LONDON, July 15 (IPS) – The political winds have turned in Britain and civil society will be hoping the government’s hostility will end.
The July 4 general election ended 14 years of rule by the right-wing Conservative Party. The centre-left Labour Party came to power, winning 411 of the 650 seats.
But behind the headlines, there is little reason to think Britain’s political instability is over, with the deeply polarised 2016 Brexit referendum still having an impact on politics.
Keir Starmer became prime minister after the most unbalanced election in British history. Under Britain’s old electoral system, his party won about 63% of the seats on 34% of the vote, up about 1.5% from its 2019 vote and down from its second-place finish in 2017.
There was little public enthusiasm for Starmer and his cautious reform promises. But with high prices, failing public services and a housing crisis, many wanted every bit of change they could get. The overwhelming sentiment among the public was that the Conservative government was selfish and unrealistic and should go.
Labour was not the only beneficiary of the Conservatives’ decline. Smaller parties and independents won the most votes in a century. The right-wing populist Reform Party came third with 14.3%, doing best in the areas that had the strongest support for leaving the EU, but because of the way the electoral system worked, it won just five seats.
Labour’s parliamentary majority is wide but shallow, with many seats won by narrow margins. The Reform Party, which came second with 98 seats, is expected to exploit the Tories’ disarray and make as much noise as possible in parliament to find a breakthrough next time. Conservative politicians may decide to turn their lessons further to the right and that a coalition or merger between the two right-wing forces cannot be ruled out.
Discontent and apathy were also reflected in the record low voter turnout of just 59.9%. There may be several reasons for this. The perception that Labour’s victory was a foregone conclusion, and the voter ID measures introduced by the previous government may have prevented 400,000 people from voting. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that at least some of those who stayed home felt they had no choice but to choose between the parties on offer.
Time to reclaim your rights
To address discontent and to stave off the threat of right-wing populism, Labour must demonstrate that it can make a difference in solving Britain’s economic and social unrest. One way to signal change and build positive partnerships to tackle problems is to respect civic space and work with civil society. There is much room for improvement here.
Under the previous government, hostility towards civil society and civil liberties have grown. Last year, the UK’s civic space assessment was downgraded to ‘disturbed’ by CIVICUS Monitor, our collaborative research project that tracks the health of civic space around the world. The main reason was new laws that significantly increased restrictions on protests and expanded the powers of police to disperse and arrest protesters. Climate activists were a major target.
As the outgoing government backed away from its pledge to zero and pledged to expand oil and gas extraction, campaigners increasingly embraced nonviolent direct action. The government’s response was to denounce climate protesters under laws that criminalize protests deemed noisy or disruptive. Mass arrests of protesters have become commonplace, and it is no longer uncommon for people to be sentenced to prison for protest-related crimes. Recent protests against the monarchy and those demanding stronger action against Israel have faced similar treatment.
Meanwhile, the outgoing government has continued to stoke public hostility, particularly towards migrants crossing the English Channel who have no legal route. The ‘hostile environment’ policy led to the Windrush scandal, when people who had been living legally in the UK for decades were detained and deported for not having the necessary documentation. More recently, the government introduced the Rwanda policy, threatening to permanently deport people to authoritarian East African countries. When the European Court of Human Rights ruled in response to a civil society lawsuit that the policy was unlawful because Rwanda was not a safe country to send people to, the government passed a law declaring it safe, and more right-wing politicians argued that Britain should step back from the court.
At the same time, the government has squandered aid money to cover the costs of housing asylum seekers in the UK. In 2020, the government merged the Department for International Development into the Foreign Office and withdrew its pledge to spend 0.7% of GNI on aid in 2021. Last year, the government spent more than a quarter of its aid budget on housing asylum seekers in the UK. This money should be used to end poverty and inequality in the global South.
As part of their rightward shift, the Conservatives have rolled back their commitment to LGBTQI+ rights and waged a cultural war on trans rights, pledging to ban gender-neutral toilets and ban discussions about gender identity in schools. The UK has fallen from being the most LGBTQI+ friendly country in Europe to 16th. As is the case whenever politicians vilify an excluded group, hate crimes against trans people have reached record levels.
All of this leaves civil society with a big agenda to deliver to the new government. There have been some encouraging early signs: the government has backed off the Rwanda plan; it has reversed the ban on onshore wind farms; but there is much more advocacy to be done. The best way to signal a new beginning is to commit to respecting and restoring the spaces in which demands can be expressed: rebuilding relationships with civil society, restoring the right to protest, and reversing human rights abuses..
Andrew Furmin is the editor-in-chief of CIVICUS, co-director and writer of CIVICUS Lens, and co-author of the Civil Society Report.
© Inter Press Service (2024) — All rights reservedOriginal Source: Inter Press Service
