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Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer delivers a speech about the British National Health Service in Braintree, Essex on May 22, 2023.
LONDON—In just the past week, Tory former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to resign his seat in Parliament rather than cooperate with an investigation of his misdeeds as prime minister, a reminder to the public of the deepening disaster of 13 years of Conservative rule. And last Saturday, Scotland’s former, very charismatic First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon of the ruling Scottish Nationalist Party, was arrested in a corruption scandal involving diversion of party funds. With the Scottish Nats now in disarray, Labour is primed to pick up several seats it once held in Scotland.
In addition, it becomes clearer by the day that the main Tory obsession of the past decade, exiting the European Union, which finally came to pass in 2020, is a fiasco for the British economy and ordinary Brits. Between the end of 2019 and 2022, the UK had the worst growth rate of any major economy, according to the OECD. British GDP declined by 0.4 percent, compared with a 4.3 percent gain for the U.S. and positive growth for the rest of the EU.
Brexit demolished Britain’s strategy of being a low-tax venue for banks and other corporations serving the rest of the EU, without putting anything in its place. In October 2021, the UK government’s own Office of Budget Responsibility calculated that Brexit would cost 4 percent of GDP per year over the long term. More than 200 financial companies have relocated out of Britain to EU member nations. The BBC has reported that Brexit has cost the UK economy more than COVID.
As of May 2023, 55 percent of people in Great Britain thought that it was wrong to leave the European Union, compared with 33 percent who thought it was the right decision. Just 9 percent of Brits consider it to be more of a success than a failure.
All of these factors cause Labour’s leader, the generally well-liked Keir Starmer, to be preternaturally risk-averse. Just let the Tories keep destroying themselves, goes the premise, and Labour wins. He is so risk-averse, in fact, that Starmer’s waffling on a range of issues has itself become an issue.
The most important of these, of course, is Brexit. Starmer is well known for being pro-European. It is widely expected that if he can just get elected, Starmer will strike some sort of deal with the EU that will bring Britain back into Europe’s customs union and single market, but stop short of membership. Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Lichtenstein have variants on such deals.
The quid pro quo is that as a non-member, Britain would not get to vote on EU policy. But conversely, Britain would regain mostly barrier-free access to the EU. For a nation whose economy is desperately short of quid, that’s not a bad quo.
The sticking point is that the Norway version of this arrangement requires Norway to admit immigrants from the rest of Europe under the usual EU rules of free movement of persons. (Tiny Lichtenstein gets a waiver.) Resentment against immigrants, especially in one-time Labour strongholds in Britain’s depressed industrial north, drove a lot of Labour voters to support Brexit, so a return to free immigration would be a non-starter.
During the 2023 local elections, the Labour Party gained more than 500 councillors and 22 councils, becoming the largest party in local government for the first time since 2002.
Starmer denies being interested in any such deal. Though most voters now view Brexit as a mistake, the idea of revising Brexit is still viewed as a third rail of British politics. For the better part of decade, whether to exit the EU came to dominate British public discourse and led to the worst sort of demagoguery. Voters are sick of it, say many pundits.
I’ve spoken with people close to Starmer, and their advice is that he should leave the subject alone, except to say (which he does repeatedly) that the Tory government is doing a terrible job at “making Brexit work,” and that he would presumably do a better job.
The trouble with that somewhat disingenuous formulation is that nobody could make Brexit work for the UK. Once in office, Starmer would surely need to seek fundamental revision.
And there are more serious deficiencies in his leadership. Starmer is attempting to position himself as a normal, reliable, no-drama sort of fellow, a competent steward in contrast to the clown show that is the current Conservative Party. That sounds right, until you appreciate that what Britain needs is not normal stewardship but a dramatic break with the failed economic policies that have predominated since the Thatcher era.
Exhibit A of the kind of blunder that Starmer’s caution can produce is his stance on the recent strike of National Health Service nurses. The strike, the first ever for nurses, was mainly about the long-term suffocation of the beloved NHS for lack of sufficient resources. Starmer, wanting to avoid controversy, ordered the entire Labour shadow cabinet, about 40 people, not to walk union picket lines.
But this was no ordinary strike. In interview after interview, ordinary people expressed support for the nurses. And there is nothing normal about the NHS status quo. Starmer passed up a golden opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to drastic change. His own wife works in the NHS.
Exhibit B is the recent statement by Labour’s shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, backpedaling from the party’s commitment to invest an additional 28 billion pounds a year in public infrastructure for a decade, on the grounds that “the money isn’t there.” But of course the money would be there if Britain had adequate taxation of corporations and the wealthy. Reeves, sounding very neoliberal, said the plan would have to be delayed two years.
Starmer himself has disavowed earlier commitments from the campaign that got him elected leader of the opposition in 2020, after Labour’s disastrous performance in the 2019 campaign under Jeremy Corbyn. He has said he no longer considers himself a socialist, and in 2022 he explicitly disavowed several commitments he made in his campaign for the leadership to renationalize rail, mail, water, and energy. Instead, he now promotes five rather general principles of how to revive Britain, which include economic growth, clean energy, NHS reform, policing, and education. All are short on details.
In his youth, Starmer was very much a leftist. His family was active in Labour Party politics, and he was named for Labour’s founding leader, Keir Hardie. After university, he spent a year as editor of the radical magazine, Socialist Alternatives. He then got a law degree and spent much of his career as a public prosecutor, getting elected as a Labour M.P. in 2015.
As leader of an always fractious Labour Party, Starmer has managed to get along with all factions—no mean feat—and has some detractors but no bitter personal enemies. In his 2020 campaign for party leader, Jenny Chapman, vice-chair of centrist Tony Blair pressure group Progress, was his campaign chair; Kat Fletcher, who worked on leftist Jeremy Corbyn’s 2015 leadership campaign, was director of field operations.
Starmer is as well-positioned as any recent Labour leader to win a big governing majority. But his basic tactical premise is deeply flawed in one key respect. Back to normal is not compelling because it isn’t sufficient. In the past two decades, life has become ever harder for normal Brits. The basic premise of how to position the British economy as a tax haven for finance has been blown to hell by Brexit. What’s needed is substantial social investment in the workforce, physical capital, and public infrastructure. Labour’s proposed 28 billion pounds a year—about $35 billion—is a small down payment.
The comparison with Joe Biden is instructive. Like Starmer, Biden presented himself as normal, in contrast with Trump, the American counterpart to the lying and buffoonish Boris Johnson. But unlike Starmer, Biden has pushed for a surprisingly radical program. Yes, Biden did most of that once he managed to get elected, but even as a candidate he sounded more transformative than Starmer does.
Starmer and his advisers are mindful of electoral disasters in recent Labour Party history. They include the 1979 “winter of discontent,” when public sector strikes caused rubbish to pile up and ambulances to miss calls, helping to elect Margaret Thatcher; the Shakespearean fiasco of the 2010-2015 period, when the Miliband brothers ran bitterly against each other for party leader and the winner, Ed Miliband, lost the 2015 election; and the 2019 Brexit-afflicted election, when Labour’s position under Corbyn was so muddled that it managed to alienate both supporters of “Leave” and “Remain.”
Starmer may yet be the leader with the potential to unite left and center-left, and he has his admirers. Will Hutton, former editor of the Observer and one of Britain’s most respected pragmatic progressives, recently wrote that Starmer “is shaping up to be a potentially transformational Labour leader” with the capacity “to reinvent the Labour party as a means to bring together an inclusive British progressive coalition.”
You can certainly understand the strategy of not rocking the boat. During the 2023 local elections, the Labour Party gained more than 500 councillors and 22 councils, becoming the largest party in local government for the first time since 2002.
But big leads in the polls more than a year ahead of a general election have a habit of evaporating. And unlike the parade of frauds and fools who led the Conservative Party since 2010, the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is a polished professional who has avoided major gaffes.
What has been missing from British politics is not just sensible policies, but credible leadership. Starmer may yet coast to victory; he would likely do even better if he acted more like a leader.
