The political tide has turned in the UK – and civil society will be hoping for an end to government hostility.
The 4 July general election ended 14 years of rule by the right-wing Conservative party. The centre-left Labour party has returned to power, winning 411 out of 650 parliamentary seats.
Behind the headlines, however, there’s little reason to think the UK’s spell of political volatility is over, and the impacts of the deeply polarising 2016 Brexit referendum continue to ripple through politics.
Keir Starmer has become prime minister as a result of the UK’s most disproportionate election ever. The country’s archaic electoral system means his party won around 63 per cent of seats on just 34 per cent of the vote, up only around 1.5 per cent on its 2019 share and less than when it came second in 2017.
There was little perceptible public enthusiasm on display for Starmer and his promises of cautious reforms. But with high prices, failing public services and a housing crisis, many people wanted whatever change was available. Overwhelmingly the public mood was that the Conservative government was self-serving and out-of-touch and had to go.
Labour was far from the only beneficiary of haemorrhaging Conservative support. Smaller parties and independents took their biggest share of the vote in a century. The right-wing populist Reform UK party came third with 14.3 per cent of the vote, doing best in areas that had most strongly backed leaving the European Union, although the workings of the electoral system meant it won just five seats.
Labour’s resulting parliamentary majority is broad but shallow: it won many seats by small margins. Reform, having come second in 98 seats, can be expected to try to exploit the disarray in the Conservative Party, make as much noise as it can in parliament and hope for a breakthrough next time. Conservative politicians may well decide the lesson is to tack further right, and an alliance or merger between the two right-wing forces can’t be ruled out.
Discontent and disengagement were also indicated by a turnout of only 59.9 per cent, one of the lowest ever. There may be a several reasons: a sense Labour’s win was a foregone conclusion, and voter ID measures introduced by the last government that may have stopped 400,000 people voting. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that at least some who stayed at home felt there was no point choosing between the parties on offer.
Time to reclaim rights
To address disaffection and stave off the threat of right-wing populism, Labour will need to show it can make a difference in addressing the UK’s economic and social malaise. One way it can signal a change and build positive partnerships to tackle problems is by respecting civic space and working with civil society. There’s plenty of room for improvement here.
Under the last government, hostility towards civil society grew and civic freedoms suffered. Last year, the UK’s civic space rating was downgraded to ‘obstructed’ by the 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 police powers to break them up and arrest protesters. Climate activists have been the main target.
As the outgoing government backtracked on its net-zero pledges and committed to more oil and gas extraction, campaigners increasingly embraced non-violent direct action. The government’s response was to vilify climate protesters, backed by laws that criminalise protests deemed to be noisy or disruptive. Mass arrests of protesters have become commonplace, and it’s no longer rare for people to receive jail sentences for protest-related offences. Recently, protesters against the monarchy and those demanding stronger action on Israel have faced similar treatment.
Meanwhile the outgoing government relentlessly fuelled public hostility towards migrants, particularly those crossing the English Channel in the absence of legal routes. Its ‘hostile environment’ policy led to the Windrush Scandal – in which people who’d lived legally in the UK for decades were detained and deported for want of documentation they’d never needed. More recently the government introduced its Rwanda policy, threatening to permanently remove people to the authoritarian East African state. When, in response to a civil society lawsuit, the European Court of Human Rights ruled the policy illegal because Rwanda wasn’t a safe country to send people to, the government passed a law declaring it safe, and its more right-wing politicians called for the UK to leave the court.
At the same time, the government raided its aid budget to cover the costs of hosting asylum seekers in the UK. The government merged its international development ministry into its foreign affairs ministry in 2020 and, in 2021, dropped its commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on aid. Last year, it spent more than a quarter of its aid budget – money that should be used to help end poverty and inequality in the global south – on hosting asylum seekers in the UK.
As part of its rightward shift, the Conservative Party also backtracked on its commitments to LGBTQI+ rights, waging a culture war against trans rights, including by promising to ban gender-neutral bathrooms and prohibit discussion of gender identity in schools. The UK went from being Europe’s most LGBTQI+-friendly country to 16th. As happens every time politicians target an excluded group for vilification, hate crimes against trans people hit record levels.
This all leaves civil society with a big agenda to take to the new government. There’ve been some early encouraging signs. The government has dropped the Rwanda plan. It’s reversed an onshore wind farm ban. But there are many more advocacy asks. The best way to signal a new beginning would be to commit to respecting and repairing the space where demands can be articulated: rebuilding relationships with civil society, restoring the right to protest and reversing attacks on human rights.
Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.
