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      Rishi Sunak, Britain’s Prime Minister, Is Probably Doomed

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      When Rishi Sunak became prime minister of Britain a year ago, there was little sense of celebration. The markets were in free fall after the disastrous 49-day tenure of his predecessor, Liz Truss, and the government was in disarray. Mr. Sunak, who had been rejected by Conservative Party members earlier in the year, was inserted by lawmakers in the desperate hope he could calm the crisis. Given that the party had just ousted two leaders in quick succession, it was unclear how long he would even stay in the post.One year later, he can take comfort that Britain is in a different place. It’s now possible, for a start, to have a conversation with visitors without being asked what on earth is going on. Projecting decency and stability, Mr. Sunak has calmed the markets, helped to repair relations with the European Union and sated his party’s appetite for regicide. The next election, due by January 2025, is on the horizon. Even party critics concede that Mr. Sunak will lead the Conservatives into it.But that’s where the good news stops for the prime minister. While Mr. Sunak has moved his party out of crisis mode, he is yet to win over voters. Against hopes that a new leader would raise the party’s fortunes, Mr. Sunak’s approval ratings have sunk along with esteem for the Conservatives. The polls repeatedly suggest a 20-point lead for the opposition Labour Party, whose leader, Keir Starmer, businesses and the media view as the prime minister in waiting.Adding to a sense of fatalism, a steady drip-feed of local elections — often set off by the bad behavior of Tory lawmakers — have cost the Conservatives once-safe seats. Two more, including one in Conservative hands since 1931, went over to the opposition last week. Mr. Sunak may be doing his best, in trying circumstances. But at the moment, it’s nowhere near enough.There’s an argument that any leader would struggle with the conditions Mr. Sunak inherited: high inflation, increased borrowing costs and low growth. Across the world, incumbent governments of all stripes are finding their time is up — whether it’s the center-left Labour Party in New Zealand or the right-wing populist Law and Justice party in Poland. When Mr. Sunak has found success, it’s been by making his own weather. His renegotiation of the Northern Ireland protocol, an especially vexed post-Brexit arrangement, showed maturity and won him a brief popularity bounce.Yet economic difficulties have been stubborn. Mr. Sunak, a former chancellor, was picked by lawmakers because of his economic credentials — and he has managed to win back some market confidence. But the government is still boxed in. The right of the party, including the outspoken Ms. Truss, wants tax cuts. Mr. Sunak won’t budge until inflation is down, which is not happening quickly enough. Facing a winter of high bills, Britons will be feeling the pinch for some time to come.But Mr. Sunak’s biggest challenge is the length of time his party has been in power. The Conservatives, plagued by scandal, have overseen a country where discontent is legion: A survey taken this summer found that three-quarters of people in Britain believe it is becoming a worse place to live. After 13 years of Tory rule — the same amount of time New Labour, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, enjoyed in office — the other side can’t be blamed for Britain’s woes.Mr. Sunak’s attempts to overcome this fundamental problem are twofold. First, he has accepted that the country is not working and needs to change. His five priorities — halving inflation, stopping the boats carrying migrants across the Channel, cutting National Health Service waiting lists, growing the economy and reducing debt — are designed to reflect key voter concerns. But many are pessimistic that all the goals can be achieved. Continuing health worker strikes, for example, signal that unhappiness with the state of the N.H.S. is unlikely to subside ahead of the election.His second move is more ambitious. In a bid to shake off the baggage of previous Tory governments, Mr. Sunak is trying to depict himself as the change candidate. He has axed David Cameron’s pet project, a high-speed rail network linking the Midlands and the North, and scaled down the net-zero commitments embraced by Boris Johnson and Theresa May. The goal is to show him as a man of action with his own convictions, someone prepared, as he recently put it, to “be bold.” But running against your party’s own record is tricky, and it is already causing resentment among colleagues who served in previous administrations.Hope, strangely, could come from the opposition. Mr. Starmer is yet to be embraced by the public — his job satisfaction ratings remain stubbornly low — and support for his party largely stems from anti-Tory feeling rather than enthusiasm for Labour itself. By depicting Mr. Starmer as a flip-flopping leader at the helm of an ineffectual party, the Tories aim to claw back support. Yet it’s telling that conversations with Conservative lawmakers — some of whom have already begun planning for life after politics — tend to focus more on what will happen after defeat than on how they might win.In Tory circles, a dinner party game is to debate who the next leader might be. The current favorite is Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary who has made a name for herself with attacks on identity politics. But the scale of defeat is key. A small one would see status quo candidates, like the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, or the defense secretary, Grant Shapps, emerge. A wipeout — winning fewer than 200 seats out of 650 — would give the edge to wild-card candidates from the party’s right. In that scenario Suella Braverman, the hard-line anti-immigrant home secretary, would come to the fore.For the Tories, such a contest — full of bloodletting and bombast — could be a disaster, setting the stage for years in the wilderness. To prevent it and to forestall defeat, Mr. Sunak must change the narrative. Politics is unpredictable, as Britain has amply shown in the past eight years. But right now, one thing’s for certain: The prime minister is running out of time.Katy Balls (@katyballs) is the political editor of The Spectator.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Another Setback for Rishi Sunak in a Local Election

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      Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is trailing the opposition Labour Party in opinion polls.Britain’s governing Conservative Party, which is trailing badly in the opinion polls, lost one of its safest parliamentary seats on Friday in a significant new setback for the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who was also awaiting the result of another closely watched contest.Voting in the two Conservative strongholds of Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire took place on Thursday to replace two of the party’s lawmakers — one of whom quit after an allegation of sexual assault — and came as Britain’s health care system faces acute strain and its economy stagnates amid high inflation.The first result, announced early Friday, from Tamworth, is a stinging blow to Mr. Sunak, who, since he became prime minister last year following the brief and disastrous leadership of Liz Truss, has failed to close a persistent double-digit deficit in the opinion polls against the opposition Labour Party. The stakes are high because Mr. Sunak must call a general election within the next 15 months.In Tamworth, northeast of Birmingham, the vote was to replace Chris Pincher, the former Conservative lawmaker who had represented the district. He resigned from Parliament after a drunken incident in which, it was alleged, he had groped two men. In the 2019 general election, Mr. Pincher won with a majority of 19,634. On Friday that was overturned when Sarah Edwards for Labour won 11,719 votes, and the Conservative candidate, Andrew Cooper, won 10,403.“Tonight the people of Tamworth have voted for Labour’s positive vision and a fresh start,” Ms. Edwards told her cheering supporters after the result. “They have sent a clear message to Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives that they have had enough of this failed government.”Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, described the vote as “a phenomenal result that shows Labour is back in the service of working people and redrawing the political map.”In a statement, he added: “To those who have given us their trust, and those considering doing so, Labour will spend every day acting in your interests and focused on your priorities. Labour will give Britain its future back.”A result was also expected early Friday from the vote in Mid Bedfordshire, around 50 miles north of London, to replace Nadine Dorries, a former cabinet minister and prominent supporter of Boris Johnson, who quit as prime minister last year.Analysts caution against over-interpreting the results of these types of local contests — known as by-elections — where there is no prospect of the result changing the government, and voters often cast their ballots to register a protest against the governing party. Less than 36 percent of registered voters turned out to vote in Tamworth; in Mid Bedfordshire the number was higher, at 44 percent.Because the Conservatives won so convincingly at the last general election, in 2019, Labour still has an electoral mountain to climb if it is to win a clear majority the next time Britons are asked to decide who should govern them.Yet, the scale of the switch of votes does not bode well for Mr. Sunak, suggesting that even some of his Conservative Party’s more secure strongholds are no longer impregnable.Mr. Sunak was praised for restoring some measure of stability after Ms. Truss’s economic plans roiled the financial markets and she became the country’s shortest lived prime minister in history. But he has struggled to win over the British public after 13 years of Conservative government.In recent weeks, Mr. Sunak has tried to seize the political initiative with a series of eye-catching decision: scaling back climate change targets, canceling the second phase of a high-speed rail project, announcing new measures to phase out the sale of cigarettes to young people and proposing a shake-up the high school examination system.Little electoral reward appears to have flowed from these announcements, however, three of which were made at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester earlier this month.That meeting was distracted by a high-profile appearance by Ms. Truss, and by scarcely concealed jockeying from those who see themselves as contenders for the party leadership, should the Conservatives lose the general election.By contrast, Labour’s conference in Liverpool, the week after, presented a more unified and confident image of a party that sees itself as close to power.Friday’s results are the latest in a succession of election setbacks for Mr. Sunak. In July Labour won a by-election in Selby and Ainsty, in the north of England, overturning a Conservative majority of more than 20,000.Earlier this month, Labour unseated the Scottish National Party from the Rutherglen and Hamilton West district, in a result that underscored a revival of the main opposition party’s fortunes in Scotland. Success there during the next general election could significantly improve Labour’s prospects of forming the next government. More

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      Scenting Power, U.K. Business Flocks to the Labour Party

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      The governing Conservative Party was long seen as entrepreneurs’ natural ally and lobbyists’ most important target. With an election on the horizon, that’s changing.It was impossible to miss: a large green, yellow and blue off-road vehicle parked in a prime spot in the exhibition hall at the Labour Party’s annual conference. The car belonged to Ineos, one of the world’s largest chemical companies, and its outsize presence, among dozens of businesses and organizations, marked the company’s first time attending the gathering.Andrew Gardner, who runs Ineos’s huge refinery complex in Grangemouth, Scotland, was standing by the vehicle on Tuesday afternoon, grabbing time with passing Labour lawmakers to discuss the company’s goals.He had never attended a Labour conference before, and skipped the governing Conservative Party’s the previous week, but said he had come to this one, in the northern English city of Liverpool, because Labour was expected to form the next government. His colleague Richard Longden, Ineos’s head of communications, chimed in, describing “a vibe here of a party that’s changed, and one that’s looking forward to the future. And business needs to be speaking to them and needs to be seen.”“Which is exactly why we’re here,” Mr. Gardner added.In Britain, the Conservative Party has traditionally been seen as the party of business and the guardians of free enterprise. Now, under the centrist leadership of Keir Starmer, Labour is taking over that mantle. As the party inches closer to power, with a general election expected next year, it is engaged in a mutually beneficial love-in with the corporate sector.At the four-day conference this week, attended by 18,500 people, British executives and lobbyists representing industries from finance and technology to construction and defense crammed into bars, corridors and meeting rooms as Labour made its pitch to be “the undisputed party of business,” in the words of Jonathan Reynolds, a lawmaker who speaks for Labour on the issue.The record attendance was boosted by companies showing up for the first time, decamping from their more familiar habitat of Conservative Party gatherings, including Ineos, whose CEO and founder is the billionaire Brexit supporter Jim Ratcliffe.Ineos’s refinery complex in Grangemouth, Scotland. The company, whose founder is a billionaire Brexit supporter, had a strong presence at Labour’s conference.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesMr. Gardner said that Labour was already saying 80 percent of what he wanted to hear in terms of decarbonizing large-scale industry, as the company invests in reducing its carbon emissions. (That off-road vehicle was hydrogen-powered.) But he was there to push for the last portion, which was to lobby Labour not to end natural gas exploration in the North Sea too soon.That message was “slowly percolating,” he said. And there was some evidence that Ineos was being heard: Rachel Reeves, who would become Britain’s first female chancellor if Labour win next year, mentioned Grangemouth in her speech to party members.The party brought together about 200 executives on Monday at a forum within the conference to meet would-be cabinet ministers.“What we are experiencing is a party who tell us that, if elected, they want to be business-friendly government, that they want to work with the private sector in partnership,” said Chris Hayward, who speaks on policy questions for the City of London, Britain’s historic financial district.At a reception on Tuesday evening held by Labour Business, a forum to engage with the commercial sector, the mood was almost euphoric. As guests sipped wine and ate canapés, the group’s chairman, Hamish Sandison, said that not only had the tide turned in terms of Labour’s relationship with business, it had “become a tsunami.”That enthusiasm partly reflects strained relations with the governing Conservatives, particularly over Britain’s exit from the European Union, which many big corporations opposed.Boris Johnson, a former prime minister, famously dismissed the concerns of businesses over Brexit in crude terms. His short-lived successor, Liz Truss, caused markets chaos with her plans for unfunded tax cuts. And although her successor, Rishi Sunak, restored some calm, he has recently upset many businesses by abruptly changing targets on some net zero plans and canceling part of a high-speed train network.Labour has been on a journey, too. Its previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, promised nationalization of key industries and big increases in public spending funded by higher taxes. That agenda has been unceremoniously junked by Mr. Starmer, who became leader in 2020 and moved to purge his predecessor.Labour’s shift attracted some surprising names, like JCB Hydrogen, an energy firm, which handed out tote bags to party members. Its chairman, Anthony Bamford, was a prominent supporter of Brexit and, during the last general election in 2019, hosted a campaign event for Mr. Johnson.Outside the Labour conference on Tuesday. It had 18,500 people in attendance.Jon Super/Associated PressWhat draws many businesses to Labour is the prospect of a more stable policy environment, which could be cemented by the party’s plans for a long-term industrial strategy — an idea that runs counter to Mr. Sunak’s free-market instincts.Carl Ennis, the head of Siemens in Britain and Ireland, was also at the Labour conference for the first time. He was there to lobby for an “overarching” and long-term approach, which was something that the Conservatives were struggling to provide, he said. “My job is to make the U.K. an attractive place for Siemens to invest its money in,” he said, adding that Labour’s industrial strategy appealed to him.In every meeting room, businesses had the same central plea: Give us consistency. And the Labour party was receptive, said Shevaun Haviland, the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce. “We feel very positive that the party’s listening to what we have to say and what our members have to say,” she said.Ben Wilson, vice president of public policy for Mastercard, said that his experience of engaging with the party was “indicative of how open Labour is to business,” saying that he and other executives had the opportunity to discuss policies that could form part of the platform of the “next government.”All this has revived memories of the 1990s when, in the years before Tony Blair became prime minister, the party wooed business over lunches and dinners in what was nicknamed the “prawn cocktail offensive.” This time much of the interaction has been over breakfast with Ms. Reeves, nicknamed the “scrambled eggs and smoked salmon offensive.”“Ever since I became shadow chancellor I’ve had this aim to reach out to business,” Ms. Reeves, a former economist at the Bank of England, said at a small event on the sidelines of the conference. “A lot of the businesses that I’ve met over the last two and a half years would have seen, in some of the announcements this week, their fingerprints on our policies.”While some on the left of the party were unnerved by the dominant presence of business and its influence on future policy, other supporters suggested it was the inevitable result of Labour’s double-digit poll lead.“Businesses are here in numbers,” said Stephen Kinsella, a former antitrust lawyer and Labour donor. “There are a lot of people who want to back a winner, think they have spotted a winner and realize they need to get to know the people who are going to be in government.” More

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      UK’s Labour Holds Party Conference After a Big Win

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      Just ask Britain’s opposition Labour party.Only a month ago, some Labour Party officials were fretting about the risks of fighting a parliamentary election in Scotland days before the party’s annual conference.What if the party underperformed, just before its leader, Keir Starmer, had to make one of the most important speeches of his career?In the end, the opposite happened.Labour exceeded its own expectations, trouncing the Scottish National Party in the district of Rutherglen and Hamilton West, outside Glasgow.It now seems the timing could not have been better. The victory not only promised to energize the gathering in Liverpool, but it also offered a road map for how Britain’s main opposition party could defeat the Conservatives and regain power after 13 years.“One thing is now clear,” Labour’s triumphant candidate, Michael Shanks, said to a cheering crowd on Friday. “There’s no part of this country where Labour can’t win. Labour can kick the Tories out of Downing Street next year and deliver the change that people want and this country so badly needs.”That is a message that Labour’s leaders will push relentlessly over the next three days, and it captures a paradox at the heart of British politics: Labour, the party of change, is seeking to lock in its current trajectory, while the Conservatives, the incumbents lagging in the polls, are desperate to shake up the political landscape.That dynamic helps explain why the Conservative leader, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, scrapped part of a costly high-speed rail project — one long supported by both parties — and is restyling himself as a disrupter. “Be in no doubt,” he told his party conference last week in Manchester, “it is time for a change, and we are it.”Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain on Wednesday at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester. He has tried to position himself as a “change candidate,” even as his party has held power for 13 years.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor Mr. Starmer, the goal is less far-fetched, if still challenging, according to analysts: He needs to give voters good reasons to vote for his party, rather than simply against the unpopular Conservatives.“Keir Starmer has done a lot of things faster than he expected,” said Jonathan Powell, who served as chief of staff to a previous Labour prime minister, Tony Blair. “His task now is to make the sale to the public, which doesn’t really know him.”That will most likely involve Mr. Starmer reiterating the five missions that he set for the party in February, focused on economic growth, clean energy, the National Health Service, crime reduction and expansion of opportunity.A few of these missions sound not unlike the goals Mr. Sunak has set. And if Labour wins power, it will face the same funding squeeze that has shackled the Conservatives. But Mr. Starmer at least is not hobbled by his party’s record in government. Polls suggest that serial scandals under one of Mr. Sunak’s predecessors, Boris Johnson, and the misbegotten tax policies of another, Liz Truss, have lingered in voters’ minds.“People don’t like the Tories — they’re prepared to vote for Labour,” said Steven Fielding, an emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham, who is attending the conference as a delegate. “But there is a sense that Labour has to give those voters something.”One thing Labour does not want to give them is the drama that spiced up the Conservative conference, with its attention-grabbing speeches by Ms. Truss and Suella Braverman, the home secretary, both of whom appeared to be vying for the future of the party even as Mr. Sunak tried to assert his control.At a pre-conference briefing for delegates, Mr. Fielding said, Labour officials warned them to avoid unguarded late-night conversations with journalists. “This is not a place to debate policy,” he said, paraphrasing the party’s message. “This is not a time for disagreement. This is a time for nailing the lead Labour has.”In polls of whom Britons would prefer as prime minister, Mr. Starmer ranks roughly even with Mr. Sunak, even though Mr. Starmer’s party is far ahead of the Conservatives.Hannah McKay/ReutersMr. Starmer will no doubt gladly discuss the by-election. Labour won back the seat from the Scottish National Party, which had held it since 2019, with a resounding 58.6 percent of the vote, an increase of 24.1 percentage points over its last election, while the S.N.P. scored 27.6 percent, a decline of 16.6 points.“You couldn’t have had better walk-up to the conference,” said Nicola McEwen, a professor of public policy at the University of Glasgow. “The scale of the victory is more than they could have hoped for.”Professor McEwen cautioned that by-elections, with their low voter turnouts and strong anti-incumbent bias, do not automatically translate into similar gains in general elections. But she said the Labour Party had run an effective, disciplined campaign in Rutherglen — one it could rerun in districts across Scotland, where the S.N.P., like the Conservatives, is battling acute voter fatigue.Were Labour to replicate its success throughout Scotland, it could pick up 42 seats, according to John Curtice, a professor and pollster at the University of Strathclyde. (It currently has only two.) That would restore the party to a level of dominance that it has not had since 2014, when the S.N.P., riding a wave of support for Scottish independence, emerged as a dominant political force.Such a gain could help Labour amass a clear majority in Parliament, even if — as Professor Curtice said was likely — the party’s nearly 20-point advantage over the Tories tightens somewhat in the coming months.If the S.N.P. maintained its current number of seats, Labour would need to beat the Tories by 12 percentage points just to eke out a single-seat majority in Westminster, according to Professor Curtice. But for every 12 seats that Labour wins in Scotland, it could give up two percentage points to the Tories and still gain a majority.Labour still faces challenges, political analysts said. Mr. Starmer, a former public prosecutor, is not nearly as charismatic a figure as Mr. Blair was in 1997. In polls of whom Britons would prefer as prime minister, he ranks roughly even with Mr. Sunak, even though his party is far ahead of the Conservatives.As prime minister, Mr. Sunak retains an ability to set the agenda. After Mr. Sunak announced the suspension of the rail project, called High Speed 2, Mr. Starmer acknowledged that Labour would have to honor it. “I can’t stand here and commit to reversing that decision,” Mr. Starmer told the BBC. “They’ve taken a wrecking ball to it.”But on Friday, the Labour leader was not looking over his shoulder at the Tories. In a jubilant detour to Scotland, on his way to Liverpool, he sounded very much like a politician who could see a clear path to 10 Downing Street.“You blew the doors off,” Mr. Starmer told a victory rally. “Because we’ve changed, we are now the party of the change here in Scotland. We’re the party of change in Britain, the party of change right across the whole country.” More

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      Scottish By-election Result: Labour Beats S.N.P. in Key Parliamentary Vote

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      The opposition party took back a parliamentary seat from the Scottish National Party, in a win that observers said showed a path to power in next year’s general election.Britain’s opposition Labour Party won back a parliamentary seat in Scotland on Friday by a thumping margin, after a closely watched race that had been viewed as a barometer of the party’s national appeal before a general election next year.In a dramatic swing of votes, Labour unseated the Scottish National Party from the Rutherglen and Hamilton West district, a cluster of towns outside Glasgow that had been held by the S.N.P. since 2019. Voters triggered the by-election by recalling the party’s representative, Margaret Ferrier, after she violated lockdown restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.The result was striking evidence of a Labour revival in Scotland. But the broader significance is for the party’s looming national contest with the governing Conservative Party. Analysts said the victory suggested that Labour could make significant inroads against the Scottish National Party next year, which could give it the margin to amass a clear majority in Parliament over the Tories.Though a Labour victory was expected, its scale was not. The wide margin gives a welcome shot of momentum to the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, two days before his party gathers in Liverpool for its annual conference. It will add to the sense that Labour, with a nearly 20-point advantage over the Conservatives in national polls, is a government in waiting.It also dramatizes the collapsing fortunes of the Scottish nationalists, for many years a hugely powerful force in Scottish politics, led by the charismatic Nicola Sturgeon. Her sudden resignation in February plunged the party into division, and within months it was hit by a financial scandal that undermined voter confidence.Labour had been left with only a single seat in Scotland after its bruising defeat in the 2019 general election, while the surging S.N.P. picked up 48 seats. Even before Thursday’s vote, polls had suggested that Labour could grab back as many as half of those seats in the next election, which would give it a valuable cushion, even if its lead over the Conservatives narrows nationally.When all the votes were tallied early on Friday morning, the district elected the Labour candidate, Michael Shanks, over the Scottish nationalist candidate, Katy Loudon, by a margin of 9,446. The seat had traded hands between the parties several times since it was created in 2005; Ms. Ferrier had held a margin of only 5,230 people.Labour won 58.6 percent of the vote, an increase of 24.1 percentage points over its last election, while the S.N.P. drew 27.6 percent, a decline of 16.6 percentage points. The Conservatives won only 3.9 percent, a decline of 11.1 points, while 11 other candidates split the remainder of the vote.Speaking to cheering supporters, Mr. Shanks said the results sent an unmistakable message that “it’s time for change,” adding, “There’s not a part of this country where Labour can’t win.”Anas Sarwar, the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, characterized it as a “seismic” victory in an interview with the BBC. “Scottish politics has fundamentally changed,” he said.If Labour were to perform as well in every constituency in Scotland as it did in Rutherglen, it could win more than 40 seats in a general election and re-establish itself as the dominant party in Scotland, John Curtice, a professor at the University of Strathclyde and a leading pollster, told the BBC.“This is a remarkably good result for the Labour Party,” he said.Turnout for by-elections is typically lower than in general elections, but the 37 percent turnout in this vote was a particularly steep decline from 2019. Analysts attributed that to a combination of heavy rain and a requirement for voter ID — a first in a Scottish election — which officials said may have resulted in some people being turned away from polling places.But the low turnout did not hamper Labour, which had poured resources into the race. Mr. Starmer and other Labour leaders campaigned aggressively in the district, emphasizing Mr. Shanks’s roots in the community, where he is a teacher.The result is a stinging setback for Humza Yousaf, who replaced Ms. Sturgeon as Scottish National Party leader and first minister of Scotland, and who campaigned energetically on behalf of Ms. Loudon, a former teacher and respected local council member.For all the euphoria among Labour officials, some observers said the result was as much a reflection of disgust with Ms. Ferrier’s behavior, and fatigue with the S.N.P. more broadly amid an ongoing cost of living crisis, as it was of excitement about Mr. Shanks and Labour.“The S.N.P. has brought Scotland to its knees,” Elizabeth Clark, 68, a retired nurse in Rutherglen, said last month.Still, as polls closed at 10 p.m. on Thursday, Jackie Baillie, the deputy leader of the Scottish Labour Party, was confident. “It is clear for all to see,” she said, “that Scottish Labour is once more a serious force in Scottish politics.” More

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      How America Made James Bond ‘Woke’

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      After so many decades fighting evil masterminds bent on Britannia’s destruction, the 21st-century version of James Bond has found a very 21st-century antagonist. In the newest Bond novel, “On His Majesty’s Secret Service,” 007 is charged with protecting King Charles III from a dastardly plot hatched by a supervillain whose nom de guerre is Athelstan of Wessex — in other words, a Little Englander, a Brexiteer, a right-wing populist, apparently the true and natural heir to Goldfinger and Blofeld.The novel’s Bond, who carries on a “situationship” with “a busy lawyer specializing in immigration law” (not to worry, he’s not taking advantage, “he wasn’t the only man she was seeing”), must travel to Viktor Orban’s Hungary to infiltrate the vast right-wing conspiracy and avert a terrorist attack at Charles’s coronation; along the way the secret agent muses on the superiority of the metric system and the deplorable dog whistles of populism.The book’s mere existence seems designed to agitate conservatives; I wouldn’t have read it without the spur of hostile reviews from right-of-center British scribblers. But the progressive Bond also usefully illustrates an interesting feature of contemporary politics in the English-speaking world. It isn’t just that American progressivism supplies an ideological lingua franca that extends across the Anglosphere, such that what we call “wokeness” naturally influences the fictional MI6 no less than the real C.I.A. It’s that forms of progressivism that originated in the United States, under specific American conditions, can seem more potent among our English-speaking friends and neighbors than they do in America itself.This is not a fully provable assertion, but it’s something that I felt strongly on recent visits to Canada and Britain. Politically, Canadian Conservatives and Britain’s Tories seem to be in very different positions. In Canada, the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, looks poised for a major victory in the next election, which would end Justin Trudeau’s three-term reign as prime minister. In Britain, the Tories are poised for a drubbing in the next election, which would push them into the opposition for the first time since 2010.But in power or out of power, both groups seemed culturally beleaguered, resigned to progressive power and a touch envious of the position of American conservatives (if not of our political captivity to Donald Trump). In Canadian conversations there were laments for what was lost when Trudeau defeated Stephen Harper in 2015 — how elections have consequences, and the consequences in Canada were a sharp left-wing turn that no Conservative government is likely to reverse. In British conversations, the talk was all about how elections don’t have consequences, and how notional conservative rule has done nothing to halt the resilience of progressive biases in government and the advance of American-style wokeness in the culture.These complaints encompass a lot of different realities. In Canada, they cover the rapid advance of social liberalism in drug and euthanasia policy — with nationwide marijuana decriminalization followed by British Columbia’s new experiment in decriminalizing some harder drugs, while assisted suicide expands more rapidly than in even the most liberal U.S. state. In Britain, they cover the increasing enforcement of progressive speech codes against cultural conservatives — like the Tory councilor recently arrested by the police for retweeting a video criticizing how police officers dealt with a Christian street preacher.In both countries the complaints cover rising immigration rates — the conscious policy of the Trudeau government, which is presiding over an extraordinary surge in new Canadians, and the sleepwalking policy of the British Tories, who despite Brexit and repeated populist revolts find themselves presiding over record net migration rates. (By contrast, when America elected the immigration restrictionist Trump, immigration rates did actually decline.)And in both countries, conservatives feel that their national elites are desperately searching for their own versions of the “racial reckoning” that convulsed the United States in the summer of 2020, notwithstanding the absence of an American-style experience with either slavery or Jim Crow.Thus the spate of national apologies, canceled patriotic celebrations and church burnings in Canada in 2021, following claims about the discovery of a mass grave in British Columbia near one of the residential schools for Indigenous children that the Canadian government sponsored, often through religious institutions, in the 19th and 20th century. (The cruelty and neglect at these schools was real but the specific claims about graves at the B.C. school have outrun the so-far scanty evidence.) Or thus the attempted retcon of England’s deeply homogeneous history — well, since 1066, at least — into an American-style “nation of immigrants” narrative, and the sense, as the British writer Ed West wrote in 2020, that in English schools “America’s history is swallowing our own.”To the extent that these complaints capture an Anglosphere reality, I think you can identify several different points that might explain what Canadian and British conservatives are seeing.The first is a general tendency of provincial leaders to go overboard in establishing their solidarity and identification with the elites of the imperial core. Both Ottawa and London can feel like provincial capitals within the American imperium, so it’s not surprising that their leaders and tastemakers would sometimes rush to embrace ideas that seem to be in the American vanguard — behaving, as the British writer Aris Roussinos puts it, like “Gaulish or Dacian chieftains donning togas and trading clumsy Latin epithets” to establish their identification with Rome. By contrast in continental Europe, in countries that are under the American security umbrella but don’t share as much of our language and culture, the zeal for imitation feels a bit weaker, and “anti-woke” politics that double as anti-Americanism feel more influential.The second point is the role of secularization and de-Christianization, which are further advanced in the British Isles and Canada than in the United States. The new progressivism is not simply a new or semi-Christian substitute for the former Western faith, but the rhetoric of diversity-equity-inclusion and antiracism clearly fills part of the void left by Christianity’s and especially Protestantism’s retreat. So it would not be surprising for an ideology that originates in the post-Protestant precincts of the United States to carry all before it in post-Protestant Canada or Britain, while meeting more resistance in the more religious regions of America — and not just in the white-Christian Bible Belt but among the religious-conservative minorities whose rightward trend may be keeping the Republican coalition afloat.Then the third point is that smaller countries with smaller elites can find it easier to enforce ideological conformity than countries that are more sprawling and diverse. Once a set of ideas take hold among the cognoscenti — progressive ideas in this case, though it could apply to other worldviews as well — it’s more natural to conform, and more difficult to dissent, in the cozier precincts of Westminster or among Canada’s Laurentian elite than it is in the American meritocracy, which spins off more competing power centers and dissenting factions.An extreme example of this tendency is visible in Ireland, which shifted incredibly rapidly from being the West’s conservative-Catholic outlier to being close to uniformly progressive, a swing that the Irish writer Conor Fitzgerald attributes to a fundamental reality of small-island life: “Because of Ireland’s size, it is much more socially costly for an Irish person to appear to go against a consensus than it is for other people in other countries.”A recent essay by the Cardiff academic Thomas Prosser makes a related point about other small Celtic polities, noting that Scotland and Wales as well as Ireland have governments that are more progressive than their voters, a pattern he attributes to the way that ascendant ideologies (neoliberalism in the 1990s, or woke progressivism now) can sometimes achieve a kind of full elite “capture” more easily in smaller countries.Bucking consensus is presumably easier in Britain and in Canada. But not as easy, perhaps, as in the vast and teeming United States — which in its First Amendment-protected multitidinousness can be both the incubator of a potent new progressivism and also the place where resistance to that ideology runs strong, indeed stronger even than among 007 and other servants of His Majesty the King.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Tony Blair, Former U.K. Leader, Is Suddenly Back in Favor

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      The former British prime minister, who left Downing Street widely unpopular, is back in favor with his party, Labour, which hopes his political skills can be an advantage as an election nears.A decade and a half after Tony Blair left Downing Street, one issue still defines the former British prime minister in the eyes of many Britons: his disastrous decision to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.When Mr. Blair was given a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II last year, more than a million people signed a petition demanding the honor be rescinded. And within his own Labour Party, he remained a complex figure, detested by those on the far left while grudgingly admired by some who noted that he was the party’s only leader to have won three consecutive British elections.Today, with the Labour opposition sensing rising power under the stewardship of its leader, Keir Starmer, Mr. Blair is suddenly, and rather remarkably, back in favor. For Mr. Starmer, embracing Mr. Blair sends a political message, underscoring Labour’s shift to the center. But the former prime minister also has charisma and communication skills that Mr. Starmer lacks, assets that could be useful as a general election approaches.Last month, the two men appeared onstage together, exchanging compliments at a glitzy conference organized by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — an organization that works for governments around the world, including autocratic ones, and churns out policies that could help Labour if it wins the next election.Mr. Blair, now 70, is graying, thinner and his face a little more gaunt than when he left Downing Street in 2007. But he still effortlessly held the stage as he told the audience that Britain would be in safe hands if Mr. Starmer won the next election.“It was like the apostolic succession was being declared,” said John McTernan, a political strategist and onetime aide to Mr. Blair, who added that “the chemistry between the two guys made you think they talk a lot and they understand each other.”Mr. Blair and Labour’s current leader, Keir Starmer, exchanged compliments onstage at a Tony Blair Institute conference.Stefan Rousseau/Press Association, via Getty ImagesJill Rutter, a former civil servant and a senior fellow at the Institute for Government, a London-based research institute, said Mr. Blair “has clearly been keen to reinsert himself as a big player in British politics,” but Mr. Starmer “is the first leader who seems prepared to let him do so.”The right-leaning Daily Telegraph newspaper was more blunt. “Tony Blair is preparing to rule Britain again — and Starmer might just let him,” read the headline of an opinion article.Mr. Blair led Labour into power in 1997 in a landslide victory and was prime minister for a decade, shifting the party to the center, helping to negotiate a peace deal in Northern Ireland and presiding over an economy strong enough to invest in health and education.But by the end of his tenure, and as Iraq descended into chaos, the public had soured on Mr. Blair, who, along with George W. Bush, the United States president, had justified the invasion with never-substantiated claims that the country had weapons of mass destruction. The invasion led to years of sectarian violence in Iraq and the rise of Islamist militant groups that became precursors to the Islamic State.Mr. Blair’s reputation post-Downing Street was further damaged by lucrative consultancy work for governments with dubious human rights records, seeming to confirm his affinity for wealth. Such questions have also been raised about his institute. London’s Sunday Times recently reported that the institute continued to advise the government of Saudi Arabia after the slaughter of the writer Jamal Khashoggi and still received money from the kingdom.The awarding of a knighthood to Mr. Blair last year prompted a street protest.Antony Jones/Getty ImagesIn a statement, the institute said, “Mr. Blair took the view then and is strongly of the view now — as he has said publicly — that whilst the murder of Mr. Khashoggi was a terrible crime that should never have happened, the program of social and economic change underway in Saudi Arabia is of immense and positive importance to the region and the world.”“The relationship with Saudi Arabia is of critical strategic importance to the West,” it added, and “therefore staying engaged there is justified.”None of these criticisms have stopped a rehabilitation that would have been inconceivable while Labour was led by Mr. Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, a left-winger and a fierce political adversary of Mr. Blair’s. At the time, Mr. Starmer worked alongside Mr. Corbyn, and when Mr. Starmer became party leader in 2020, he initially kept Mr. Blair at arm’s length.Now, their ties are so warm that when the former prime minister recently celebrated his birthday at a London restaurant, Mr. Starmer dropped by to wish him well.“Tony has just kept going after a period in which it was almost like the Labour Party didn’t want him to be around,” said Alastair Campbell, Mr. Blair’s former spokesman. “I think people eventually think, ‘Say what you like about the guy, but he’s good at what he does; he’s still the most credible explainer of difficult situations.’”Some see a modern-day political parable in Mr. Blair’s return.“A lot of politics has now taken on the narrative of celebrity,” said Mr. McTernan, the political strategist, adding, “Tony, as a political celebrity, fell in the eyes of the public but he has earned his way back.”“It’s not about forgiveness about Iraq, but there is an arc of a narrative around Tony,” Mr. McTernan said, with Britons starting to “be ready to listen again.”Mr. Blair addressing British troops as prime minister in Basra, Iraq, in 2003.Pool photo by Stefan RousseauMr. Blair’s political rehabilitation has been helped by comparisons with a governing Conservative Party that has presided over political turmoil. Years of deadlock over Brexit were broken when Boris Johnson won a landslide election in 2019 — only to be driven out of Downing Street last year under a cloud of scandal. He was replaced by Liz Truss, the British prime minister with the shortest stint in history, before Rishi Sunak restored some stability.“We have had such a succession of failed prime ministers that, to look at someone who did command the stage, you do look back and say, ‘He was quite a big dominating prime minister,’” said Ms. Rutter.The institute’s output has also helped change Mr. Blair’s image, Mr. Campbell, his former spokesman, said. The former prime minister saw a gap for relatively nonideological research focusing on technocratic policymaking and tackling challenges such as artificial intelligence, digital policy and relations with the European Union.With about 800 staff members scattered around the world in Abu Dhabi, Accra, San Francisco, Singapore and New York, and a sleek, modern office in the West End of London, the institute has even had influence over the Conservative government, Ms. Rutter said, pointing to Mr. Blair’s proposal during the coronavirus pandemic to structure its vaccine program around giving as many people as possible a first shot.Mr. Campbell, his former spokesman, added that the work of the institute showed Mr. Blair in a new light, making money not just for himself but also “to build an organization, the fruits of which people are now seeing.”Perhaps the biggest question is: Now what?Mr. Blair, on the left of the second row, sat with other former prime ministers at the coronation of King Charles III this year.Pool photo by Richard Pohle“In the campaign, does an intervention from Tony help?” Mr. Campbell said of the coming election. “In my mind, it would; it would be big news. But that’s a tactical question.”If Labour wins power, more possibilities for influence would open up for Mr. Blair.Ms. Rutter suggests he has built up his institute in part because, when he was in Downing Street — which has relatively few staff members compared with government departments — he believed he had too few experts at his disposal.“The question is whether Blair is content to have an institute churning out reports that a Labour government may or may not want to look at, or will he be looking to be more of a power behind the throne,” she said.Mr. Blair, she added, “has tried to amass a huge piece of policy capability — the only problem for him now is that he’s not prime minister.” More

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      NatWest C.E.O. Resigns Amid Nigel Farage’s Feud With Coutts Bank

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      Nigel Farage, a political insurgent and ally of Donald J. Trump, exposed his bank for dropping him over “reputational risks.” Some analysts say he could parlay his situation into a comeback.When Nigel Farage campaigned for a fellow populist, Donald J. Trump, in 2020, he seemed like a faded star seeking the spotlight abroad after it had swung past him at home. Mr. Farage, who helped mobilize the pro-Brexit vote in 2016, was marginalized in Britain, then consumed by the pandemic.No longer: For three weeks, Mr. Farage, has been back on the front pages of British papers, with an attention-grabbing claim that his exclusive private bank, Coutts, dropped him as a customer because of his polarizing politics.Early on Wednesday, after Mr. Farage’s allegations were largely vindicated, the chief executive of his bank’s parent, NatWest Group, resigned after she admitted improperly discussing his bank account with a BBC journalist. The chief executive, Alison Rose, said she was guilty of a “serious error of judgment.”For Mr. Farage, who expertly stoked the dispute on social media and with appearances on the TV network GB News, the drama catapulted him back into the limelight. It was a striking turn of events for a political insurgent who became, for many, a reviled symbol of Brexit, and later, a culture warrior on right-wing television.Now, facing expulsion from Coutts, a bank founded in 1692 that serves members of the British royal family, Mr. Farage suddenly began getting expressions of sympathy from some improbable places.“He shouldn’t have had his personal details revealed like that,” Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party said on the BBC Radio 5 Live show. “It doesn’t matter who you are; that’s a general rule,” Mr. Starmer said, adding that Ms. Rose’s departure was warranted by her mishandling of the case.Among Mr. Farage’s stoutest defenders was Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who said on Twitter, “No one should be barred from using basic services for their political views. Free speech is the cornerstone of our democracy.”Pressure from Mr. Sunak and the chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, hastened Ms. Rose’s downfall after she confessed to being the source for the BBC report, which claimed, erroneously, that Mr. Farage had been dropped because he did not have enough money in his accounts. The government owns 39 percent of NatWest, which in turn owns Coutts.Alison Rose resigned her position at NatWest Group after saying she spoke to the BBC about Mr. Farage’s bank account.Simon Dawson/ReutersThe episode, analysts said, underscores the power that Mr. Farage, a former head of the U.K. Independence Party, still wields over the Conservatives. The Tories have long feared losing the votes of Brexiteers, who were critical to their electoral landslide in 2019, to whatever populist party is currently identified with Mr. Farage.Though Mr. Farage, 59, stepped down in 2021 as head of his latest party, Reform U.K., he is the host of a GB News talk show and remains an outspoken voice on issues like asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats. Prodded partly by Mr. Farage’s commentary, Mr. Sunak has made curbing the influx of small boats one of the five major goals of his government.“They’re very aware they need to hold on to the Farage-friendly voters they picked up in 2019,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, “They’re being driven in that direction, too, by the right-wing print media. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened — and it won’t be the last.”Mr. Farage isn’t satisfied yet. He is demanding the ouster of NatWest’s chairman, Howard Davies, and the chief executive of Coutts, Peter Flavel. And he says he will fight on behalf of thousands of other people whose accounts he says have been unfairly closed.“You can’t live or survive in the modern world without a bank account — you become a nonperson,” Mr. Farage said on GB News on Wednesday. “The whole banking industry culture has gone wrong. We need big changes in the law.”What exactly Mr. Farage has in mind is not clear. But his campaign plays into a fervid political climate in Britain, which suggests that his critique might gain traction. The Conservatives, trailing Labour in opinion polls by double digits, are seizing on social and culture issues to try to galvanize their voters.Mr. Sunak asserted this week that the Labour Party was in league with criminal gangs and unscrupulous lawyers in promoting the flow of asylum seekers across the channel. He presented himself as the bulwark against this illegal immigration, the kind of claim Mr. Farage might have made when he was in politics.Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain onboard Border Agency cutter HMC Seeker, last month ahead of a news conference on immigration. Pool photo by Yui Mok“If Farage is smart, he will use this as a runway to some kind of political comeback,” said Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent whose recent book, “Values, Voice and Virtue,” claims that Britain is ruled by an out-of-touch elite that is well to the left of the broader population.“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Goodwin said. “The institutions, like the banks, are dominated by people who lean much further to the cultural left than many voters and who often do not even realize they are being political.”Such sweeping assertions are open to debate, of course. In the United States, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has had mixed results going after what he calls the “woke” policies of corporate giants like the Walt Disney Company.What makes Mr. Farage’s story striking is that he turned out to be right on the facts of the banking case — and some bastions of the British banking and media establishment turned out to be wrong.In late June, Mr. Farage said on social media that his bank told him it planned to close his account in July. Seven other banks, he said, turned him down when he tried to open a new account. He said he believed he had been flagged as a “politically exposed person,” meaning he was vulnerable to bribery by foreign governments, and therefore a risk to the bank.In early July, the BBC reported that the bank, now identified as Coutts, dropped Mr. Farage because he was not maintaining adequate account balances — and that his politics had nothing to do with it. But on July 18, Mr. Farage made public a 40-page document he obtained from the bank, which painted a different picture.A branch of Coutts Bank in London.Susannah Ireland/ReutersMr. Farage, the report said, is “considered by many to be a disingenuous grifter,” often criticized for racist or xenophobic statements. Such statements, it said, put Mr. Farage at odds with the bank’s goal of being an “inclusive organization.” The report also noted that he is an ally of Mr. Trump’s and a fan of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, though the bank’s risk committee found no evidence of “direct links” between him and the Russian government.“There are significant reputational risks to the bank in being associated with him,” the report concluded, recommending that Coutts wind down its relationship with Mr. Farage after the expiration of a mortgageThe BBC’s economics editor, Simon Jack, and the chief executive of BBC News, Deborah Turness, apologized to Mr. Farage — as did Ms. Rose, who confirmed that she was the source for its report. She expressed regret for discussing his account, as well as for “the deeply inappropriate language contained in those papers.”For Mr. Farage, who has sometimes seemed adrift since Britain left the European Union, it seemed the springboard to a new cause, if not a return to politics.“It signals a big campaign on behalf of the huge number of ordinary people who’ve been de-banked and have had no one to speak up for them,” Mr. Farage said through a spokeswoman at GB News. More