It’s hard to mess up the showcase speech to a party conference. Keir Starmer did not disappoint during his address on Tuesday, even if he is not one of politics’ great orators.
People said we couldn’t change the party—but we did.
People said we couldn’t win across Britain—but we have.
People say we can’t deliver national renewal—but we can, and we will.
Britain’s new prime minister received the statutory standing ovation at the start and the end of his hourlong address at the Labour Party conference in the northwestern city of Liverpool, as he outlined his decadelong program to turn Britain around and clear up the mess that he has inherited from 14 years of Conservative Party misrule.
The cheers from the crowd throughout turned to roars when Starmer pledged to nationalize the railways and work for a cease-fire in Gaza, as well as when he described the racism that motivated the rioters who rampaged across the United Kingdom in August as “vile.”
But beyond the choreography of moments such as these, there is deep concern that Starmer has done little to allay. Given the landslide majority that Labour secured in elections held on July 4—Britain’s “Independence Day” after the buffoonery of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his ilk—and given the tailwind that he enjoyed, Starmer has had a hugely disappointing start.
Almost all his errors have been unforced. These have included accepting an elaborate succession of gifts, ranging from ultraexpensive glasses and clothes for him and his wife to hospitality tickets for soccer and rock concerts, mostly from one single funder, at a time when he was warning the public of the need to tighten their belts. He has allowed his chief of staff to dominate government, to the chagrin of ministers and public officials, while agreeing to a salary for her that is higher even than his own.
Less than three months since taking office, Starmer is enjoying lower approval ratings than any of his (Tory) predecessors, with the exception of the short-lived and catastrophic Prime Minister Liz Truss. All this is bad and unnecessary, but also—if he learns some basic empathy—recoverable. He and the country are in it for the long haul. Unlike Truss, he stands no chance of being dispensed with by his party or by the electorate for at least five years.
However, underlying these missteps is a more fundamental problem. It is one that often afflicts governments of the center-left in Europe, the United States, and beyond. What are they in power to do? What do they stand for?
A successful public prosecutor who entered politics late in his career, Starmer has so far shown only a limited understanding of the potential of government. He has defined himself as the incremental repairman. Everything that the Conservatives got wrong, he will put right. Immigration? No more scheme to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda—let’s find other ways of restricting numbers. The European Union? Let’s improve relations, but not rejoin its customs union, its single market, or its freedom of movement. Health? Let’s crack down on obesity, let’s reform the National Health Service bureaucracy, but not invest more money.
The pattern is not hard to discern. Starmer has convinced himself that he can improve people’s lives purely by tackling their country’s many problems more efficiently. He is not setting about changing the fundamental tenets that underpin British society. He is a cautious conservative.
His economic analysis lies at the heart of it. In 2010, when then-Prime Minister David Cameron brought the Conservatives back to power, he and his chancellor of the exchequer (the U.K.’s name for its finance minister), George Osborne, ushered in an era of austerity. They blamed the 2007-08 financial crash (not so much the bankers, but the profligate Greeks and others in the EU); they blamed their Labour predecessors. They embarked on their task with relish. Everything that could be cut was cut—after-school clubs for kids, free school meals, you name it. Hospital waiting lists soared. Homelessness increased.
“I am not going to hide hard choices from the British people,” Osborne declared in 2010 as he announced an “‘emergency budget,” in which, among a host of measures, child benefit payments were frozen, and housing benefit payments were reduced in a bid to knock billions of pounds off the national debt. Austerity under the Tories became a fetish, pursued with relish and with determination, to the exclusion of other policy choices.
Fast-forward to now, to the first budget of the new era, due on Oct. 30, and more of the same is expected. Indeed, so gloomy have Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves been that consumer confidence has dropped sharply in anticipation of the pain.
That budget announcement will be defining for this government. Starmer and Reeves have been deliberately, almost ostentatiously, preparing the country for misery. In a special address to parliament within weeks of arriving at the Treasury, Reeves laid bare the scale of the woes left by the former administration, not least a budget deficit of £22 billion ($28 billion). The message then and since has been—there will be pain now but hopefully gain later. Yet when it comes to remedial measures, they have boxed themselves in.
Throughout the election campaign, Starmer reiterated his promise many times over that he would not increase any of the basic taxes—income tax, value added tax, national insurance, or corporation tax. That leaves him and Reeves little room for maneuver. They can go after capital gains and pensions, and perhaps inheritance taxes or various forms of property taxes. All will be unpopular, and none will bring in the kind of money that the government needs to balance the books.
Starmer could have announced that, having seen the true state of the economy upon coming to power, he now has no choice but to break his promise and increase taxes, particularly for the better-off. He refuses to do this, and so what Labour leaders are left with is a further squeeze on public spending.
They have made their choice—a political choice. They defiantly deny that this constitutes austerity. But to most economists, it is just that. As one veteran economics-watcher, William Keegan, wrote in a recent column for the Guardian entitled “Britain didn’t vote Labour just to get a new iron chancellor”: “Can somebody please tell the Labour party that they won the election?”
In other words, could they perhaps show some courage, particularly while they are unassailable in Parliament?
There is another way of looking at the arithmetic. The Labour Party won 211 more seats than in the previous general election in 2019, but half a million fewer total votes. It enjoys a massive 174-seat majority, but one that is based on just under 34 percent of the votes cast—the least proportional result in modern British election history. This is due to a stunning, clever campaign strategy rather than all-encompassing popularity. Under this scenario, Labour is already looking over its shoulder at the next election, due by 2029, with anxiety.
Whenever the party feels beleaguered (and irrespective of whether that is justifiable or not), the default of Labour prime ministers is to curry favor with voters from the right and fight one enemy—its own left wing.
U.K. governments have provided financial help toward the costs of raising children since 1946. However, in 2017, the Conservatives limited the number of children that families may claim benefits for to just two children. Starmer has refused to reverse that, and when a critical motion was tabled in Parliament in July on the issue, seven Labour MPs voted for it. They were immediately suspended from the party. To drive the “we’re tough” message, Starmer then announced that his administration would save around $2 billion by restricting winter fuel payments to the elderly—which had previously been universal—only to the very poorest. Many in his party and in the country’s trade unions are furious.
Historian David Edgerton outlines three scenarios for how the party will evolve. The first is that Labour continues to disappoint and is replaced in five years’ time by a party even further to the right than it one it displaced. The second is that it succeeds in becoming a more efficient and slightly more compassionate version of its predecessor, a scenario in which “in effect, [it] becomes a new, competent, small-C conservative party,” in Edgerton’s words.
The third scenario is that the Labour Party seeks radical, center-left change for Britain. This final option, Edgerton suggests, is the least likely.
From a liberal-left perspective, the government’s start is not all gloom. Along with rail nationalization, protections for workers’ rights are being beefed up and renters are being given more power against exploitative landlords. Onshore wind energy will be expanded. Planning rules are being overhauled to allow for more house building.
Some of these reforms may turn out to be radical, but do they amount to a transformation? Starmer won’t be able to blame others for much longer.