Every political project carries within it the seed of its destruction. Its tensions, contradictions, limitations—and ultimately its downfall—are ripe from the start. The sociocultural zeitgeist into which he was born, along with the quality of his thinking and leadership, determine his longevity.
Classically, the postwar settlement persisted because it was supported by a strong working class and a powerful liberal intelligentsia. Likewise, Thatcherism became hegemonic not only because of its leadership qualities but because of its intellectual underpinnings – like Friedrich Hayek The road to captivity – and the much more individualistic, consumer-oriented times in which it arrived. But nothing lasts forever.
And so we turn to the Labor Party in 2026 and the leadership of Keir Starmer. A party, a project and a leader who are all in existential crisis less than two years after being elected to office, and despite a Labor majority of 165. As the local election results make sense, there are only two questions facing Labor: how big is this crisis and can Keir Starmer avoid it?
The thinness and hollowness of a Labor victory in 2024 is now being revealed. The old saying remains true: “It is governments that lose elections, not opposition parties that win them.” If there was one thing that was very clever about the Starmer project, it’s that it skillfully let the Tories screw up the last election for themselves. But Labour’s little strategy of giving opponents and the media nothing to aim for has now backfired, faster than even its biggest critics could ever have imagined. “Change” for Starmer and co was just a convenient slogan.
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Unlike Attlee, Wilson or Blair, Starmer and his team never did their homework. They never dug deep in terms of vision, policies or plans. Of course, they have a culture. But hyper-factionalism is wholly unsuited to governing in complex, chaotic times. It cynically enabled his team to hoodwink the party into supporting him in the 2020 leadership election, but as a method of governance it is completely and utterly unfit for the task of running a government in these poly-crisis times.
All this when they knew from 2022 that the next election was theirs and they had enough time to prepare. For them, it was enough to beat the left, not be conservatives, and fit in as “competent adults.” What events have shown, however, is that no government can behave competently in the absence of an intellectual framework, a deep understanding of the zeitgeist, and a culture and program that allows you to navigate and negotiate your way to a vision of a good society, a journey that many voters and forces in the country want to share.
But the debate that arises now is not only about the end of a particular leadership project; it is about whether he will bring the party down with him. Pasokification was the term coined to describe the dramatic decline of the sister party of Labor in Greece in 2009, which went from over 40 percent to less than 5 percent in one election cycle. Can Labor now pass their own version of De-Sokification?
Obviously poll numbers are a factor. Labour’s support has actually halved since the general election, from an all-time low of just 34 per cent for a winning party. And now it is Reform that looks set to benefit from the boost a first-in-office gives the leading party, winning a potential Commons majority with just 28 per cent of the vote. Polls are obviously subject to change. There is a world in which Labor can win again, but it is predicted, like 2024, that everyone around them will do poorly. This is doable. Both the Reform project and the Green Party are new and fragile. They can quickly mature, professionalize and harden – or they can stagnate, as Farage regularly does and Zack Polanski has recently with a series of mistakes and missteps. Starmer’s message in the run-up to the national polls was essentially that Reform and the Greens were not serious parties for tough times. Throughout the campaign, Labor nationally said little, if anything, about what it would do to improve people’s lives locally. Good counselors were beaten through no fault of their own.
Likewise, a major national issue may emerge, as in 2019 with Get Brexit Done, or in 2024 with Kick the Tories Out, which gives a numerically large single party majority. But as we have seen in both cases, the fragility and fragmented nature of the political landscape precludes any possibility of strong and stable governance. Unless there is a clear vision, a program of where to take a government and a method of governance within what seems like permanent fragmentation of the party system, there will only be continued chaos. So even if Labor can somehow create another majority, however slim, with a lower share of the vote than last time, that just kicks the death knell for Labour. If the party cannot be recast as an energetic, hopeful and ambitious party of change, able to operate on the basis of pluralism rather than tribalism, then it will be doomed to irrelevance.
Wales is the country of mourning, a country it has led for a century. This is the political equivalent of ravens leaving the Tower of London. Labor no longer looks or feels like a national party of government. And look at the party itself. No one knows what the true membership figure is because party bureaucrats refuse to embarrass themselves by revealing it. A rumored estimate is that the real number is less than 200,000, putting Labour’s membership third behind Reform and the Greens. Perhaps this is not so surprising when Keir Starmer spoke to the nation and said that those who did not support him within the party “know where the door is”. This election will have lost another large section of councillors, often the only people who keep their local parties functioning. A series of union conference votes on incompetence are also coming, just as wealthy party donors are said to be keeping their hands in their pockets, many of them unhappy with failed promises to govern effectively. If the movement and decline continues, there are likely to be MP defections to the Greens and possibly Reform.
Critically, Labor has seemingly lost its opposition monopoly on the right. Until now, Labor could get progressive voters to vote head over heart against the Tories or reform. But by-elections in Caerphilly, and Gorton and Denton, where Plaid Cymru and the Greens edged ahead of Labor to defeat Reform respectively, have crushed a remaining card. It is worth noting here that the problem with Peter Mandelson was not just that he cultivated and sustained a friendship with a pedophile, and that he was intensely soft on the filthy rich, but also his claim that Labor voters had nowhere else to go. They do now.
Ultimately, for many, this is all because Labor has lost its moral compass. Whether it was the winter fuel allowance, the “free” cups and concerts, its refusal to tax the rich, the aforementioned Mandelson affair and, perhaps most notably, the lack of opposition to the genocide in Gaza, many members and voters no longer see Labor as a progressive party. All this is against this self-proclaimed prime minister “who never loses” and therefore does not really learn. A prime minister described by candidates on the doorstep as “electoral kryptonite”. A Prime Minister who once claimed he never dreamed and who insists there will never be such a thing as “Starmerism”. A prime minister who is therefore ill-equipped to make the bold changes that the party and the country need. Starmer never understood why he wanted to govern, for whom and how. Inevitably it ended up being a politics of survival of the day in circles of ever-diminishing ambition.
The omnicrisis will not end. The symptoms are everywhere: the EU, NATO, the transatlantic alliance, Ukraine, the Middle East, climate change, the economy and the breakdown of the social contract itself – all compounded by democratic systems that no longer seem capable of resolving them. The bottom line is that Starmer has neither the inclination, motivation nor means to change the state and economic systems. Failure was inevitable.
In his early days, Starmer talked a lot about the end of plaster politics. Now there will be requests to give it more time. Time is not the issue. The issue is its potential and capacity. Nobody, least of all those in the Cabinet who are touting their lines from No 10, really thinks Starmer can lead Labor into the next election. It must be doubtful whether he really believes it. There will come a time when the plaster must be removed. It could be this week or a few months. The sense of urgency for MPs may not be there yet. But it will come. A project so fragile, with such shallow intellectual and cultural roots, cannot withstand repeated political humiliation.
The stark truth is that Starmer has never really been leader of the Labor Party or Prime Minister because he has never offered any serious leadership. Labor must decide when, not if, to oust their ghost leader before it’s too late.
(Further reading: This looks like the end for Labour)
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