There has been a strange refusal to understand the scale of Labour’s collapse. Perhaps because still, somewhere, it is believed that Keir Starmer saved the Labour Party in 2020, and because Labour is in office with a huge undeserved majority. But getting a notional national 17 per cent vote share in the local elections, is easily the worse share of the vote Labour has had in its entire history as a national political party. Losing Wales as it has, where it received 11 per cent of the vote, is no passing malaise.
This is not a sudden development. New Labour and Starmer’s Party has been losing vote share since 1997, from 43 per cent in 1997 to roughly 30 per cent in 2010 and 2015, the same levels achieved by Michael Foot. Labour lost Scotland in 2015. Jeremy Corbyn temporarily took Labour back to Blair and Wilson levels of support, but Starmer’s Party only managed 34 per cent of the popular vote in 2024 and has lost vote share at an extraordinary pace ever since.
Nor can what has happened be seen as the British iteration of a general crisis in social democracy. The revival under Corbyn was based on a social democratic programme. Furthermore, Labour has been losing votes to social democratic parties like the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. Nor did New Labour or Starmer’s Party suffer from a failure to communicate – on the contrary its message has got through 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 Labour Party”, and indeed to “my government”. This is new – no previous leader claimed the party as his in this way, nor trespassed on the monarch’s headship of government. More than that, Starmer insists, still, that he and Morgan McSweeney saved the party.
It is a common complaint, from Wes Streeting to the left, that Starmer has no vision, no project. But that is quite misleading. Starmer had an exceptionally strong vision for the future of the country, and a profoundly blinkered one. Starmer’s party abhors the left and wishes for a future without it. He is continuing the New Labour project: to create a new conservative and conformist party. That is, a party with minimal member influence, funded by private donors, committed to maintaining a status quo, and offering remunerative post-political careers for its apparatchiks. It is a party deeply committed to the alliance with the United States, and the one 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, for redistribution was ruled out. 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 must remain “investible”. Starmer’s Party’s conservatism extended to being deeply Unionist, even in relation to Northern Ireland. It even started to believe in Brexit, and trumpeted minor trade deals just as the Tories had. It aped the Tories and Reform on immigration.
And, it should not be forgotten, it inherited from the Brexiteers, and New Labour, a policy of using routine mendacity as a central political tool. It has continued the corruption of public discourse, descending to new lows with its dishonest attacks on Green Party policies and opponents of Israel’s policies. It wanted and wants to keep things as they are, and to reward and honour figures like Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, both of whose friendships and business relationships tell us all we need to know about them politically.
So deeply committed is his government to this vision that even as the policies to maintain its rule became irrational from the perspective of the national interest, and voter opinion, it has doubled down on them. It royally sucked up to the United States under Trump, even as he so clearly became the enemy of Europe and of Ukraine. It didn’t criticise when Trump threatened the independence of Canada, an older ally than the US. It made tech deals with him which further compromise British sovereignty, energy supplies, and the NHS. It facilitated the Israeli annihilation of Gaza, giving military aid and political cover, imprisoning British people who dissented, and improperly sabotaging parliamentary debate on the subject.
Starmer’s Party didn’t get economic growth, but continued with the same policies which have failed for 14 years. It cut pensions, and retained the two-child cap, and suspended MPs who objected. It could not even bring itself to think about the nationalisation of water despite the scandalous performance of the private companies, some of which could be taken over practically without payment. This is not a lack of vision, but a surfeit of shopworn thinking, all missing a serious analysis of where we have been, and what the possibilities for action are, or any willingness to mobilise people and opinion in favour of change.
What then of “Labour values”? Is it the case that Labour has been led by an intruder? In that case it is striking how little opposition there has been within the party. MPs always have the option not just of voting down policies they do not like, but of making clear that they might, forcing changes of policy. In any case they should take responsibility for what they vote for. There has been practically no resistance, except from the tiny remaining left faction in the party.
Now, with Starmer’s Party rejecting Starmer, what are the policy alternatives on offer? Very few. To an astonishing extent this leadership contest will be driven by personalities and vibes. As in the case of Starmer, the main qualification for leadership appears, risibly, 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 needs to be made for Andy Burnham who has articulated a limited domestic programme of nationalisation to provide essentials more fairly, devolution and PR, and shown some understanding that a critique of Thatcherism and New Labour is required, as well as one of the British state and constitution. He is notable too for his campaign for a duty of candour in public life, and his complaints about routine lying by political machines. We await his views on foreign policy and on the Middle East. But his campaign remains insurgent, forced to hurdle the forthcoming Makerfield by-election.
It was a very different story when there was a Labour Party, before the 1990s. Labour was a party both of protest and power. There were clear political divisions within the party, well articulated by key figures, which covered the whole spectrum of policy from domestic to foreign affairs, with little overlap with Tory positions. Senior Labour ministers once resigned from government for political reasons, as did Harold Wilson and Aneurin Bevan in 1951.
In the 1950s there was a long-standing argument between the Bevanites, who weren’t just cuddly pro-NHS types, but opponents of grandiose plans for British military spending, German rearmament and British hydrogen bombs. The Gaitskellite right opposed them, but some, notably Gaitskell himself, criticised the British-French-Israeli attack on Suez in 1956, standing up for international law. Starmer’s Party does not even call it out when other countries break equivalent norms. The Bevanites, like Harold Wilson later, wanted to intervene strongly in the economy to improve it; the Gaitskellites thought capitalism was doing fine and that Labour should tax, and spend on welfare. The right were welfarist, the left productivist.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was an equally strong debate between many overlapping positions. This included a clash between anti-nuclear economic nationalists, keen on state planning and hostile to the common market, and those in more in favour of the common market and free market capitalism. Labour was a party that differed on these and other important issues, but also differed from the Tories, for example on radically extending the welfare state, and intervening in industry.
Historic Labour, for all its faults, was a party committed to changing the status quo. It represented the organised 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 key change is not over this or that policy, many of which may or may not now be appropriate. It is rather the shift of reforming energy from the historic Labour party to the New Right.
For over a generation, the parties of ambition and change have been Thatcher’s Tories, and then Ukip, the Brexit Party and Reform. They not only changed things but set the agenda for New Labour, and Starmer’s Party, which essentially ceased, especially the latter, to be progressive or centre-left parties. It is hardly 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 Labour values have been usurped by Starmer’s faction. It is what kind of party could be built out of the corpse of Starmer’s party. One option is clearly a more Blairite party: pro-tech giants, the US, and privatisation. But are there any serious options to create a progressive party, one that dares speak out on the issues of the day, that actually communicates with a progressive electorate? It is hard to see at the moment whether the ambition or capacity exists within it.
It is worth noting that Starmer’s Party is only barely the official party of the organised working class. Whereas Labour had affiliated to it nearly every major trade union, today only just over half of union members are in party-affiliated unions. And even then some may leave. This is hardly surprising: as it stands its policies, Starmer’s Party’s political instincts, are far closer to those of the Tories and Reform than to the progressive parties that are eating it up. And that is not accidental, or the result of a lack of vision. It was the whole point.
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Subscribe here to comment“It aped the Tories and Reform on immigration.”
Really? Over 100,000 people applied for asylum in the UK last year [source: the Observer, 3rd or 10th May]. How many of the backlog of failed asylum seekers were deported? Fewer than 8000. What happens to the rest? They remain in the UK. Along with vast numbers who immigrate via official applications through non-asylum routes.
The idea that if you don’t adopt an open borders “nationality is a reactionary artefact as was proved conclusively by [insert name of 1960s/70s sociologist, preferably French or German]” position, you are “apeing the Tories/Reform”, may go down well in University Senior Common Rooms like the one inhabited by Prof. Edgerton, but it is clearly not held by voters, as we saw two weeks ago. But then perhaps everyone outside the SCR is a reactionary? The Left (in its widest sense, including non-members of the Labour party) has spent decades informing anyone concerned about immigration that they are a racist bigot – and amazingly, rather than voters saying “thank you for educating me about my error, I am so grateful to you that I will vote Labour to expiate my sin” they’ve stuck up two fingers to the Left and voted en masse for Right-wing parties. Who could possibly have anticipated that? Well……
As a Labour activist, I despair of the nonsense which passes for discussion on this issue.
Actually, it’s not the case that former Labour voters “stuck up two fingers to the Left and voted en masse for Right-wing parties.”
Analysis of the results of the disastrous (for Labour) May local election results show that, while Labour only managed to hang on to a measly 33% of the people who voted for them at the 2024 general election (i.e. 2/3 of these voters did not vote for Labour in the local elections), only 5% of these Labour “defectors” in England switched to Reform. The biggest shift was from voting Labour to not voting at all (24%), with the close second being a switch to the Greens (22%) – hardly “sticking up two fingers to the Left”. The Lib Dems took a further 10% and the remaining 7% were split between the Tories and other parties.
The reason Reform did so well is not because former Labour voters switched to Reform en masse, but rather former Tory voters switched to Reform (28% of people who voted Tory in 2024 switched to Reform in the local elections), while the Labour vote either stayed at home or switched to more left-leaning parties (The Greens, Plaid, SNP, independents).
It was almost an exact replica (in reverse) of what happened in the 2024 general election – when once again the party that won (Labour) did so not by persuading voters for other parties to switch to them but because the opposition fragmented. in that case, it was the Tory vote that collapsed as former Tory voters either stayed at home or switched to a more radical alternative (in their case a more right-wing alternative, Reform), splitting the right-wing vote and allowing Labour to win a big majority on a poorer share of the vote than they achieved in 2019, which was (rather unfairly) widely branded Labour’s worst-ever performance.
All the above does not take away from the fact that Reform is taking seats previously held by Labour and there is clearly a strong danger of ending up with a Reform Government. But we need to be clear that this is NOT because Reform is persuading lots of former Labour supporters to jump ship to them.
Interestingly, if you look in more detail at the reasons given by former Labour voters (in 2024) for not voting Labour this year, the biggest reason given (by 44% of Labour defectors) was “They have become “Tory-lite” and abandoned traditional Labour values”, followed by “It’s not clear what Labour stands for any more”. Being soft on immigration was way down the list.
You can see the full analysis here: https://cdn.persuasionuk.org/May_2026_elections_preliminary_analysis_7325311b0f.pdf
It’s long been the case that the majority of asylum claims are accepted. You claim that around 8 per cent of asylum claimants have been deported under Labour, but the government’s own figures place it closer at 34 per cent, considerably more than under the Tories (9 per cent).
Under Starmer, we have seen an increase in racism of all kinds. Many of us believe his rhetoric is responsible for this. A prime example was his channelling Enoch Powell’s notorious Rivers of Blood speech. Having appointed a Home Secretary in the Kemi Badenoch mould, the government is following through with draconian anti-immigration measures, and performative cruelty such as the attack on family reunion.
To deny that the government ‘aped the Tories and Reform on immigration’ is to reveal yourself ignorant of government policy.
Couldn’t agree more.
There is also the deluded belief that immigrants are all inherently socialist and progressive in their views.
I always find David Edgerton a very intersting writer – his books on Britain’s War Machine and The Rise and Fall of the British Nation are extremely refreshing views of recent history. The Labour Party has always found it difficult to get elected because the English working slass even in the 1950s at the height of Trade Union membership is generally conservative. I grew up in a Labour household in the 1960s but my dad was a factory worker and most of his mates were not political. I followed on as a staunch Labour voter in all elections plus pro EU membership.I got a university eduaction and well paid private sector jobs but found Labour going increasingly right wing in order to get elected. Regardless the Conservatives went for broke with neoliberalism and the bond market and the fall of communism releasing millions of cheap workers did the rest. How to be social democratic in a world run by global finance is a difficult question to answer unless you are adding value to the economy. I only survived becasue I got a good education and took the capitalist shilling. Holding socialist, pro EU views will soon be like living as a Catholic in Reformation England…..you keep quiet about it.
Starmer was overwhelmingly elected as Party leader on a platform of radical measures such as nationalisation but discarded most of these policies upon winning the leadership.Hard to say who feels most shortchanged: the Party membership which had tired of Corbyn’s unelectability,or that part of the electorate which pinned its hopes upon something different than fiscal restraint.If Starmer has the courage to face a contender then he needs to spell out to the PLP and the membership what he will change in policies and how he expects to beat Reform. His speech last week didn’t do any of those things and nor did it sound authentic being a knee jerk response to the prospect of losing his position prior to a general election. He has already lost the backing of the unions but it is still possible that he will salvage support from enough backbenchers who fear for their seats to restore his authority.
Labour in practice from the 1940s to the end of the Cold War was firmly Atlanticist, economically somewhat to the left of centre, and socially conservative. Left wing challenges were seen off. Much the same as Starmer’s Labour. In fact, I think Starmer said his model was Wilson, and politically that might be so, minus the communication skills and deeply political mind of the latter. And two things crucially have changed since the 1960s: Labour is no longer an insurgent movement based on a self-confident organised working class, and a credible socialist alternative is no longer articulated (anywhere for that matter). Starmer is therefore about as good as it can get for Labour, and any new leader, whatever superior political skills they may have, will not revive social democracy, except maybe in a Blairite sense.
You mention the “policy of using routine mendacity as a central political tool. It has continued the corruption of public discourse…” I could not agree more. One hears this complaint from anyone who still dares to discuss politics – “They are all liars”. It was Blair, Mandelson and notably Alistair Campbell, spin-doctor in chief, who institutionalised lying as a form of communication. The very word “spin-doctor” is a lie – it implies something other than blatant untruth.
The policy continues. Noticeably, Andy Burnham has already retracted his statements from last week about wishing to re-join Europe – he has realised this is unpopular with core working-class Labour supporters. How many will turn to their friends and family and say – “You can’t believe a word he says”.