What the DA can learn from Britain’s Labour Party in this post-Brexit world

The timing was almost too neat to believe. On Monday morning, Sir Keir Starmer stepped outside 10 Downing Street and resigned as leader of the Labour Party, becoming the shortest-serving of Labour’s seven UK prime ministers. The date, 22 June, fell almost precisely 10 years after Britons voted to leave the European Union. The coincidence is not merely symbolic; the causal chain, connecting those two events, is a story of a country enduring a downward spiral of self-destruction. The UK has been many things over the last decade; one thing it has not been is united.

Starmer’s successor — almost certain to be Andy Burnham — will be Britain’s seventh leader in 10 years, an extraordinary tally for a country that once prided itself on quiet, political stability.

David Cameron resigned the morning after the Brexit vote, humming a tune, desperate to avoid the catastrophe of his making. Theresa May was ground down by the contradictions of enacting Brexit. Boris Johnson finally delivered it, then collapsed under a mountain of his own contradictions. Liz Truss detonated the UK bond market. Rishi Sunak steadied things but had no idea where to sail the good ship Albion. Starmer won a landslide and then squandered it with a combination of being politically tone-deaf, uncharismatic, prone to embarrassing policy U-turns, and having a peculiar gift of managing to make a 174-seat parliamentary majority feel precarious.

Labour, it must be said, never loved Starmer in the way it did Jeremy Corbyn or even Tony Blair. It was always a grudging, convenient relationship. Burnham is now his most likely successor, a fact that markets are already digesting. Sterling fell modestly on the news, trading 0.19% weaker against the dollar, while UK gilt yields were largely unchanged, although they were sold off on Friday following Burnham’s by-election win. The bond market’s reaction is a fair reflection of national sentiment: cautious rather than panicked, which is roughly all Britain can hope for these days.

General failure

This is a failure — of Starmer, and of Labour. But it is also indicative of the more general failure of the country. The obstacles are structural. UK labour productivity growth has been anaemic for two decades. Britain’s gross savings and investment rates are the lowest in the G7. Its population is ageing, its government finances are shot, and its headroom for critical spending is non-existent.

Economists estimate the UK GDP per capita is between 6% and 8% lower than it would have been if the vote 10 years ago had gone the way of Remain. That is an extraordinary, unparalleled act of self-harm. It is visible in stagnant wages, fraying public services and a social fabric that is ripping itself apart. Then there is the quiet humiliation of Poland — once a source of cheap “Polish plumber” workers — now looking set to overtake the UK on a per capita basis within the next 10 years.

Brexit did not cause all of Britain’s problems. But it accelerated, exacerbated and came to epitomise them. It also inaugurated a post-truth political culture that Starmer was unable to transcend. The global era of populist posturing it initiated — of nationalism over institutionalism, of cultural and racial grievance over multiculturalism — has proved more durable than critics had hoped.

Across the West (and beyond), nationalist parties have flourished, barriers against trade and migration have been raised, and the political centre has been hollowed out by both flanks. Liberal parties everywhere — including the DA in South Africa — are asking the same, urgent question: what does it mean to be liberal in this new world, and is there still a viable politics to be built around it?

Yet, there are nascent signs the political weather could be shifting. Viktor Orbán has been ousted in Hungary. The Maga movement faces a reckoning in the US midterms, with Donald Trump’s approval ratings at historic lows.

Across several Western democracies, centrist parties are rediscovering a workable formula: that liberalism need not mean cultural detachment from the concerns of ordinary voters, nor should it embrace Wokeist virtue-signalling. Liberal parties should rather deliver pragmatic, growth-oriented economics alongside addressing social issues of voter concern, such as illegal, uncontrolled immigration. Canada and Australia have shown it. Even Denmark — governed by the left, yet running some of Europe’s most stringent immigration controls — has proven that social democracy’s essential commitments need not be sacrificed on the altar of pointless cultural progressivism.

Liberalism reinvents itself

Moreover, liberalism — a basic belief in political and economic freedom, championed by thinkers like John Locke and John Stuart Mill — has an impressive record of reinventing itself. Liberalism has repeatedly been condemned to death — for instance in the 1900s, 1930s and 1970s — only to emerge more vigorous than before. These revivals have all followed the same formula: liberal centrists acknowledge their mistakes, rethink their governing assumptions, reorganise their parties and alliances, and articulate a new vision of the future.

In South Africa, another self-described liberal party is seeking to reinvent itself. Who knows where the Democratic Alliance will go under the new leadership of Geordin Hill-Lewis. Like Burnham, he is a politician who has excelled at the local; running a city which (whether or not one agrees with his policies) is at least economically growing faster than most others in SA.

But the local does not automatically translate to policy at the national. Hill-Lewis will have to decide: a tack back toward the multilateral, multiracial DA espoused by Mmusi Maimane, or capitulation to the older, narrower instincts on the party’s right, just as South Africa endures its worst xenophobic violence in years?

Does the DA want to be a party that can expand its overwhelmingly white voter base and become the dominant voice in an increasingly fragmented SA political landscape? Or is it happy to surrender to the siren call of nativism that has seduced so many of its European counterparts? Classical liberalism — the belief that economic freedom and political rights are inseparable — is not a comfortable position in 2026. But it remains the correct one.

The DA should not abandon its responsibility as the standard-bearer of classical liberalism in SA. It should be engaging in the global conversation — with parties such as Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US — about what liberalism means after Brexit, after Trump, after the long populist decade — and working out how to communicate that vision to voters.

Anything less ambitious would be yet another betrayal of liberal South Africans. After being let down so many times by a party riddled with myopic personal agendas, voters may not grant it another chance to find out. DM