Keir Starmer, Reform UK and Britain’s populist paradox
A country ripe for the radical right is on course to elect a centrist who wants a quieter politics
OPPOSITION leaders usually dream of entering Downing Street to the roars and bellows of a triumphant crowd. According to Sir Keir Starmer, the arrival of a new Labour government after the next general election will sound more like the start of a yoga class. There will be “a collective breathing out,” he said in a speech on January 4th. “A burden lifted. And then, the space for a more hopeful look forward.” Fourteen years of Conservative government will end not with a bang but an ommmmm.
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This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Britain’s populist paradox”
Britain January 13th 2024
- The housing ladder, 1950-2005
- A typically British way to smooth handovers of power
- Britain’s worst miscarriage of justice sparks outrage at last
- Britain’s health-care system looks rather as it did in the 1930s
- Wales wants to be more like Scandinavia
- Counting Britain’s beauties and leech-bleeders
- Keir Starmer, Reform UK and Britain’s populist paradox
From the January 13th 2024 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
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A monumental social reform is closer to being realised
The slow death of a Labour buzzword
And what that says about Britain’s place in the world
Britain’s Supreme Court considers what a woman is
At last. Britons had been wondering what those 34m people who are not men might be
Can potholes fuel populism?
A new paper looks at one explanation for the rise of Reform UK
Are British voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks?
How the idea of false consciousness conquered the governing party