Read or listen to the SFL Liberty Report by Gonçalo Torres which delves into the libertarian perspective on the issue of the British Election with Oscar Gill-Lewis.
Gonçalo Torres: Hi, thanks for tuning in to the SFL Liberty Report. This time I’m discussing the British election with Oscar Gill-Lewis, an editor at Speak Freely and a local coordinator in the UK. So this was an interesting election. It was the first time in 14 years that Tories didn’t win an election. Do you think that this was a Labour win or is it a Tory loss, or are people just tired of Tory governments? Or are they excited about a Labour government?
Oscar Gill-Lewis: I think from my point of view, it’s a Tory loss. I don’t think that the Labour Party have been particularly inspirational this election period. Neither has Starmer, he’s considered as quite dry, quite boring, quite safe pick and fairly similar to Sunak as well. You can see that in their personalities as well as in their manifestos. If you took the branding off the manifestos, the Labour Party and the Conservatives, and you read them, you’d be hard-pressed to say which one belongs to which party in terms of their political messaging, their rhetoric, how they come across and then also the policies that they proposed. They’re both incredibly similar, but after 14 years, people have become fed up with Conservative rule. And also in my recent article for Speak Freely. I talk about how Sunak has just completely given up on the young voter base, so boosting the triple lock pension for pensioners and then also suggesting that he would introduce national service which would also benefit the older generations and pensioners.
GT: So did he manage to win the older vote?
OGL: Somewhat, he had a base of pensioners, but it wasn’t enough. He maintained his seat, but there were lots of high-ranking Conservative MPs who lost their seats who will have also been reliant on pensioners.
GT: Yeah, these were some of the past Tory prime ministers who have been especially controversial, right, Boris Liz Truss, now Sunak, a very unpopular leader. I think I read he would be the most unpopular leader if he were to win the election this time. I also read, that the Labour leader would be entering with a negative approval rating if he were to win. So, it was a really difficult choice, probably for Britain.
OGL: I mean, that demonstrates my point perfectly that there’s not any love for Starmer particularly. It’s the same thing with Sunak and Starmer, people don’t see them as different candidates, it’s like if in, your national elections, if people are fed up with the party, they will react against it in the European elections in the European Parliament, which is why you get more extremist parties in the European Parliament. And I think it’s the same thing with this. It’s not a reaction to the person necessarily, it’s more like revenge against the party.
GT: So we already know that the Tories have been difficult, but how would you evaluate the last 14 years? After all, were they overall positive for the country, or do you think they were negative?
OGL: I think they were, they were negative overall. I mean, it is, it’s rather disappointing. Boris Johnson had an 80 seat majority in 2019, but his opponent was Jeremy Corbyn. That’s, that’s starting with the lead. Corbyn was incredibly unpopular. Is allegedly anti-Semitic and wanted to nationalise a lot of a lot of industries in the UK. He wanted to scrap nuclear weapons and get out of NATO. I think then Boris Johnson also was able to capitalise on his personality cult.
But I think that the Conservatives were just trying to win elections rather than improve the country. So they were able to win with Boris Johnson, Theresa May and David Cameron sneaking by with the coalition. At the end of the 14 years. The UK has stagnated. Economically, productivity has stagnated. The standard of living has stagnated. David Cameron said that his proudest achievement in office was legalising gay, marriage which is great, but it’s not, “I increased the growth of the UK by X per cent”.
GT: Yes, yes, it’s a great social win for sure, but he didn’t improve the quality of life of citizens in an economical way.
OGL: Exactly. And he couldn’t point to anything else either.
GT: Yeah, I also read that they typically flip-flopped a lot in policies because they were in power for so long that they tried multiple things.
OGL: Yeah, so you had so you had a lot of different sections of the Conservative Party come into power and then that’s where you see that the flip-flopping on the issues because you’ve got one part of the Conservative Party in power. Then a different part takes over and it has a different view on something. Another thing that was not very good, a trait that came out of the Conservative Party, was that they were incredibly paternalistic. So this really came out during COVID-19. Boris Johnson claimed to be a libertarian at one point and then came in and put incredibly harsh social restriction rules in that had no scientific backing. He also put in a huge sugar tax. Theresa May passed a security law which allowed huge invasions of personal privacy by the state. You could see that a huge trait of the Conservative Party was being paternalistic, even though they were trying to present themselves as not paternalistic.
GT: It kind of reminds you of when Donald Trump wanted to gain the libertarian votes, but he increased tariffs by so much in all of those trade wars, and that’s curious. So as we discussed, the Labour Party lost power 14 years ago, how do you think they changed, essentially are they the same party or did they also go through those changes that we were discussing in the Tories before?
OGL: While Blair and Brown were in power, they revolutionised the Labour Party. So they became New Labour, and they moved away from the sort of traditional socialist policies that Labour went for, and they turned to more market, you might even say neoliberal policies, sort of like Bill Clinton. And Starmer has gone down a similar path because he’s basically realised that it’s the best way to be elected, rather than going for the Jeremy Corbyn radical approach. I’d say the biggest difference is that Starmer is open to nationalisation, for example, one of the big things they’ve talked about is nationalising the railways, which has been quite a controversial topic in the UK. But he’s gone for a bland, centrist approach. They talk about growth a lot, they are very big on growth, but they also want to improve public services, and it’s sort of the contradiction of which one will they prioritise because if you’re going to try to improve public services you need to increase taxes, and it’s trying to not increase taxes too much where you dampen the growth that you’re trying to achieve.
GT: It’s also like not to give grades to the Tories, but they went through multiple economic crises. They had to manage Brexit, but they also went through the energy crisis through COVID-19. So that’s really put a dent in the economy. And now it’s Labour returning with hopefully a more stable world economy. They have a chance to maybe get better growth. Do you believe that the future of growth and development in the Labour Party can be positive despite their problems?
OGL: I’ll just go back to your point. I mean that that is part of the problem, of being in power for 14 years is that you just have so many skeletons in your closet that you can’t, that you just will have problems that follow you. COVID-19 and the energy crisis, and that sort of does hand it to Labour. But at the end of the day, they do have to come up with policies that will actually produce the growth that they’re talking about. I mean, one of the things that I talked about before was that the manifestos were quite similar, with the Tories and the Labour Party. So they both proposed building 1.5 million or 1.6 million houses. I think that’s over there the term, but basically it’s whether you’re building those in London or if you’re building those in the UK. I think it’s a huge, it’s a huge barrier to growth and I think that’s why they’re targeting it. Because we’ve got a housing crisis, so in terms of developed economies in Europe, we’ve probably got one of the biggest lack of housing. So people can’t move to jobs, they can’t have a high standard of living as they want to. It encourages people to leave. You can’t move out of your parent’s house. You can’t build a family. It’s a huge barrier to growth.
One of the examples that Labour is trying to follow at the minute is the example of Milton Keynes and sort of building new towns rather than trying to build up already developed areas like cities. And that’s definitely had some success, but it’s a huge challenge because of the various planning acts that we have that stop growth and that stop us building houses, which originated in the Planning Act of 1947.
And it’s whether there’s the political will to sort of overcome the planning out, but there’s so much bureaucracy that’s involved with it and meetings and committees, and you can’t actually just solve that from Downing Street.
So they’ll have that big problem to solve. And they’re also looking to invest in infrastructure across the country, but that comes with some challenges. Can the population be patient enough to wait for the results while enduring the higher taxes that might come because of the need to fund this new infrastructure? I’m hopeful, but I’m not too hopeful. I think they will have more growth than the Tories for example, but it’s whether they can actually get started from the very beginning rather than wait and spend too much time planning or debating and whether they can quiet the radicals in the party.
GT: To move away from the discussion of two big parties, they’re also. A lot of smaller parties there was the former guy played them, the Greens and I think they were really interesting. In this election, the Reform UK tried to steal the votes away from the Tories. Did they succeed? Were they a good or are they a good alternative?
OGL: So my understanding is that Reform and not necessarily reform alone. I think all of the smaller parties took votes from the Conservatives.
GT: Even the Greens?
OGL: Yes, the Greens as well to some extent. The Brexit Party, which is Nigel Farage’s last time in parliament, their voting pattern and their seats were roughly the same and the people who voted for them are roughly the same. So they stuck to their base, who voted for them again. So they’ve not actually taken from other parties, they’ve just reclaimed their base. And then you’ve got the Lib Dems who have had a huge increase as well as the Labour Party and the other smaller parties. So it’s sort of across the board.
GT: Yes, actually I saw that the increase in the Lib Dems they got something like, but like 12% of the votes and got like a 40% of the votes and got like 12% of the seats.
OGL: 12% of the votes and 11% of the seats.
GT: Exactly, and reform got a little bit more of the votes, but so much less of the seats, less 60 seats or something. Why does the election or the democratic system in Britain allow for something so disproportional?
OGL: So the system that we have in the UK is called first past the Post. So it’s basically we have 600. And so our House of Commons, our Parliament, is made up of 650 seats. So that’s the 650 constituencies across the UK. Basically, in a constituency, it’s the person who gets more votes. Then the other party, so it’s, you don’t need necessarily a majority of the votes or anything like that. You just need more votes than anyone else. And then you get a seat in parliament. So what a lot of the smaller parties will call for is something called proportional representation, which would give them more seats in parliament basically, which is where seats are given proportionally according to the vote. So I think you said before reform got 14% of the votes, but 1% of the seats. And it’s just because the system really that the first past the post, it’s just a different system. It’s the whoever gets the most votes. So it doesn’t matter how many votes you get overall, it’s just in your constituency.
GT: In your opinion, is this a good system or does it need reform?
OGL: I think it’s better than proportional representation because you wouldn’t get a ruling party, otherwise you just get lots of various parties, and you wouldn’t have a strong ruling party. I don’t think either system is perfect, but I’d much prefer the first past the post than proportional representation.
GT: So now that the Lib Dems have a number of seats in parliaments are you as a libertarian happy with these results? How close are they to libertarians?
OGL: I don’t see the Lib Dems as libertarian. Think they were more. They’ve always been quite socially liberal, but they were sort of more market-orientated in their coalition with the Conservative Party in 2010. So one of the former leaders, Vince Cable, was on a podcast with the IEA and talked about being in a coalition of the Conservatives. They (the conservatives), wanted to put tariffs on this. They wanted to regulate this and that, and it disillusioned the Liberal Democrats from being more market-orientated. More libertarian, as you might say. And that’s seen in the current version of the party right now. It’s been captured by the more socially illiberal trends we see coming on, so supporting gender ideology and other things like that where it’s more sort of going into sort of the Democratic socialist rather than markets and/or market-orientated and socially liberal.
GT: What will be different in Britain’s foreign policy now with Labour, will they try to establish some ties with Europe after Brexit? Will they also be Eurosceptic? What do you think?
OGL: I mean just in terms of the Israel-Palestine issue, I think that the Labour Party will at the beginning try and not rock the boat too much on too many issues. So I think it will continue the current level of support for Israel. They’ll probably try to decrease it over time. Obviously, it doesn’t want to attract the same labels of anti-Semitism that the Labour Party received when Corbyn was the leader. It doesn’t want to continue supporting Israel to the same extent. It’s not the most pro-Israel party.
And then I think it will continue its support for Ukraine. I think it’s, it’s, it’s equal to the Conservatives that the UK was one of the first countries to give a huge amount of support to Ukraine. It’s exactly the same as the Conservatives in that sense. I think we’ll see that continue.
In terms of Europe, its voter base is split 50-50 on Europe. Some are incredibly Eurosceptic and some absolutely love the EU, so it will have a really difficult time trying to reintegrate with the EU in terms of establishing deeper ties with certain programmes, like there’s a youth programme that it was thinking about joining, but it hasn’t, it doesn’t want to alienate half of its base.
They’re sort of stuck in limbo where it doesn’t want to alienate half of its voter base on either issue. Starmer has talked about rejoining the single market, but I don’t think that they will try that. They won’t even attempt in the first term to try and rejoin the EU.
GT: Actually, I said that was the last question, but I think I have one more for you if you don’t mind. It’s just that in Europe, there’s been this huge wave of populism. Does Reform UK feed those standards, or has the UK been somewhat immune to that strength?
OGL: I don’t know whether Reform UK is necessarily feeding the wave of European populism. I think it’s probably caught the last wave. It feels fairly new, but it’s not made a huge impact here in the UK.
And I think one of the key differences that you sort of see with Reform UK being a populist party in the UK versus other European populist parties, is that Reform UK is actually more right-wing economically than you might expect. So one of the key theories for populist parties is that they tend to be left-wing economically, but socially quite right wing, which is exactly what Marine Le Pen’s party is, but Reform UK have gone more economically right wing. I don’t see it as a continuation. I mean, you could see it as a continuation, but it’s not, it differs in certain ways in that it didn’t expect to win. It just helped get Nigel Farage back in Parliament. It didn’t expect to win. And that’s one of the key differences is that, for example, the Populist Party in the Netherlands is that it’s ruling on a coalition, which is what you would get with a proportional representation. So you could say that the Populist Party is ruling, but it’s ruling in a coalition. It’s not the sole party. It’s not like the Labour Party ruling by itself.
GT: Thank you so much, Oscar, for agreeing to participate and for talking to us about this by his election.
OGL: It was an absolute pleasure.
