TThe Labour Party won a landslide election victory in the UK last month, but now faces the difficult and unforgiving task of governing, not helped by the discovery of a £22bn black hole in the public finances.
Considerable voter discontent has focused on the dire state of hollowed-out public services, particularly the NHS. With waiting lists for hospital appointments growing longer, voters on both the left and right are deeply concerned about the health service. Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing Reform UK, is prepared to exploit any public discontent about the state of broken public services and has been vocal about his desire to win over Labour voters.
Keir Starmer is the first centre-left leader to win a British election since Tony Blair, who won with a large mandate to modernise Britain. This time it is different. While Labour won two-thirds of the seats in parliament, it took just over a third of the vote, and much of Labour’s success came from widespread dissatisfaction with 14 years of Tory rule.
Starmer has promised voters that change starts now, but when it comes to the NHS, Labour faces a daunting task. Restoring trust in the health system will be a long, difficult and expensive road in a country struggling with a combination of slow growth, labour shortages and weak public finances.
In a recent research We at Boconni University and the London School of Economics investigated the political consequences of the declining performance of the NHS. By analysing government data on local care home closures and linking this to data on public preferences and voting intentions, we found that closures increased people’s dissatisfaction with the health service and resulted in increased support for reform (and its predecessors, the Brexit Party and Ukip). Furthermore, the link between local care home closures and support for reform is strongest in areas that have experienced increased immigration and migrant registrations at local GP practices. These findings could pose serious problems for Labour if NHS services continue to suffer from cancelled appointments, cuts and closures.
We have seen the results of cuts to public services in other parts of Europe. In Italy, far-right parties have enjoyed electoral success longer than anywhere else in Europe. A 2023 study showed that in Italy, hard right gains in government have been accompanied by cuts and closures of public services. In 2010, a government reform forced municipalities to close and merge local public services, to the detriment of residents. Some “native” citizens then saw themselves as opponents of immigrants in a zero-sum competition for access to essential public services. This research found that broken promises and underfunded public services increase discontent, and when people feel that the state can no longer adequately meet their needs, they experience deep discontent. This has provided fertile ground for the hard right to exploit by promising to restrict immigration and immigrants’ access to local public services. As a result, this increases support for right-wing parties.
But it is not only in Italy and the UK that the erosion of public services is being keenly felt. Across much of rural France, a sense of neglect has led to a swing to the right, leading to a surge in votes for Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National. Similarly, in the Netherlands, the rhetoric of Geert Wilders, leader of the election-winning Freedom Party, includes opposition to cuts to public services alongside anti-immigration sentiment.
Britain’s Reform Party, like many populist far-right parties across Europe, portrays access to public services as a zero-sum game between “native” and “migrant” populations, and blames the latter for deteriorating public services. So fixing the most pressing problems in the NHS will be key to stemming the tide of the populist right in Britain. The problem for Labour is that there is no quick or easy solution to the challenges facing the health service. One of its first actions was to strike a pay deal with junior doctor leaders to end a 20-month dispute that had resulted in 1.5 million appointments being postponed and to increase pay for other NHS staff, but at the same time it decided to withdraw funding for the replacement of crumbling hospitals in a bid to shore up public finances.
This will not inspire much confidence among voters that the NHS is safe in Labour’s hands. And until mainstream parties can demonstrate that they can protect public services, populist parties will continue to draw support from disaffected and ignored citizens.
Yet delivering good health care and maintaining public investment will be a challenge as economic growth stagnates and public finances are under pressure. Whether Starmer’s government can meet public expectations will be one of the key questions of his tenure as prime minister and could determine his ability to win a second term.
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If the British people feel that their new government cares about them and is able to restore good public services that meet their growing needs, then perhaps the far right can be kept at bay.
At a time when trust in politics is low, Labour must deliver or face the wrath of an electorate that wants – even demands – change and may turn to the populist right in the hope of achieving that change.
