By Amotz Asa-El

 

THERE was a time when Britannia ruled the waves. Now the waves rule Britannia.

Like a storm-tossed ship’s terrified passengers, the kingdom that once dominated the world has just thrown another of its admirals overboard, abandoned by the masses, the elites, the media, and his own political peers.

Yes, Keir Starmer’s two-year premiership lasted longer than Rishi Sunak’s 18 months, not to mention Liz Truss’s 50 days, but with one decade’s seventh prime minister set to enter 10 Downing Street, something is obviously wrong in His Majesty’s realm. What is it?

 

STARMER’S downfall was not about his executive performance. On all his main tasks – immigration, growth, and social policy – his delivery was reasonable.

Immigration, which peaked at 944,000 in 2023, last year plunged to 171,000; the economy grew faster that the rest of the seven richest democracies; and social reforms included a 4.1% raise in minimum pay, railway nationalizations, and raised taxes on gambling, expensive houses and private schools.

Like such measures or not, that’s what Starmer was elected to do. Why, then, did he fall? The one scandal pundits mentioned, his appointment of the disgraced Peter Mandelssohn as ambassador to Washington, is unconvincing. Yes, it showed mistaken judgment, but it was no Profumo Affair, in which the government fell after it emerged that the secretary of defense slept with a Soviet spy.

The better explanation is Labor’s defeat in last month’s local elections, which made its lawmakers panic. But that’s where the deeper questions arise: why panic – there are more than three years until the next general election – and why behead the party leader?

And the answer is that the panic is because the British establishment, both Labor and the conservatives, faces a challenge they do not know how to confront, other than to decapitate one leader after another.

 

REPLACING the leader assumes the voters’ problems is their leader’s identity. If only it were so. The British voters’ problem is not their leader’s identity, but their country’s direction.

It takes no historian to link British politics’ instability to the great event that opened its decade of revolving leaders: Brexit. That jolt, say Brexit’s opponents, was so massive that it debilitated British politics. Wel, they are wrong. The problem was the people’s feelings, which the referendum voiced, and the politicians had failed to detect.

The London-based political and cultural elites had lost touch with the industrial and rural parts of their land. Having underestimated the alienated population’s size and pain, they were stunned once they met the masses’ wrath in the polls.

And then, faced with Brexit’s statement, a massive effort was launched to doubt the majority’s judgment, dilute its verdict and test its will. That’s what the first post-Brexit prime minister, Theresa May, who had opposed the idea all along, tried to do. But even when the baton passed from her to one of Brexit’s key supporters, Boris Johnson, he failed to present an alternative path: say, to lynchpin a grand free-trade zone with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Brexit was only technically about the regulations which gradually threatened British sovereignty and challenged the very concept of national will.  Underneath this legal layer bubbled what mattered most – feelings. And the feeling that drove the Brits to vote Brexit was the same feeling that in the recent local elections made them snub Labor: fear.

The British are fearful, and the fears that drove them to destabilize their political system are not only theirs, but much of the free world’s, from Germany, Italy and France to the United States.

 

ACROSS the West, millions live in growing fear. They fear that the postwar world they inherited is cracking in its every layer. Economically, they fear for their jobs, housing, and savings. Socially, they feel invaded by immigrants. And culturally, they feel that their parents’ traditional values are being replaced by postmodern alternatives which they resent.

Whether or not these feelings are justified is beside the point. What matters is that the security, pride, and sense of belonging with which Western citizens emerged from World War Two have given way to  insecurity, alienation, and steadily eroding dignity.

That, and not the charisma of this or that candidate, is what led millions of Brits to vote for Brexit, that is what made them unseat the Tories, and that is what just made them unseat 1,498 of Labor’s municipal candidates.

 

THE MAN who benefits from these gathering anger and despair, is the populist Reform UK party’s Nigel Farage. He is what the British establishment really fears.

Historians will agree that, whatever this rabble rouser’s role in making Brexit happen, he did not cause the earthquake he so shrewdly exploited. The earthquake was caused by generations of politicians across the rich world who invited from the poor world millions of hewers of wood and drawers of water without preparing their full social absorption. The storm that this myopia stirred is what Britain's political turmoil is about. And the storm has hardly begun.

Millions of Brits now wonder what will be left of the British nation, culture, and character in several decades’ time.

Then again, judging by Keir Starmer’s resignation speech, that British character is still alive and well.  Citing the doubts that grew over his leadership, the departing leader said: “I have heard the answer … and I accept that answer with good grace.”

That grace is part of a culture; a British culture; the British value of assuming responsibility, the way foreign minister Peter Carrington resigned after Argentina invaded the Falklands, and the way prime minister David Cameron resigned after the Brexit poll, which he had called, and resulted in his “Remain” campaign’s defeat.

Keir Starmer cleared the stage with humility, responsibility, and grace, in line with British value of public responsibility, a value which a rapidly changing Britain may or may not preserve, but here in the Jewish state – has yet to arrive.

Jerusalem Post 26 June 2026