It’s too early to draw clear conclusions about the meaning of Thursday’s dramatic national election in the U.K., and still less about what lessons it might offer to America's feeble attempt to preserve democracy. But one thing is clear enough: Headlines around the world announcing that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has won a huge victory are factually accurate yet fail to convey the underlying complexity of the situation — especially the extent to which British politics has been thrown into complete disorder.
Starmer, the moderate who has led Labour since 2020 following the party’s crushing defeat the previous year under leftist avatar Jeremy Corbyn, literally became prime minister overnight after the resignation of Rishi Sunak, who also announced that he would step down as leader of the Conservative Party. Sunak oversaw his party's devastating collapse at the polls over the six-week election campaign, and has no possible political future after that. Based on near-final vote counts, Labour has won 412 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons — one of the largest majorities in British political history, and the party’s biggest win since Tony Blair’s neoliberal-flavored “New Labour” surged to victory in 1997.
