Whatever happens in Westminster, it ought to be clear to Labour MPs that Keir Starmer is a political failure. For those on the centre-left (which I accept does not include conservative-minded readers, but bear with me) our non-negotiable political imperative, our reason for getting out of bed in the morning is to stop Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick and the rest of the radical right turning the United Kingdom into a gruesome imitation of Donald Trump’s America.
‘The Labour party is a crusade or it is nothing,’ said Harold Wilson. Under Starmer’s bloodless leadership it is in danger of becoming nothing
The failure of Keir Starmer’s government is not therefore just one of the normal vicissitudes of politics we can take on the chin. It could lead to the destruction of the BBC, the NHS and the Human Rights Act. Given that elements of the right are now openly discussing what they euphemistically call ‘remigration’ – deporting wholly legal immigrants – it’s not hysterical to imagine that it could also lead to a British version of Trump’s ICE.
Keir Starmer says that stopping Farage is his reason for getting out of bed in the morning too. ‘We must come together to fight Reform, with everything that this movement has,’ he told the last Labour party conference. But the evidence to date is that Starmer can’t do it. If that doesn’t change, he has to go.
‘The Labour party is a crusade or it is nothing,’ said Harold Wilson. And under Starmer’s bloodless leadership it is in danger of becoming nothing. It can’t fight Farage on its own, as Labour and Starmer’s disastrous poll ratings are proving. Nor can Starmer persuade voters who have splintered away to the Liberal Democrats, Greens, nationalists or Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party to hold their noses and vote Labour tactically.
The failure to understand that winning tactical votes is of prime importance in modern politics has been Starmer and McSweeney’s greatest mistake. They governed as if we were still in the 1990s, and showed no understanding of how the world has changed. They followed what despairing Labour friends of mine call the ‘hippy punching’ strategy.
In the old politics, punching hippies made perfect sense. Labour and the Conservatives tried to reassure ‘median voters’. Psephologists gave them patronising names such as ‘Mondeo Man’ and ‘Worcester Woman’ and explained that leaders could woo them by distancing themselves from their party’s extremes.
Tony Blair aimed to attract Conservative voters. So he punched the hippies of the 1990s by engaging in a bidding war with Michael Howard to see who was tougher on crime. Because he was a conservative, David Cameron wanted to attract Labour voters. He didn’t need to punch hippies. On the contrary, he had to pretend that he wanted to hug hoodies and that he cared about the environment so deeply that he would cycle to Westminster (with an official car carrying his briefcase following behind at a discreet distance.)
The world of Cameron and Blair is long gone. Public opinion realigned after Brexit: now we are in an age of bloc politics. There’s a right bloc: Conservatives and Reform. And a left bloc: Labour, the Lib Dems, Greens and nationalists. Voters circulate within their blocs and rarely switch over from left to right or right to left.
Last year, Jane Green and Marta Miori of Nuffield College Oxford showed that one half of Labour’s 2024 vote had remained loyal, one fifth had moved to other left-wing parties, one fifth were undecided, and just one-tenth had moved to the right.
Because we have the absurdity of multiparty competition in a first-past-the-post system, small shifts and tactical voting can have disproportionate electoral impacts.Labour won two thirds of the seats in the Commons on one third of the vote at the 2024 election because left-wing voters used their votes efficiently while Farage supporters were not prepared to back the Conservatives.
Like so many men who pretend to be hard headed realists, McSweeney and Starmer have been further away from reality than a doped-up hippy. Instead of trying to reassure centre-left voters that it was safe to back Labour for the greater good of defeating Farage, they went out of their way to alienate them.
You can take your pick. Starmer’s Powellite rhetoric about Britain becoming an ‘island of strangers’. The endless briefings from Downing Street against Ed Miliband’s green agenda. The failed attempt to cut disability benefits, and the absolute refusal to reverse Boris Johnson’s disastrous Brexit settlement. In a grimly comic moment that shows how deep the stupidity runs, a Starmer Labour loyalist told Sienna Rodgers of the House magazine that, now their beloved McSweeney was gone, ‘uber-woke, net-zeroist rejoinerism’ would run riot.Whoever it is does not grasp that Labour is losing precisely because it is not woke, green or pro-European enough.
An effective political strategist would say that, as well as bringing down sky-high immigration rates (which Labour is in fact doing), it ought to remind ethnic minorities and white liberal-leftists that Labour is an anti-racist party. Labour should be launching targeted attacks on Conservatives who are going along with ‘remigration’ policies that were once favoured by the National Front. Labour ought to be shouting about its commitment to clean energy, and the jobs it brings, and reminding the public that it seems like only the day before yesterday that large portions of the right were denying the existence of man-made global warming.
As for Brexit, having exhausted all other options, Labour should finally consider telling the truth about the damage leaving the EU has caused. One reason why the Starmer government has gone out of its way to repel its voters is that our media culture is dominated by right-wingers who insist that Labour governments can succeed only if they do what right-wingers want them to do. But the main reason has been the inability of McSweeney and Starmer to think about how the world has changed
Contemplating their failure, Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford, says that instead of trying to persuade its friends that it is still on their side, Labour is ‘targeting all its strategic energy on socially conservative voters who are not interested in voting for [the party].’
Labour played Farage’s game by talking up the importance of immigration, and failed to cheer its own supporters and sow divisions on the right by emphasising the need to raise taxes to rebuild public services.
Maybe now McSweeney has gone Starmer will be like a prisoner released from his cell. Maybe he will emerge as the leader who can galvanise the anti-right majority in this country. Maybe he will grasp that, if it is to win again, Labour needs to stop punching hippies and start hugging them.
But if he can’t, and I say this as someone who voted for him and admired him, Starmer must step aside. The stakes are too high.
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