Sir Keir Starmer isn’t ready for this fight
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There can be little doubt that Sir Keir Starmer is looking forward to the upcoming campaign with rather more enthusiasm than his rival.To remain in office, Rishi Sunak’s party must win a clear, overall majority on July 4. No other party would lend him its support if he falls short of the winning threshold. For Labour, by contrast, even an anaemic performance that left it merely the largest party would see Starmer ensconced in No 10 as his party’s first election-winner since Tony Blair.
So how far has Labour come in the last five years, since it emerged from the shadow of an existential civil war over Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, and how drastically has it changed in that period? Is it ready to face the people? And, more fundamentally, is it ready to govern?
Incredibly, if you think back to five years ago, Starmer was still serving in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet as shadow Brexit Secretary. That means he has had a remarkably short period of time – a mere single parliament – in which to transform a party, its message and its programme.
To put that into perspective, in 1997, Tony Blair had had 14 years’ experience as an MP, 13 of them on the front bench. He and his shadow cabinet had had more than a decade each to work out why Labour had been rejected by the voters in the past, what it had to do to win voters’ support in the future, and what they should do once they returned to government. Blair himself, alongside Gordon Brown, led the campaign to reboot the party as New Labour, transforming the party’s outlook and fortunes.
Blair’s reforms were seen at the time as a revolution, but they were the latter part of an evolutionary arc that allowed for gradual change over a long period. Starmer, because he found himself as the heir apparent to Corbyn after just five years as an MP, and knowing that he would have just one shot at the top job, had no choice but to cram all the changes to the party necessary into a much narrower time frame.
Change takes a long time – time, in short, which Starmer simply has not had. A mere four years ago, Labour was still recovering from a civil war after seeking to reverse the result of the EU referendum of 2016, while insisting it was doing no such thing. This blatant sleight of hand, born of cowardice and cynicism, was brutally exposed in the 2019 general election.
Now, as we enter this election period, how successful has Starmer been in imposing his will on the party? It is a mixed picture. Yes, he has forced it to adopt centrist, sensible, moderate policies in place of Corbyn’s more ambitious socialist agenda. And yet on the so-called “culture war” issues, Labour still has a long way to go. Lest we forget: this is a leader who jumped on the American Black Lives Matter bandwagon in 2020, pictured taking the knee in his Westminster office alongside his deputy, Angela Rayner.
And Labour remains, despite the groundbreaking Cass Report into trans health care for young people in England, committed to making self-ID for trans people easier. His party in Scotland supported reforms that would have allowed children and sex offenders to change their legal gender, whether or not they suffered from gender dysphoria.
Despite Starmer’s lead, much of his party, and an increasing number of his MPs, too, seek the approval of anti-Israel elements in their communities, rather than take the occasionally tough, unpopular but correct stance on Israel. These vestiges of amateur student politics, rather than reflecting the priorities of ordinary voters, is something Starmer has failed to purge. The hard Left has never gone away, with Corbyn’s favoured candidates who were parachuted into seats before the 2017 and 2019 elections still there, beating the drum for a more radical course.
But Starmer now has no choice but to work with the cohort of MPs fate has given him. The party as a whole may not be ready, but he will be relying on promoting a few stellar talents and sidelining the rest, hoping that the likes of Wes Streeting and Rachel Reeves would be enough to reassure voters that the bad old, dangerous days of Corbyn really have ended.
Despite these challenges, Starmer has – so far – been lucky, not just that his gamble forcing policies on his party has paid off, but in the self-immolation by successive Tory prime ministers. In politics, as in humour, timing is everything. NoBut will that luck hold for another six weeks?
