Labour Shouldn't Get a Free Ride to No. 10
The party should have been given far more scrutiny during the election campaign. Its policies on education, wealth creation and public-sector management are naive and sometimes dangerous.
Labour Party leader Keir Starmer
Photographer: Hollie Adams/BloombergOn July 4, the British people are likely to do something remarkable: hand the Labour Party almost absolute power without subjecting it to even rudimentary scrutiny.
The British political system is what the Tory grandee Lord Hailsham once described as an “elective dictatorship”: The prime minister doesn’t confront the system of checks and balances that are common in liberal democracies, most obviously in the US. The second chamber is unelected, the Supreme Court is a novelty and local government is weak. And Starmer is likely to enjoy both a huge majority and the support of the civil service and the wider intelligentsia.