Starmer Agonistes

Last week, in one of its worst-ever local election results, Labour lost 1,400 seats to Reform UK, lost Wales to the nationalist Plaid Cymru, and failed to prevent the secessionist SNP winning a fifth consecutive term of government in the Scottish Parliament.  Keir Starmer’s government was rejected by everyone, everywhere, all at once.  Here is one former Labour Party insider, Patrick Maguire, reflecting on the Labour prime minister’s response:

[Starmer offers] another eight years of nothingness, of learnt helplessness, of pained and empty stridency, of Guardian pieces collapsing under the accumulated weight of their own clichés, of workmanlike effort to win arguments without ever making them, of ponderously describing problems rather than using Labour’s landslide majority to solve them, of meandering reviews and consultations, of nonsense sinecures for any grandee of pensionable age. Indeed, as one near-suicidal MP remarked of the appointment of Baroness Harman and Gordon Brown to two of those on Saturday morning: “Are they high?”

With friends like that, who needs enemies? Starmer had drafted the former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown into his cabinet as a financial crisis adviser, and Baroness Harman, the equally elderly former health secretary and civil rights champion, to advise on misogyny. “It’s a joke,” one normally loyal minister told the BBC. “There is no question to which bringing these two back is the answer.”

The thinking in Number 10 appeared to be that, since Starmer is too weak to reshuffle his rebellious cabinet, he has to, well, do something—so he reached back for some reflected glory. But it was the wrong something and only undermined his position further.

Angela Rayner, the former deputy leader and a potential leadership challenger, promptly ordered Starmer to move left on taxation and spending or risk a leadership challenge. Indeed, the rebellion had already begun.

An unknown from the deeper recesses of Labour’s back bench, Catherine West, said she could not stand it any longer and put herself forward as an alternative leader in the hope of forcing more serious cabinet members to act. To stage a leadership contest, 80 Labour MPs must send a letter to the Parliamentary Labour Party saying they have lost confidence in the leader and are nominating an alternative.

What seems striking in Maguire’s withering assessment is that policy is hardly mentioned. It seems all about style, demeanour and the lack of credible ideas. It is as if Starmer won a landslide victory two years ago and did not know what to do with it—that he was simply a rabbit in the headlights of public opinion and got run over by a hostile media.

Yet this is not quite what happened. Starmer did come to office with policies.

These included a promise to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants on small boats by defeating the smuggling gangs that were earning millions from the callous trade. He promised to make growth and business the center of his economic strategy and not to fall into the fiscal trap of relying on ever-increasing taxes: growing the pie rather than cutting it into ever-finer slivers.

Starmer promised to end  the “sleaze” and petty corruption that appeared to have dogged the Tory regime and to unite the nations and regions of the UK behind a new sense of British patriotic identity. “Country above party,” as one of the Labour slogans put it. He also promised categorically to honor Brexit and not try to take Britain back into the EU, its customs union, or its single market.

He did not “smash the gangs” and halt the arrival of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants. The number of undocumented young men from war zones arriving annually on the beaches of the English Riviera has risen since Labour came to power two years ago. He increased taxes, mainly on business, by £80 billion, and failed to take an axe to the regulations that have strangled economic growth. Those taxes, especially on inheritance, have led to an exodus of some wealthy people taking their taxable assets with them.

The weeks before the local elections were dominated by the Peter Mandelson/Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Starmer was himself accused of taking gifts from businessmen without declaring them. The assault on British national identity continued in schools and colleges, where young people are routinely told that Britain was an evil empire and needs eternally to atone for colonialism and slavery (even though Britain was the first significant country to abolish the latter). A recent poll found that half of young adults under 30 would “never fight for their country”.

As for Brexit, he may have promised in Labour’s manifesto not to reverse the 2016 referendum decision to leave the European Union, but he has sought to do precisely the reverse.  Today, in what was billed as the speech of his life, the prime minister announced that he intends to restore Britain to “the heart of Europe”. That was the phrase used by the Conservative Prime Minister John Major in the 1990s when he took Britain into the Maastricht Treaty that created the European Union. Ever since, it has been one of the enduring slogans deployed by supporters of remaining in, or returning to, the EU.

Starmer cannot have used this accidentally. He must know that placing Britain back at the “heart of Europe” is like declaring civil war against those who voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. It is almost as provocative as his famous phrase that Britain was becoming “an island of strangers.” He recoiled from that when he was told that it was a slogan used by the anti-immigration right. He will not be allowed to unsay this declaration on Europe.

Labour’s 2024 manifesto promised no return to the EU single market or the customs union. Yet Starmer has been trying to gain back door access by adopting the rules and regulations of the single market under so-called “dynamic alignment”.  But Brussels seems in no mood to allow selective access to their free trade bloc.  British tech and defense firms have been locked out along with food and agricultural producers.

The leadership rebel, Catherine West, said immediately after her leader’s speech that it was “too little, too late.” She has now postponed her leadership bid until the autumn in order to allow others, like Rayner or Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, to enter a leadership contest. At the time of writing, over 70 Labour MPs have now called on the prime minister to give a timetable for his departure, including Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, and six ministerial aides have quit.  Starmer may have avoided a leadership challenge this very week, but the clock is ticking.