‘Honourable and Gallant Members’: Patrician militarism prevails under Labour
The 2024 general election was a flat affair. A historically low turnout returned a blandly technocratic centrist government. For those with a serious interest in foreign policy and military matters there was very little to choose between the big parties.
Even before the election began, the Tories seemed to know the game was up. The sense of inevitability was compounded by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s stumbling on defence-nostalgia, a mainstay of British politics, at the very outset. First, over a widely derided pledge to ‘bring back national service’. Second, over his questionable commitment to the 80th D-Day commemorations which fell in the same period. The ‘party of defence’, whose invocations of patriotism, war and empire are so reflexive and have often wrong-footed Labour in the past, never seemed to get out of the blocks.
On election night, a number of so-called ‘big beasts’ of the Conservative party fell, as well as many more minor players. Labour, the party of Iraq and Afghanistan, returned to power as most expected. As press coverage pointed out, the high turn-over of seats presented something of an optical illusion given the low turn-out figures. In many constituencies the difference between the Labour and Tory vote seemed to align closely with the figures for defections to the hard-right anti-immigration party Reform UK.… Read more