How Labour Defeated Populism
They didn’t use emotional slogans. They tried not to make promises they can’t keep. They didn’t have a plan you can sum up in a sentence, or a vision whose essence can be transmitted in a video clip. They were careful not to offer too many details about anything.
Nevertheless, Keir Starmer and the Labour Party will now run Britain, after defeating two kinds of populism. Yesterday they beat the Conservative Party, whose current leaders promised back in 2016 that simply leaving the European Union would make Britain great again. Instead, Brexit created trade barriers and dragged down the economy. To compensate, the Tories leaned hard into nationalist rhetoric, looked for scapegoats, and shuffled through five prime ministers in eight years. None of it worked: Labour has just won a stunning landslide victory of a kind no one would have believed possible after the last election, in 2019.
[Helen Lewis: Goodbye to Tory Britain]
Long before this election, Starmer, the new British prime minister, also ran a successful campaign against the far left in his own party. In 2020, he unseated the previous party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who had led Labour to two defeats. Systematically—some would say ruthlessly—Starmer reshaped the party. He pushed back against a wave of anti-Semitism, removed the latter-day Marxists, and eventually expelled Corbyn himself.
