In 2024 the Democrats in the US delayed too long replacing an incapable and unpopular president Joe Biden as their presidential candidate, until the disastrous TV debate with Donald Trump when Biden lapsed into incoherence.
They replaced him with the not notably capable or popular vice president Kamala Harris, who was too closely associated with the Biden administration’s mistakes to distance herself from them. Trump was the beneficiary of these avoidable errors, with calamitous results for America and the world.
The Labour Party has pursued a similarly self-destructive course in seeking to remove Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister long after his chronic failings as a politician and party leader were visible to all. Labour’s disastrous defeat in the 7 May local elections ought to be the equivalent of Biden’s TV debacle two years earlier. Yet, as in the case of the former American president – but without the excuse of deteriorated mental health – Starmer was at the time of writing still stubbornly in denial about the necessity for his departure.
A Labour Party with greater skills in defenestrating failed leaders would have got rid of Starmer last year. Bizarrely, it was telegraphed ahead for months that the rival panjandrums of the party would wait until horrendous defeat in the local elections before seeking to evict Starmer, which is like an army command saying that it will wait to remove a general of proven incapacity until he had lost one more battle. And lose it Starmer most certainly did, producing for Labour representatives what was less of an electoral setback and more of a mass extinction event.
Like Biden in 2024, Starmer at the time of writing is in denial about his responsibility for this historic defeat, arguing that his departure would produce paralysis or chaos, as if his continuation in office would not do the same. But can any successor escape the Starmer legacy of a directionless government that could never make up its mind what it wanted to do and how to do it? Yet such political resurrections are not impossible: witness John Swinney, the Scottish Nationalist Party leader, who has bounced back from the turmoil of Nicola Sturgeon’s last scandal-hit years in office and heavy losses in the 2024 general election.
Can Labour rescue itself, or might we soon be watching a British re-run of Kamala Harris syndrome, whereby a new leader is so tainted by association with a discredited predecessor that they can never establish a credible political identity of their own? This prompts another important question: supposing Starmer goes, does this mean the end of the Blue Labour project, which purged the left and moved to the right, but failed to prevent working-class voters defecting to Reform and precipitated a huge exodus of progressive voters to the Greens?
The latter’s national vote share jumped to 18 per cent, ahead of Labour on 17 per cent with Lib Dems just behind on 16 per cent. According to a study by the London School of Economics, “a co-ordinated or unified left could have halved the number of Reform gains”.
The figures make clear that any future Labour prime minister, one who seriously intends to stop a Reform victory at the next election, will have to put together a popular front of left or progressive voters. Starmer and his closest acolytes are the last people to do this, coming as they mostly do from the right of the Labour Party, viscerally hostile to the left and eschewing radical change. Even when fighting for his political life in his speech on Monday, Starmer proposed nothing very new. Nationalising the remnant of the British steel industry in Scunthorpe was never going to do the job.
What might a new prime minister do that could really shift the political dial in a short space of time? It would have to be something striking and vastly popular such as bringing Thames Water and South East Water under public administration. But the present Cabinet looks far too timid and conservative to undertake measures that might compete with Reform’s pipe dreams.
Labour ministers and MPs lament that they have done many good things, but these will take time to bear politically attractive fruit. A quicker way for a party to establish its political identity in the eyes of voters is to make the right enemies at home and abroad. During the local and devolved elections last week, the only good thing said about Starmer by voters in interviews was that he had kept Britain out of the US and Israeli attack on Iran.
But Starmer – with his genius for getting the worst of all possible worlds – equivocated, allowing US bombers to use bases in the UK for “defensive” purposes. Suppose for a moment that Starmer had picked a fight with Trump, who evidently only respects those who stand up to him. Might this have reversed Labour’s fortunes?
It is easy to pillory Starmer as a serial blunderer, but the fact that he is the sixth British prime minister in 10 years proves that no leader or party can satisfy voters who believe the country is stagnant or in decline. They are right that Britain suffers from serious political, social and economic failings, but only in politics is it in a condition of semi-permanent crisis.
Lamentations about “Broken Britain” are over-stated – often grossly so – when it comes to the NHS, transport, energy, utilities and Armed Forces. At the same time, the UK is a patchwork of relatively prosperous and left-behind areas and communities. Political instability further erodes national self-confidence and opens the door to any charlatan scapegoating immigrants and selling Messianic dreams of renewal.
Starmer and Labour stood a good chance after they won the general election in 2024 of closing the door to a British version of Trumpism, but they were baffled by an increasingly dangerous and unstable world. Starmer may go, but he will go too late.
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