There has been a strange refusal to understand the extent of Labour’s collapse. Perhaps because it is still, somewhere, believed that Keir Starmer saved the Labor Party in 2020, and because Labor is in office with a huge undeserved majority. But getting a national share of 17 per cent of the vote in local elections is easily the worst share of the vote that Labor has had in its entire history as a national political party. Losing Wales as he did, where he got 11 percent of the vote, is not a passing regret.
This is not a sudden development. New Labor and Starmer’s have lost vote share since 1997, from 43 per cent in 1997 to around 30 per cent in 2010 and 2015, the same levels achieved by Michael Foot. Labor lost Scotland in 2015. Jeremy Corbyn temporarily returned Labor to Blair and Wilson’s levels of support, but Starmer’s party achieved just 34 per cent of the popular vote in 2024 and has lost vote share at an incredible rate since then.
Nor can what has happened be seen as the British repetition of a general crisis in social democracy. The revival under Corbyn was based on a social democratic programme. Furthermore, Labor has lost votes THE social democratic parties such as the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. Neither New Labor nor Starmer’s party have suffered from a failure to communicate – rather its message has come across very clearly and the progressive electorate does not like it.
I call it Starmer’s Party for a reason. Keir Starmer keeps referring to “my Labor Party”, and indeed “my government”. This is new – no previous leader has claimed the party as his own in this way, nor breached the monarch’s head of government. More than that, Starmer insists, still, that he and Morgan McSweeney saved the party.
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It’s a common complaint, from Wes Streeting on the left, that Starmer has no vision, no project. But this is quite misleading. Starmer had an extremely strong vision for the country’s future, and a profoundly dark one. Starmer’s party hates the left and wants a future without it. He is continuing the project of New Labour: to create a new conservative and conformist party. That is, a party with minimal member influence, funded by private donors, committed to maintaining the status quo and providing rewarding post-political careers for its apparatchiks. It is a party deeply committed to the alliance with the United States, and the only country with which the US has a special relationship, Israel.
He was not so much committed to growth as dependent on it to keep things going, because redistribution was out of the question. His economic policy is fiscal rectitude, support for innovation and “entrepreneurs” and subsidies for foreign investment in the UK. Starmer’s party rejects, with grim determination, public ownership even of natural monopolies. These should remain “investable”. The conservatism of Starmer’s party extended to being deeply Unionist, even in relation to Northern Ireland. He even began to believe in Brexit and trumpeted small trade deals as the Tories had done. She took on conservatives and immigration reform.
And, it must not be forgotten, she inherited from the Brexiteers and New Labour, a policy of using routine lying as a central political tool. She has continued to corrupt public discourse, stooping to new lows with her dishonest attacks on Green Party policies and opponents of Israel’s policies. She wanted and wants to keep things as they are, and reward and honor figures like Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, both of whose friendships and business dealings tell us all we need to know about them politically.
So deeply committed is his government to this vision that even as policies to preserve its rule became irrational from the perspective of national interest and voter opinion, it has doubled down on them. Royally, it was drowned out by the United States under Trump, even as he became so clearly the enemy of Europe and Ukraine. It did not criticize when Trump threatened the independence of Canada, an ally older than the US. He made technology deals with it which further compromise British sovereignty, energy supplies and the NHS. He facilitated the Israeli annihilation of Gaza, providing military aid and political cover, imprisoning British dissenters and ineptly sabotaging parliamentary debate on the subject.
Starmer’s Party had no economic growth, but continued with the same policies that have failed for 14 years. He cut pensions and kept the two-child limit and suspended MPs who objected. He could not even think of nationalizing water, despite the scandalous performance of private companies, some of which could be taken practically free of charge. This is not a lack of vision, but a large amount of shop-worn thinking, all lacking a serious analysis of where we have been and what the possibilities for action are, or any will to mobilize people and opinion in favor of change.
What then with “work values”? Is it the case that Labor has been led by an interloper? In that case it is surprising how little opposition there has been within the party. MPs always have the option not only to vote down policies they don’t like, but to make it clear they can, forcing policy changes. In any case, they must take responsibility for what they vote for. There has been virtually no resistance, except from the small left faction left in the party.
Now, with Starmer’s Party rejecting Starmer, what are the policy alternatives on offer? Very little. To a surprising extent this leadership race will be driven by personalities and atmospheres. As in Starmer’s case, the main qualification for leadership seems, oddly enough, to be a working-class background, not a policy programme; in the case of Al Carns it seems to be the only qualification on offer.
An exception must be made for Andy Burnham, who has articulated a limited program of domestic nationalization to deliver the essentials more fairly, devolution and PR, and has shown some understanding that a critique of Thatcherism and New Labour, as well as a critique of the British state and constitution, is required. He is also noted for his campaign for honest office in public life and his complaints about routine lies by political machines. We await his views on foreign policy and the Middle East. But his campaign remains insurgent, bound to stall the next snap election in Makerfield.
It was a very different story when there was a Labor Party, before the 1990s. Labor was the party of both protest and power. There were clear political divisions within the party, well articulated by key figures, which covered the entire spectrum of politics from domestic to foreign affairs, with little overlap with conservative positions. Senior Labor ministers once resigned from government for political reasons, as Harold Wilson and Aneurin Bevan did in 1951.
In the 1950s there was a long debate between the Bevanites, who were not just pampered pro-NHS types, but opponents of grandiose plans for British military spending, German rearmament and British hydrogen bombs. The Gaitskelite right opposed them, but some, notably Gaitskell himself, criticized the British-French-Israeli attack on Suez in 1956, defending international law. Starmer’s Party doesn’t even call it out when other countries break equivalent rates. The Bevanites, like Harold Wilson later, wanted to intervene heavily in the economy to improve it; The Gaitskelites thought that capitalism was doing well and that Labor should tax and spend on welfare. The right was conciliatory, the left productivist.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was an equally vigorous debate between many overlapping positions. This involved a clash between anti-nuclear economic nationalists, eager for state planning and hostile to the common market, and those more in favor of the common market and free market capitalism. Labor was a party that differed on these and other important issues, but also differed from the Conservatives, for example on radical expansion of the welfare state and intervention in industry.
Historic Labour, for all its faults, was a party committed to changing the status quo. It represented the organized working class, among other groups. It was a social democratic party which was committed to understanding and changing the world. Other things have changed drastically since the 1970s, but the main change is not about this or that policy, many of which may or may not be appropriate now. It is rather the shift of reformist energy from the historic Labor party to the New Right.
For more than a generation, the parties of ambition and change have been Thatcher’s Tories and then Ukip, the Brexit Party and the Reform Party. They not only changed things, they set the agenda for New Labour, and Starmer’s Party, which essentially, especially the latter, ceased to be a progressive or centre-left party. It is not surprising that progressive parties have grown in opposition to both – the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein, all now in office. In England, the Greens are part of the same movement.
The question is not whether Labor values have been usurped by the Starmer faction. It’s what kind of party can be built from the corpse of Starmer’s party. One option is obviously a more Blairite party: pro-tech giants, the US and privatisation. But is there any serious alternative to creating a progressive party, a party that dares to talk about the issues of the day, that actually communicates with a progressive electorate? It is hard to see at the moment whether the ambition or the capacity exists within her.
It is worth noting that Starmer’s Party is not only the official party of the organized working class. While Labor had recruited almost every major union, today just over half of union members are in party-affiliated unions. And even then some may leave. This is hardly surprising: as its policies stand, Starmer’s Party’s political instincts are much closer to those of the Conservatives and Reform than to the progressive parties that are feeding it. And this is not accidental, or the result of a lack of vision. That was the whole point.
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