It’s over. However long he limps on, even if he stumbles brokenly to the finish line of the next election, Keir Starmer’s race is run, his time is over, his project done, his failure sealed. It may seem a premature judgement on a Prime Minister with a 170 seat majority and four years left in office, but all is not as it appears.
When Labour was first on course to win its historic majority, I predicted trouble, trouble that has now come to pass. I noted that Starmer was unusually unpopular for an incoming leader, and a year on from taking office, he is now seen negatively by an overwhelming majority of the public on every measure from competence to trustworthiness. A majority currently believe he should step down as leader.
I suggested that “a Labour party committed to fiscal moderation and equipped with a massive majority will naturally default to radical social policy”, and sure enough we recently saw a restless Commons passing the decriminalisation of abortion, and the legalisation of assisted dying.
Yet, as I also warned, this has failed to mollify frustrated backbenchers:
All of this spells trouble for the Labour party, and its vast majority will mean a lot of MPs on the backbenches with no shot at a cabinet post. If Labour starts sinking in the polls, and powers continue to be leached away from parliament, this could be a group with every motivation to make trouble.
Sure enough, last week Labour MPs threatened a massive rebellion over welfare reforms that would see hundreds of thousands of individuals lose their benefits, with over 120 MPs set to vote against the government. In response Starmer has been forced to make concessions, and the government says it is now confident it has peeled off enough votes for a straightforward majority. However at least 50 MPs have said they are unsatisfied with the compromise, and that it represents a “two-tier” system in which current claimants will keep their benefits, whilst new disabled claimants will be left adrift.
Pressure has also come on hapless Chancellor Rachel Reeves (“Rachel from accounts” to her many critics) to resign. Though currently unlikely, it’s a reflection of just how unpopular and divisive Labour’s current spending plans are proving. The government’s climb down on welfare may see off a rebellion from MPs, but it looks set to mean a freeze to personal tax allowances, meaning a real term income tax rise on working people.
This tendency to tack right then left again is not clever Blairite triangulation, but almost its opposite
Starmer is caught between a rock and a hard place. He is bleeding voters on the left and the right. Morgan McSweeney rightly believes that Starmer must focus on the centre and right of British politics. There is no way to sell the realities of economic and policy trade-offs to the left of his party, or to compete with the Alice in Wonderland plans of a Green Party which is promising to spend £160 billion and fund it all through levelling massive taxes income, wealth and corporations. Yet Labour MPs, especially those on the backbenches, have no will or political story to justify cuts to welfare. The intuition that many voters have that many claimants are fraudulent or could be in work are simply not shared on the political left or in the PLP. More problematically still, Starmer himself struggles to articulate this narrative, instead citing the need to make difficult trade-offs. But typically this attempt to split the difference sees the Prime Minister awkwardly astride an unbridgeable political divide. Right-wingers who portray welfare claimants as scroungers may be seen as “demonising” needy people by the left, but they are making a moral case for the just distribution of resources to voters. But Starmerite pragmatism looks a lot more like feeding the disabled into the blender for the sake of the bottom line — it’s not an inspiring or morally tenable story.
This tendency to tack right then left again is not clever Blairite triangulation, but almost its opposite. The key to triangulation, with policies like “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” is that they identified a concealed conceptual cohesion that chimed with the intuition of the public. People wanted to fight poverty and give troubled youths better choices, but they also wanted criminals to face strong and certain penalties. In subtly differentiating himself from traditional left-right framing, Blair was also framing himself as more independent and principled than those towing the party line.
Starmer, by contrast, appears blown about by every passing breeze. His climbdown over welfare wasn’t even the most catastrophic U-turn of the recent days, with the Prime Minister suddenly backing off his “island of strangers” speech on migration, saying he “deeply regrets” using that line.
Whatever one thinks of the welfare cuts or the rhetoric of his speech, changing course late in the day and at the behest of others is a fatal show of weakness on his part. Starmer’s only real hope was to appear tough and principled, holding the course in the face of opposition and calling the bluff of internal critics.
But there is no real trick to doing this — you have to actually be tough and principled. Saying things you don’t believe, and making choices that are imposed on you, is not leadership, and won’t work. Starmer has lost his chance to govern from this point onwards. Tacking back to the left may buy him time and help with party management, but with no substantial changes to the cage of Reeve’s fiscal rules, and a weak man at the heart of power, this government is over before it has even begun.
