Keir Starmer's Britain: Can the Centre Hold?

The British Labour Party turned itself into a plausible party of government with astonishing speed, a mere five years having passed between former party leader Jeremy Corbyn's epic defeat by Boris Johnson in 2019 to Prime Minister Keir Starmer's landslide victory in 2024. The Conservative Party's Brexit obsession and twenty-first-century populism damaged Britain immensely by raising barriers with its nearest and largest economic partners, and by ripping apart an organic, semi-constitutional relationship that also encompassed foreign and security policy. In summer 2024, however, the centre seemed to be holding in the United Kingdom, as well as in France. Whether such a salutary result could be reached in the United States, roiled by an assassination attempt on Donald Trump and a Supreme Court decision that seemed to largely exonerate him for the 6 January 2021 insurrection and facilitate his dictatorial designs, remained to be seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]