Keir Starmer is beating Boris Johnson — but Labour is still losing

British politics, as Sir Keir Starmer will tell you, is an irrational game. After two years of mismanaged crises, scandalous parties and private shenanigans, a policy vacuum and Parliamentary revolt, Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister. If there were ever any “rules” of politics, Johnson has broken them. More remarkably, the Leader of the Opposition has played by them to the letter, and yet he still faces an electoral quagmire and the prospect of years of opposition and internal disquiet. Despite all the commentators’ predictions of a Labour breakthrough or lead in the polls, Keir Starmer does not look much more likely to be Prime Minister than Jeremy Corbyn, Ed Miliband, or indeed Neil Kinnock, ever did. Why this is, and what can be done about it, goes to the heart of the British political situation.

Another week, though, and there is instead another tour of the country for the Labour leader. Like a fading rock band, Starmer trots round the country every few months to ramp up support from the old heartlands — Burnley, Sunderland, Blackpool. The scene is familiar: voters disillusioned with Labour under Corbyn, faced with a drastic North-South divide, and eager to put the two years of pandemic politics behind them.

In two years as leader, Starmer’s medicine for Labour’s electoral sickness has got progressively stronger. Far away from Corbynite economics, Labour is now “pro-business”, at least if you ask Rachel Reeves, the impressive Shadow Chancellor. In foreign policy, the images of fringe movements, Stop the War banners and covert support for religious tyrants of different sorts are replaced: Labour’s dedication to NATO is “unshakeable”, wrote Starmer in the Guardian last week.

In economics, Reeves hopes to emulate Gordon Brown’s tough exterior of fiscal probity and security. With a weakened Foreign Office and a divisive Foreign Secretary, Starmer is harking back to Ernest Bevin’s anti-Communism and Clement Attlee’s insistence on collective Western security. In the face of a Conservative Party wracked with Russian money and an incumbent who would look slightly incongruous running an anti-corruption crusade, Starmer’s path to Downing Street should be easy. Yet still it is anything but.

Starmer is evidently attempting to emulate Tony Blair’s New Labour reforms. But his party today is still nowhere near comparable to the radicalism that Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell forced into being thirty years ago. Aside from constant reminders of the new leadership, Starmer has not fundamentally changed the focus of his party,  in the same way as Blair’s abolition of Clause IV and wholesale embrace of the market. It is not that such steps have to be taken again to achieve the same result: there is no point in digging up the 1997 manifesto and hoping for a majority of 179 all over again.

Starmer’s plans for electoral rejuvenation are hamstrung by history. No Labour leader has ever won a majority without winning over large parts of Southern England. Attlee pledged a transformation in the role of the state, Wilson offered the “white heat of technology” to galvanise British economic opportunity, and Blair promised, bluntly, that he would get every child a better education without spending the country dry. Starmer has no comparable support in the South, nor anything like the same clear programme which those three leaders depended on. In trying to win back the North, he neglects the Southern provinces. With a new and vigorous Tory leader in two years time, he could easily win neither.

The root of Starmer’s troubles, however, is not his leadership; it is his party. When Blair asked Andrew Adonis to join Labour in the early 1990s, Adonis told him he would have to change the party’s name. “Labour” was too old, a stale image evoking the strikes which were long gone in Britain and the politically impotent trade unions. Most voters saw the party as stuck in that past of the 1970s, however unfair that was to Neil Kinnock or John Smith. Starmer presides over the same party thirty years on, when that industrial past is even further away, but the party itself is just as antiquated. The same distrust about the Party that Blair did so much to dispel is still present: most people feel Labour relies too much on trade union support, thinks their economic policies unviable and feels that the membership is extreme.

Undoubtedly, Starmer has done much to reform that image — recent stories of the exiled Corbyn hoping to set up a new party will be welcome — but it was only a year or two ago that Labour was still being investigated for institutional anti-Semitism. During Corbyn’s time as leader, Starmer was, to his shame, one of the party’s most popular and vocal spokesmen. For many, including this writer, supporting that same Labour Party will require evidence of a fundamental change. As trade union protests spark discord and the remnants of Corbynism continue to prosper inside, it looks all too familiar.

Election politics is dull. It is even duller when an election looks far off and a desultory government with a moral vagabond for a leader still retains such an unmerited popularity. Such is the true legacy of Corbynism which Sir Keir Starmer was bequeathed. The extraordinary hubris of the Prime Minister over the last two months has been maintained by the Tories’ certainty that Labour does not look like a party ready for government, let alone one popular enough to be elected to do so.

Prophecies of electoral pacts with the Liberal Democrats are, as always, about as reliable as the late Jeremy Thorpe’s claims to moral honesty; though they may be a plausible way for the Conservatives to be ousted from their twelve-year stint in power of this country. Ultimately, though, the only way Keir Starmer can do that is by transforming his own party.

A glance at history shows a pattern. In the early 1960s, a Conservative Party beset by embarrassing scandals and run by an out-of-touch Old Etonian was eventually replaced by a vigorous Labour leader prophesying the fruits of technological change and a new dawn. In the mid 1990s, a Tory party beset by embarrassing scandals and run by an out-of-touch (though grammar school-educated) leader was replaced by a Labour leader promising social transformation and the rejuvenation of the public sector.  

But it is not that simple: Labour cannot merely announce its programme for change and expect a similar prize. Under Blair, Labour offered a plan for the public sector, which had been neglected under Thatcherite monetarism in favour of private enterprise. Wilson was touching on much of the same theme in 1964. Today, the Conservative Party have captured the imagination on public spending, while Labour decries the Prime Minister’s immorality. This is good ground for Prime Minister’s Questions, but it will not win an election.

Both Wilson and Blair also presided over a more or less united party; Starmer does not. And it will be those two factors — party unity and economic credibility — that will change the pattern of Conservative domination in Britain. In the Sixties, Wilson talked of “thirteen wasted years” of Tory rule. Today, there have been almost as many wasted in the Labour Party. After two years as leader of that party, Keir Starmer still looks unlikely to be the man to change that.

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