The end of starmerism?

For many in London’s media-political bubble, Keir Starmer’s election win in July 2024 was a comforting return to normality. The Brexit referendum, Jeremy Corbyn’s spell as Labour leader, and a series of scandal-ridden Tory prime ministers, each upset the normal codes of British politics. The career lawyer Starmer instead represented bland, technocratic stability. He promised “new management” for party and country, able to silence the rival “populist” dangers of recent vintage. Just days after he became prime minister, writer Otto English captured the zeitgeist with a viral tweet: “It’s nice, isn’t it. The quiet”.

Starmer has never bound himself to others’ expectations. If Corbyn was long indecisive over Brexit, his party’s pro-European wing hoped that Starmer could turn Britain back toward the EU. Yet since becoming Labour leader, Starmer has simply sidelined this issue. More broadly, Starmer’s positioning has been chameleonic. Running for the leadership in 2020, after Corbyn’s electoral collapse, Starmer made his pitch to left-wing party activists with a campaign video foregrounding his 1980s work defending environmentalists and human rights causes. Asked at one debate if he was a Zionist, Starmer tiptoed around the issue. Yet as leader and now as prime minister, he has turned hard against the activist left, even forcing Corbyn out of the party.

However, while Starmer’s allies have often offended the Left of the party with their doctrine of fiscal restraint, Atlanticist foreign policy, and tightened rules on immigration, they haven’t achieved much “quiet” either. While they have removed the socialist Left from positions of responsibility, thus pushing these dissidents into messy initiatives at creating a new party, Starmer has not enjoyed a political honeymoon of the type enjoyed by Tony Blair at the turn of the millennium. If many observers were quick to compare the two — with admirers like François Hollande casting Starmer as a potential leader for European social democracy — the first year in office seems to have exhausted “Starmerism” as a viable political model.

Masters of factional warfare, the centrist technocrats now in charge of Labour can boast that they have outfoxed both the hard Left and the Conservatives. Neither of these forces can land a punch on Starmer; one party hack even called the exit of pro-Palestinian leftists from Labour a welcome case of “shaking off fleas”.  Yet Starmer’s Labour also today enjoys consistently less than 25 percent poll support, and even after ending fourteen years of Conservative rule, it marks no noticeable shift to the Left in British public life. More effective in setting the political weather is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, today polling around 30 percent — unheard-of terrain for a so-called “minor” party. It is spurred on by an angry mood rather like the one that led to Brexit, and looks to be finally ending over a century of duopoly by the Labour and Conservative parties.

Conservative Assumptions

English’s smug reference to political “quiet” was always sure to be confounded by real events. Just three weeks into Starmer’s premiership, Britain faced its worst race-rioting in decades, as far-right groups and a few thousand rowdies burned down migrant-owned businesses and physically attacked Muslims in response to a triple murder, which was falsely rumoured to have been the work of an asylum-seeker. The utopia of restored “normality” has also been shaken by such upheavals as Trump’s return to office, the sprawling Middle East war, and Reform UK’s electoral breakthroughs. Yet after a year in which Starmer’s camp has been tested hard by events, its instinct has been to lean harder into conservative assumptions.

British commentators often speak of “small-c conservatism”, to distinguish the idea of cautious moderation from the specific positions of the “capital-C” Conservative Party. Starmer’s chancellor Rachel Reeves well-illustrates the distinction, insofar as she has dropped some dogmas of past Conservative governments, while also obeying self-imposed restrictions that commit her to a hardly progressive policy course. She has criticised the language of “Tory austerity”; her budget in October 2024 saw a relatively big increase in spending on the National Health Service — helping to overcome its day-to-day funding shortfalls — and, notably, the military, with defence spending planned to more than double as a percentage of GDP by 2035.

This government has, however, also emphasised its fiscal restraint, notably through the claim that past Conservative leaders “maxed out the credit card” — thus demanding it impose some, targeted austerity. This June, it pushed through harsh benefit cuts for disabled people in the name of saving £5 billion a year, but after a rebellion by backbench Labour MPs, agreed that the cuts would only apply to new claimants. This government is also in no mood to confront financial interests, and even timid steps toward correcting glaring injustices — for instance, the call to abolish the “non-dom” tax status that allows wealthy individuals to avoid paying tax on their global income — have faltered. Backing off the plan this January, Reeves told the World Economic Forum that she had listened to the “non-dom community” and insisted that Britain is the best place to invest.

Starmer’s approach is premised on pay-off tomorrow — finding paths to including through bigger capital spending, to then eventually rebalance the economy. The late-1990s Blairite example combined a part-privatisation of public services with an overall increase in their funding; even though Blair was a “right-wing” Labour leader, his chancellor Gordon Brown’s cash injections could buy the support or passivity of the public-sector trade unions so crucial to Labour’s activist base and financing. Yet today this is a much trickier operation: overall growth has remained weak throughout the post-2008-crisis period, aside from the post-COVID recovery. Worse, the public perception is surely not on Starmer’s side, with Brits more likely to note strains on their personal finances than judge the government in terms of micro-shifts in GDP figures. Nor will Trump’s tariffs plans help.

Identity

Reform UK likes to pose as all things to all people, quixotically combining welfarist ideas with the libertarian, privatising creed beloved of Elon Musk or Javier Milei. Yet the moral force of its message, bringing together the other threads, centres on the defence of a trampled upon national identity. The party officially distanced itself from last August’s riots, yet this moment continues to weigh politically. Not only far-right YouTube accounts, but conservative tabloids and even boomer neighbourhood WhatsApp channels, are awash with stories of ordinary people jailed last summer simply for their social media posts (in the main, they were convicted of incitement to violence). For the Right, Starmer is “two-tier Keir”, a king of “woke” double standards who harshly punishes “patriotic” Brits even as Muslims and immigrants evade police scrutiny.

Starmer’s past record as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, including the repressive fast-track trials against mostly young, ethnic-minority defendants during the London riots of 2011, makes a nonsense of such claims. But in the bid to appease right-wing narratives, his camp have leaned into nationalist postures. Starmer performatively “admitted” in May that mass immigration had caused “incalculable damage” and darkly warned of Britain becoming an “island of strangers.” Labour’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, though considered by many on the Right to be a classic effete liberal and “career politician”, has been more authoritarian than most of her predecessors. In December she even came to Rome for political festival of Giorgia Meloni’s party — a force that believes in “great replacement theory” — to compare notes on border control.

The demonisation of Corbyn, when he was Labour leader, centred on the idea of a rising tide of antisemitism, blamed on what in other European countries has been termed an “Islamo-leftist” mash-up. The idea of fused immigrant, Muslim, pro-Hamas and leftist threats looms large in right-wing media. Starmer’s Labour has strongly distanced itself from this image, and banned Corbyn from standing in the July 2024 election (he won anyway, as an independent). This summer, the antics of a small direct-action group called Palestine Action, which broke onto a Royal Air Force base and graffitied some planes, provided the prompt for Cooper’s hysterical move to declare this a “terrorist” organisation, thus rendering any expression of support for it a jailable offence.

Zarah Sultana, a Muslim member of Parliament, was suspended from Labour in July 2024 less than three weeks after Starmer’s election win, along with six colleagues who backed a motion to lift a limit on the number of children for which families can claim benefits. An outspoken pro-Palestinian, in July the 31-year-old announced that she and Corbyn planned a new party, whose founding steps they would co-lead. Since Corbyn’s resignation as leader in 2020, the Left of Labour has generally avoided head-on conflict with Starmerism, though several major figures are now billed as “independents.” Even now, plans for a new party remain vague, with Corbyn cautious to move beyond a loose grouping together with a smattering of pro-Palestinian independents and Green Party MPs.

Attempts to build a left-wing alternative to Labour have often crashed into Britain’s First-Past-the-Post electoral system, which punishes smaller parties. In the July 2024 election, Starmer’s Labour won 411 of 650 seats, a landslide majority; yet its vote share (under 34 percent) and the weak overall turnout (under 60 percent) already made clear that Starmer was not entering office with real popular enthusiasm behind him. In that same contest. Farage’s Reform UK took 14 percent of the vote and only five seats. From this basis the hard-right party is now surging, cannibalising much of the Conservative vote, parts of Labour’s northern and rural support, as well as many former abstainers (notably young men). It remains unclear whether a left-wing challenger could mount any comparable rise.

Labour’s Left has lost hope in Starmer, and many have been forced out or quit the party. Palestine is a lightning-rod for dissent, and may galvanise a considerable activist layer, perhaps also in electoral challenges behind the Greens or some new left-wing party. But this cannot be enough. Starmer’s technocrats, like neoliberalised social-democrats around Europe, have pushed forward their managerial-centrist project amidst a vacuum of mass politics and amidst the historic decline of the labour movement, factors also key to the rise of the hard right. Corbyn-era Labour revived many left-wing ideas and briefly even expanded its electoral support, but remained the work of a small activist minority, centred on the urban and high-educated. Those who rebel against Starmer need not only criticism of his backsliding and hypocrisies, but to offer a wider mass of people some chance of taking their own fate in hand. Otherwise, Reform UK’s politics of grievance are ready to seize the initiative.

Author is Jacobin’s Europe editor