London, London

A few days across the pond

At some juncture soon, I’ll write on Donald Trump. The takes are flying already. My thoughts are still trying to cohere. We’ll see what rattles around in the next few days. I’m flying to Milwaukee tomorrow to pick up my credential to cover the Republican convention—I’ll miss night number one—and I’m sure I’ll think of something to say about that. Trump nearly died, but didn’t. What a strange sentence to write.

Before all this, I was in London for a few days. I had some free time for a short trip and was intrigued by the prospect of watching the United Kingdom’s elections up close. Rishi Sunak, the Conservative prime minister, had called an election for July 4th, which amused me. I wasn’t actually there on July 4th—I spent one July 4th in Europe already and I don’t intend on doing another one there—but I was milling about in the days before. I bought all the newspapers, met an old friend, made a new friend, and chatted with the good chaps at Verso, who are publishing a nonfiction book of mine next year. I walked a lot, as is my habit in foreign cities. I delighted in supermarket sandwiches that would only cost me the equivalent of three dollars. I made a mental survey of London, logging pros and cons in my blinkered New York sensibility. It was my second time there, and I had one conclusion: it’s a cleaner, more efficient, less dynamic, and less pretty New York. The Thames is brown and ugly in the daytime, more alluring at night, and the East and Hudson vistas, not to mention the Narrows, easily overwhelm it. I also need air-conditioning on my summer public transit. But I liked the little parks. Yes, many little parks. Always another Square to take shelter in, to hunt out a bench and read a good book. Parts of New York City absolutely have too much concrete. I also spent an hour in Liverpool, speeding through a Beatles museum. I had to get back to London quickly because Labour was holding a rally there in the afternoon.

One pleasant memory was falling asleep in Russell Square, near my hotel. This is something you can readily do in London because dog shit doesn’t cake park grass. My plane had come around 6:30 in the morning; the congressional and state primaries in New York had finished hours earlier and I filed this Crain’s column from a Heathrow lobby. I was still a livewire on the Picadilly line, taking in the sights, and I hoped my hotel would somehow let me check in before 2:00 in the afternoon. They did not, as is the case with most hotels, and I left my suitcase in a storage area and wandered into Russell Square, the park nearby. I read in the grass, Fernanda Eberstadt’s The Furies, and slowly, gloriously, passed out. I had those demented, fractured dreams you’ll have in the sunlight. I can’t remember what they were. London could not awe me like Tokyo could, but it was a place I could comfortably, for an hour at least, dispose of my waking consciousness.

A version of what I wrote on the U.K. elections appeared in The Nation and you can check it out there. Below is a similar piece, with a few more flourishes. Despite what the headline suggested, I did not only feel envy, though Starmer-style stability is preferable to the madness of the current moment. In a strange way, I felt recommitted to what Philip Roth once called that indigenous American berserk.

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Keir Starmer is a curious man of history. When I saw him on stage in late June, less than a week before his Labour Party would secure one of the great parliamentary majorities in British history, he was headlining a campaign rally in London, promising enough change while warning, with far more vigor, against prolonging the crisis of Conservative governance. Starmer, or Sir Keir—he was knighted a decade ago—is not a politician, as many have observed, to stir the blood. To my American eyes, he blended the charisma of Jeb Bush with the ideological slipperiness of Hillary Clinton. His speech was as memorable as a trip around the car park. Used to the garish, if occasionally thrilling, campaign theater of the United States, I was struck by the intimate gymnasium containing the entire red-shirted Labour crowd, which numbered well under a thousand. It matched the size and strength of a congressional candidate’s rally somewhere in suburban New Jersey.

But Labour won. That is inarguable. They broke 14 years of dismal Conservative rule and will have an iron-clad grip on the government of the United Kingdom, barring catastrophe, for the next five years. At first blush, this has nothing to do with the United States. There is little chance our center-left party, the Democrats, wins full control of the government this fall. If 81-year-old Joe Biden, trailing Donald Trump in the polls and battling back calls to step aside after the worst televised debate performance in American history, manages to eke out a victory, it will be incredibly difficult for Democrats to retain control of the Senate. The best case scenario, for them, is survival—nothing like the thumping victory the Labour Party enjoyed. And Starmer, a former prosecutor and human rights lawyer, is a full two decades younger than Biden, able to fluidly, if dully, communicate with his public as the new prime minister.

The British can also take comfort in the fact that the far-right is nowhere close to controlling the government. There is no Trump or Marine Le Pen looming, no rank nativist threatening to trod over 10 Downing Street. Rishi Sunak, the Conservative prime minister who Starmer vanquished, is a prototypical wealthy Tory, if the nation’s first nonwhite prime minister. Britain’s Trumpish analogue, Boris Johnson, was chased from power in scandal, and he’ll have scant influence over a political system dominated by Labour.

Americans on the left can only dream of the Democrats having five years ahead of them of interrupted power, of the GOP driven to distant margins that they may not recover from for another generation. The rest of the decade will belong to Starmer, like the 1980s belonged to Margaret Thatcher or the late 1990s and 2000s were the domain of Tony Blair’s New Labour.

The conventional read on the parliamentary election isn’t necessarily wrong: Starmer won by tugging Labour to the center and offering an agenda tailored to the broadest number of British voters. He promised to bolster the National Health Service, reverse the Conservative-imposed austerity, and build many more homes to address the U.K.’s housing affordability crisis. He promised to hire more police to crack down on knife crime (gun violence is a uniquely American scourge) and combat so-called “antisocial behavior,” like public urination, drunkenness, and drug-dealing. Like Biden, who authorized a tightening of the southern border in the vein of Trump, Starmer triangulated on immigration, pandering to nativist sentiments enough to even antagonize the Bangladeshi community, a longtime Labour constituency. He chased away Muslim voters by failing to recognize Palestinian statehood. This is not Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. In fact, over furious Labour opposition, Corbyn retained his North Islington Parliamentary seat. He is now an independent.

Yet the triumphalism of the new centrists and old Blairites masks the frailty of Labour’s sweeping victory. This is not Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the dawn of the New Deal era. This is a nation, not unlike the U.S., where disdain for the two major parties has reached a historic zenith. Conservatives and Labour won their lowest combined vote share ever, with Labour actually managing fewer votes than in either of the elections helmed by Corbyn. The British masses were far more forcefully opposed to the Tories than enraptured by Starmer’s Labour Party. Labour built their margins, in part, with the help of the collapse of Scottish National Party, as most Scots decided they preferred Labour to any lingering hopes of breaking away from the U.K. Voters on the right deserted the Conservatives for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant Reform Party, which won 15% of the overall vote and sent Farage to Parliament for the very first time. Disgust with the Tories handed the centrist Liberal Democrats more seats, too.

On the left, the Greens made unexpected gains, even taking a Labour seat from shadow cabinet minister Thangam Debonnaire. Labour’s election campaign coordinator, Jonathan Ashworth, lost his Leicester South seat to an independent pro-Palestinian candidate, Shockat Adam. Adam was not alone, with four other independents carrying seats with large Muslim populations. Democrats should take heed; enough defections from Muslim and Arab voters could damage them in Michigan, a pivotal swing state.

If the U.S. is an ailing nation by any reasonable human metric—too many poor, too many sick, too much wealth in too few hands, and, post-pandemic, a declining life expectancy—Britain is gripped by a malaise that Labour cannot easily chase away. The Tories strangled growth through repeated and demoralizing budget cuts, shredding a social safety net that was once the envy of the Western world. Britain, according to the United Nations, now has more children in poverty than any other wealthy country. Sans London, some estimate it is poorer than Mississippi. The most tangible Conservative Party legacy beyond austerity, Brexit, has predictably alienated voters across the ideological spectrum, throwing up fresh barriers to business while failing to uplift the working class who believed departing the European Union would vastly improve their lot. Starmer will not bring Britain back into the European Union but wouldn’t matter much if he publicly longed to reverse Brexit; the European leaders, preoccupied with the war in Ukraine and the onward march of the far-right, don’t care much about the fate of the British, either way. The American empire may be faded but it will never be so irrelevant.

The British national mood, as the writer Sam Kriss pointed out, remains grim. The GDP per capita is half that of America’s; beyond the glitz of London, British towns have withered. England, strangely, is the only country with a fully privatized water and sewage system, and politicians are forced to talk tough to the water-industry bosses dumping raw sewage into the rivers. The poor have gotten poorer while corporate profits have mostly flatlined over the last decade and a half. Whereas, in America, talk of politics inevitably takes on the mania of End Times proselytizing—the outcome of this election could obliterate the country for good—the British are under no such illusions. The political system, going forward, might only change so much.

The Labour government can improve lives by simply reversing the most brutal Tory cuts. Social services, public infrastructure, and the arts can all benefit from the end of a supply-side dogma. But they’ve already dialed back bolder promises. A green investment plan has shrunk to £5 billion ($6.4 billion) a year, down from £28 billion. A workers’ rights package—ending bosses’ power to arbitrarily fire and rehire while introducing rights to parental leave, sick pay, and protection from unfair dismissal—has already been weakened after enduring criticism from big business. The two-child benefit cap, which renders parents ineligible for certain state support payments for a third child onward, will remain. Starmer has promised to bolster social services without raising taxes, relying instead on nebulous initiatives to boost economic growth and use that surplus to return Britain to brighter days. There are plans to close a private-equity tax loophole and strip the country’s elite private schools of their tax-exempt status, while raising more cash by targeting widespread tax avoidance. Easier said than done.

What Britain lacks is American dynamism and verve, as well any immediate hopes of resurrecting its industrial base. Biden, to his credit, has spent much of his presidency laying the groundwork for an eventual manufacturing boom, especially for essential semiconductor chips. Starmer has promised to create a state-owned energy company, but he will need to contend with decades of diminished public capacity. His honeymoon won’t last long. If the British horizons feel constrained, there is still a certain comfort that can be derived in the Labour takeover. Politics will be sober and fairly predictable. The Conservatives may veer rightward in a bid to capture the votes lost to Farage’s Reform. A Le Pen-like figure, at some point soon, could seize the party’s leadership. The Tories, though, will be in the wilderness for five years—or, perhaps, much longer. Historically, the British can tolerate one party in power for more than a decade.

The American system, meanwhile, remains far more byzantine—layers of local and national government in conflict, a revanchist Supreme Court increasingly invalidating hard-won rights over the last half century—and deeply volatile, most of the nation herded into two bitter camps, anti-Democrat and anti-Republican. Without a parliament, there is no meaningful outlet for the millions of voters who’d prefer third parties, and with the pox of the Electoral College, minoritarian rule may be our fate again. Starmer-style muddling, in the wake of another Trump maelstrom, is now something to envy.