Keir Starmer has made a serious mistake. Ok, I appreciate that I need to narrow it down and be more specific: Starmer has made another serious mistake in his efforts to shape the choice on offer at the next election.
Over the last two years, his strategy has been to hype up the threat posed by Reform UK. That means presenting leader Nigel Farage as a viable prime minister and his party as potential winners of the election.
Starmer’s reasoning was clear and understandable. He wanted to force a binary choice on voters: Labour or Reform. Doing so would allow him to fill the absence of any positives about his own performance with negatives that many voters attach to Farage. For frustrated left-wing and centre-left voters, he hoped it would be a compelling argument to rally to the red flag, albeit for purely negative reasons.
It’s not an inspirational message: “Fine, I might be lame, but the other guy is even worse.” I’m sure the Government would rather have a story of successful delivery of their promise of change. But they don’t, and in the resulting vacuum, this was what they settled on instead.
Unfortunately for all of us, it has proved to be a serious misjudgement on two counts.
First, it meant using the commanding political and media heights of Downing Street to validate exactly the message that Reform is trying to communicate.
Throughout Farage’s career as a political insurgent, his biggest obstacle has been the perception that a vote for him – UKIP, Brexit Party, and now for Reform – might be wasted. Under the first-past-the-post system, opting for a smaller contender means letting in a major party which you oppose.
Not so now. When Farage told voters that this is their one chance to change the game, the Prime Minister chimed in to agree. That is one factor which helped to propel Reform to a national poll lead.
Perhaps that was a risk worth taking, in the minds of Starmer and McSweeney, so long as it successfully united the left and delivered a Labour victory. But it’s failing on that count, too.
The Green surge shows no sign of abating. Leader Zack Polanski’s mirror image of Reform’s insurgency is essentially now on level-pegging with Labour, and his party is set to pick up hundreds of seats in May’s local elections. Evidently, the gamble that voters on Labour’s left had nowhere else to go has failed.
In part, that’s because those at the top of the Labour Party underestimated the fact that the forces Corbynism unleashed, from economics to Nato-scepticism to frothing “anti-Zionism”, are a generational problem in British politics. Expelling and denouncing Jeremy Corbyn was necessary to sanitise Labour’s brand, but it didn’t make the ideological cult or its grievances go away. Now it’s found somewhere else to set up shop.
It’s also the second consequence of the mistake Starmer made on Reform. If a new party of the right, rejecting old conventions and campaigning through new channels, could supplant the Conservative Party, then surely by the same token a party of the left could do the same job on Labour.
Starmer intended to force voters into a binary choice, but he inadvertently reminded them that they have many more choices than just two. A sizeable chunk have listened to what he accidentally said.
Obviously, the Prime Minister is not the main cause of the fragmentation in British politics. The roots of this crisis are deep and many. But it’s absolutely clear that in trying to mitigate its impact, he has instead exacerbated it.
The consequence is that five parties are now clustered within a few points of one another in the polls.
It looks likely that Reform will win the most seats but fall short of a majority, and that Farage’s effectiveness in attacking the Conservative Party could leave the combined right unable to form a coalition or confidence-and-supply Government.
In that circumstance, the only other possible Government will be a rainbow coalition of the Left: Labour, the Greens, the Lib Dems, Your Party, SNP, Plaid Cymru and more.
Such an administration would be wildly unstable. Labour would have to replace Starmer with a much more left-wing leader. The array of parties involved would struggle to find a programme on which they could agree, and the most hardline would have a veto. Any personal scandal or illness would imperil a working majority, as in 1979 when the James Callaghan Government fell because a dying MP couldn’t attend a key vote.
In all likelihood, the outcome would be market chaos, infighting over unpopular policies that almost nobody voted for, and relentless pressure from Reform to gain power after an election in which they came first. When the whole edifice proves unworkable, a new election would follow, likely within months.
This is the dire picture that Starmer must paint if he wants to preserve his own leadership and party. The goal isn’t so much to deter Labour voters from swinging right, but to deter the left from completely splintering to an ungovernable degree. That means turning his fire on the siren voices attacking Labour from its own left flank, and leaving the right to sort itself out.
For his message, he should look to former prime minister David Cameron. There is a choice: stability with Starmer, or a coalition of chaos.
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