UK elections: How ill-managed Brexit wrote obituary to 14 years of Conservative rule

The landslide Labour Party victory in Britain after 14 years could be beneficial for the India-UK relationship. Britain should be hungry for trade, industrial collaboration, and new markets, and India could provide a very lucrative opportunity. The outgoing Tory government has failed to fill the trade vacuum after Brexit, even though the referendum and vote to exit came eight years ago.

With India, Rolls Royce has signed an agreement, but only as recently as January 2024, to work with India’s Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers Limited (GRSE) to manufacture MTU Series 4000 Marine Engines in India for the Indian Navy and Coast Guard. Rolls Royce makes a range of state-of-the-art naval application engines. This is at GRSE’s diesel engine manufacturing plant in Ranchi. Rolls Royce has also signed a seven-year agreement with Azad Engineering, based in Hyderabad, for it to manufacture critical components for its aircraft engines, again at the end of January 2024.

More initiatives in line with India’s atmanirbhar defence manufacturing policy could be welcomed by New Delhi. Let us hope the incoming Labour government acts with more urgency than its predecessor. The Free Trade Agreement, which should have been finalised at least a couple of Diwalis ago, was made a priority by Keir Starmer on the campaign trail.

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The ‘original sin’ as far as domestic politics in Britain is concerned was committed by the Tories when they held the 2016 referendum on Brexit. This act, under David Cameron as prime minister, was expected to result in a negative vote against leaving the EU. Instead, as is often the case in such ‘yes or no’ binary votes, the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU. It was a narrow margin—48 per cent against and 52 per cent for the brexit—but it illustrated the famous British class divide. The poor and working class voted to leave the EU; the middle classes and above wanted to stay part of Europe.

David Cameron, an upper-class ‘toff’, most recently acting as Rishi Sunak’s Foreign Minister, had also risked his arm with Scotland in a similar referendum in 2014. There, only 44 per cent voted for Scottish independence, while an unprecedented 86 per cent of the electorate voted in that referendum. And so Cameron thought to repeat the feat with regard to the EU.

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The Scottish vote had gone along the lines expected. It proved to be a setback for the separatists, including Scotland’s then ‘First Minister’ Nicola Sturgeon and leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP). Sturgeon worked as head of SNP from Cameron’s days to the early part of Rishi Sunak’s prime ministership, but with no real traction for SNP’s separatist plank.

Coming to today, in the 2024 election, the Labour Party took most of the Scottish seats, with the separatist SNP Party nearly wiped out, winning just 9 seats. Scotland definitely does not want to leave the United Kingdom.

David Cameron promptly resigned after the Brexit vote and left the matter of negotiating Brexit with the EU to his successor. After that, Tory prime ministers came thick and fast, trying to get out of the EU with reasonable terms. Of these, the one often described as ‘bizarre’ Boris Johnson was the most successful. But Britain has not recovered from this radical surgery yet. And amongst other things that brought Tory rule to a decisive end 14 years later, Brexit is one of the thorniest thorns embedded deep in the flesh of subsequent economic woes.

Anti-incumbency is a hydra-headed thing, and most analysts advance more recent causes such as high prices, unemployment, and the withdrawal of a host of subsidies that have made it harder to live, which took elections away from Tories. The government’s revenues have proved inadequate, and further borrowings have become unsustainable. Inflation is rampant, and prices have skyrocketed. So much so that ordinary people are struggling to put food on the table.

Illegal immigration, taking scarce jobs from those who most need them, is a hot button issue that the Tories have tried and failed to tackle.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party has been reforming itself. It got a new, centrist leader along the ‘New Labour’ lines of the very successful Tony Blair.

Keir Starmer, the PM elect, exudes a kind of stodgy dependability that lacks the Blair charm and silver tongue. It won Blair the Labour victory and prime ministership in 1997. But Starmer is well away from the dour resentfulness and anti-Semitism of his Labour Party predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. He is, however, not that far in image from former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, 2007–2010. Brown was earlier a successful Chancellor of the Exchequer. He is credited with reforming Britain’s monetary and fiscal policy under Tony Blair.

The 61-year-old Starmer is a barrister who has been a human rights lawyer. He has no truck with the radical element in his party, though he recognises that they too get elected by Labour voters. Still, it is his centrist ways that have given the Labour Party a landslide victory with 412 seats in a 625 seat lower house at Westminster. The Tories are likely to end with 121.

Meanwhile, even as he conceded defeat and congratulated Starmer and the Labour Party, Rishi Sunak won his seat at Richmond and Northallerton. So did the anti-immigrant right-wing former Tory minister Suella Braverman, whom Sunak fired for insubordination. This, even though most of the Tory ministers lost.

Hard Right politician and Reform UK Party leader, Nigel Farage, won his seat at Clacton on the eighth attempt. Along with three others from his party, he will now be heard not just in the media but at Westminster too. The Liberal Democrats are likely to end up with about 71 seats to make up the third largest block in the British parliament.

The people of Britain have voted for change, and the old orthodoxy that determined whether one was a Whig or Tory voter has become a thing of the past. The new mantra is perform or perish — British politicians are getting used to an electorate without loyalists

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.