that core pillars of the UK’s national infrastructure – its schools, hospitals, clinics and transport links – had been left to rot by successive Conservative administrations. Fewer than one in four Brits think the economy is heading in the right direction. Less than half are satisfied with the functioning of the NHS (National Health Service). More than half want to renationalise Britain’s crumbling and disjointed private rail system. The mood of national cynicism extends to the country’s political institutions. Britons have ‘internationally low levels of confidence’ in their governing elites, a study by the Policy Institute, a research unit at King’s College London, revealed last year, while ‘positive perceptions of parliament’ have ‘halved since 1990’ (7).

Sunak – late to politics, having completed lucrative stints in Silicon Valley and the City of London – was drafted into Downing Street at the tail end of 2022; ostensibly, a safe pair of hands to mop up after the turbulent, scandal-ridden premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. To his supporters, the ex-chancellor was a gifted technocrat capable of stabilising the British state. To his detractors, he was a vacuous tech bro whose other-worldly wealth made him ill-equipped for the rigours of public life. (Sunak’s wealth is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions; he is the only prime minister ever to appear on a Sunday Times ‘rich list’.)

The detractors were right. Sunak’s tenure has been a flurry of defective policies and failed public relations resets. His suggestion, at the end of May, that the UK should reintroduce a form of peacetime national service was greeted with derision; his decision, a week later, to leave the European D-Day commemorations early aroused a peculiarly British kind of patriotic fury. Seventy-five per cent of British voters now view Sunak negatively (8). No sitting leader of the UK has ever been so widely disliked heading into an election.

As if to compound Sunak’s misery, on 3 June, Nigel Farage announced that he would be standing in the general election as leader of Reform UK, the post-Brexit political vehicle he set up with the rightwing former real estate CEO Richard Tice. Speaking at the launch of his campaign in the coastal English town of Clacton – one of the most staunchly pro-Brexit constituencies in the country – Farage said that he wanted to impose an immediate moratorium on all ‘non-essential’ immigration to the UK. He later revealed two more provocatively populist policies: scrapping Britain’s net-zero targets and banning the teaching of ‘gender ideology’ in schools. In a BBC interview, he went on to accuse the West of ‘provoking’ Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (9).

By 14 June, Reform had reached 19% in the polls, one point ahead of the Conservatives. Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system means that the party will end up with a marginal number of seats after 4 July. But Farage aims to maximise his political influence rather than accumulate legislative responsibilities. ‘I intend to lead a political revolt,’ he said at his campaign launch. ‘A turning of our backs on the political status quo. Nothing in this country works any more.’

Farage may already have his eye on the next UK election in 2029. The old British conservative base is splintering. Brexit has lost its salience as a galvanising cause, eclipsed by other far-right pet themes – immigration, culture wars and the cost of living. A third of Tory voters say they may switch to Reform, an Anglified cousin of France’s Rassemblement National. Four years after leaving the European Union, British – or, at least, English – voting patterns are becoming more continental (10).

Cautious Labour alternative

Sir Keir Starmer – a former director of public prosecutions for England and Wales – has capitalised on the disunity of the UK right by presenting himself as a moderating figure in British politics, a safe, centrist alternative to 14 years of ‘Tory chaos’. Labour’s policy offer reflects Starmer’s caution. When he replaced Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in April 2020, he promised to maintain the bulk of his predecessor’s leftwing platform, including Corbyn’s plans to boost public investment, abolish the House of Lords and increase taxes on the ultra-rich. Since then, Starmer has shed nearly every aspect of Corbyn’s socialist vision. In February, Labour ditched its flagship promise to spend £28bn per year decarbonising the British economy. In its place, Starmer unveiled a more modest commitment: £5bn per year, by the end of the 2020s, for assorted ‘green investments’.

Anxious about the softness of Labour’s support and eager to play to the anti-woke gallery, Starmer has been just as ruthless on cultural issues. Corbyn opposed capping the number of immigrants coming into the UK. Starmer is vocal in his desire to reduce Britain’s net migration figures. In April 2022 Starmer called for fresh curbs on environmental protesters. In May of this year, he welcomed a hard-right former Conservative MP, Natalie Elphicke, into the Labour fold (11).

Such gestures form part of a wider political pattern. In 2023 Labour’s National Executive Committee formally barred Corbyn from standing as a Labour MP. (Corbyn has since opted to stand as an independent in his London constituency of Islington North.) In June the party banned the leftwing academic Faiza Shaheen from standing in Chingford and Woodford Green. Starmer also sought to block the veteran socialist MP Diane Abbott – in 1987, the first Black woman ever to be elected to the UK parliament – from standing as a Labour candidate, though he was subsequently forced to drop his opposition following a huge public outcry over her treatment. In each case, contested claims of antisemitism were weaponised against the left. Palestine has become a running political sore for the Labour leader, who refused for months – and in the face of growing domestic anger – to support a proper Gaza ceasefire. Starmer’s hesitancy to condemn Israel’s onslaught suggests he will pursue a strongly Atlanticist foreign policy. 
If Starmer’s ascent has been smoothed by the collapse of English conservatism, he has benefited from another stroke of political good luck: the self-inflicted implosion of the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) in Edinburgh. On 30 April the SNP’s leader, Humza Yousaf, quit as Scottish first minister after just 13 months in the post. Yousaf was the preferred successor of Nicola Sturgeon, who ran the SNP – and Holyrood, Scotland’s devolved national parliament in Edinburgh – for nearly a decade between November 2014 and March 2023. Her departure last spring, after a string of electoral victories, stunned the nationalist movement. 
Sturgeon was a victim of her own success. Under her leadership, support for independence – the SNP’s raison d’être – reached an all-time high of 58%. But when she asked the UK government to legislate for a fresh independence referendum, it simply, and repeatedly, said no. Eventually, in November 2022, the British Supreme Court ruled that Scotland could not legally secede from the UK without Westminster’s consent. This ruling blocked Scotland’s last constitutional exit route from the UK and, for Sturgeon, marked a personal impasse. She was the primary architect of the SNP’s ‘de-risking’ strategy – the idea that Scotland could gradually unpick its 300-year-old union with England with minimal political fuss.

‘Knowing when it was right to go’

In February 2023 Sturgeon announced her resignation. ‘Since my very first moments in the job, I have believed that part of serving well would be to know almost instinctively when the time [was] right to [go],’ she said. ‘Even if, to many across the country and in my party, it might feel too soon.’ Sturgeon’s departure seemed to tip Scottish nationalism into crisis. In April 2023 her husband, Peter Murrell, the SNP’s former chief executive, was arrested in connection with a long-running police investigation into the party’s campaign finances. Two weeks later, as part of the same investigation, SNP treasurer Colin Beattie was taken into custody. In June Sturgeon herself was questioned by the police. Murrell has since been charged with embezzlement; Beattie and Sturgeon have not. 
Yousaf – 38, and a former Holyrood health secretary – was elected as Sturgeon’s replacement in March 2023. But instead of restoring stability to the party, he panicked and, in the months following Sturgeon’s arrest, began shedding key policy proposals, including a slate of flagship environmental reforms. These U-turns strained the SNP’s relationship with its junior coalition partners at Holyrood, the Scottish Greens. In April 2024 Yousaf ditched his party’s governing agreement with the Greens, struck by Sturgeon three years earlier. In response, the Greens withdrew their support for Yousaf in parliament, splintering Holyrood’s pro-independence majority. By May, Yousaf, shell-shocked and out of his depth, had resigned. Meanwhile, the SNP, still reeling from Sturgeon’s exit, was forced to elect yet another leader, this time in the form of John Swinney. 
Swinney led the SNP unsuccessfully between 2000 and 2004 before becoming Sturgeon’s deputy first minister in 2014. Quietly conservative and personally unassuming, he has become a respected elder statesman of the independence movement. However, like Yousaf, he has been unable to escape the messy inheritance left by Sturgeon, a tangled combination of financial controversy, internal party confusion and constitutional inertia. As a result, the SNP’s aura of electoral dominance – it has been in power for almost 20 years, having first won office under Alex Salmond in 2007 – has evaporated, creating a political void that Starmer, a staunch unionist, is about to fill. For the first time in a decade, Labour looks set to win most of Scotland’s 57 Westminster seats. Even Glasgow, the SNP’s so-called ‘Yes City’ stronghold, appears to be reverting back to Labour.

Curiously, Labour’s revival in Scotland has not diminished the country’s appetite for independence, which still commands the support of around 50% of the electorate. The durability of nationalist sentiment suggests that the union’s future is far from secure, even if the political mechanisms for ending it remain, for now, unclear. Last year, the republican Sinn Fein became the largest party in Northern Ireland and could make further gains this summer (12). In Wales, despite Labour’s continued dominance of the Senedd (devolved assembly), independence has crept slowly into the mainstream. In January, an official commission on devolution tacitly endorsed boosting the powers of the Senedd and described Welsh sovereignty as ‘viable’ (13).

The political seas may have parted for Labour, but dispatching two increasingly discredited incumbent parties on either side of the border will be the least challenging part of the party’s transition into power. Governing Britain after 4 July will be much harder. Rachel Reeves, Starmer’s shadow chancellor, has a plan to reinvigorate the UK economy which includes a new ‘strategic partnership’ between the state and the private sector and a national wealth fund to turbocharge investment in the country’s most industrially depressed areas. Labour has been warned that its spending commitments will not undo the damage done by austerity. The spending plans set out by Labour and the Conservatives ‘imply sharp real-terms cuts to a range of [departments], without spelling out where those cuts will fall or how they are to be achieved’, a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, stated in the run up to 4 July (14). Both parties, the Institute said, were dishonestly ‘silent’ on the ‘inevitability’ of future cuts.

Reeves insists that, under Labour, a higher rate of economic growth will offset the need for further fiscal retrenchment. But the party’s position on Brexit – there will be ‘no going back’ into the single market or customs union, Starmer has said – complicates that argument. On 22 June, a group of prominent economists warned that trade barriers erected between Britain and the EU after 2020 were ‘stifling’ investment into the UK. Only by rejoining the single market could the UK ‘shift the [economic] dial in a meaningful way’, Dimitri Zenghelis, an economist at the London School of Economics, said (15). This analysis was reinforced by a report, published by the Cambridge Econometrics unit in January, which estimated that the UK economy was £140bn smaller today than it would have been had Britain voted to remain inside the EU in 2016 (16). Labour will likely use the prism of security – Russia and the war in Ukraine – to slowly integrate Britain back into European decision-making structures. The question of formal re-entry into the EU, however, will be off the table for years to come.

And before that, Labour has to grapple with its inheritance from the Conservatives. Starmer’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, has reportedly drawn up a ‘shit list’ of looming domestic crises that will demand the attention of her boss from the moment he enters Downing Street. The list is lengthy: bankrupt local councils, overcrowded prisons, a persistent shortage of NHS funding, long-running strikes on the railways and among junior doctors, and the potential collapse of Thames Water, a barely solvent utility company currently responsible for providing water to approximately 15 million people across the English southeast. These problems will instantly restrict Starmer’s political breathing space. But he does have one advantage: the Tories have left Britain exhausted and in disarray. Labour cannot possibly do any worse.