Labour’s first year in power was defined by fights within the party. The government removed winter fuel payments from most pensioners and announced the biggest welfare cuts since George Osborne. It reduced the foreign aid budget by 40 per cent and warned that high immigration had done “incalculable” damage to the UK.
Progressives, who had greeted the fall of the Conservatives after 14 years as a liberation, were left disoriented by these moves. Keir Starmer’s government, they complained, was picking fights with its friends while giving its enemies a pass.
Now, something has shifted. Starmer’s conference speech spoke of a “fight for the soul of our country” – but against Reform rather than among the left. Those close to the Prime Minister point to his attacks on Tory MP Katie Lam and Reform MP Sarah Pochin over race as evidence that he intends to maintain this shift. “Keir is his own best spokesperson,” argues one ministerial ally.
This renewed willingness to pick fights with the right is evidenced across the cabinet. “When a policy is racist, we will call it that: racist,” writes David Lammy in his piece in this week’s NS.
“That’s about being crystal clear on your values,” he tells Oli Dugmore in an accompanying video interview. “I am not for the politics of managerialism, progressive parties cannot just be the best people who happened to once work in the public services and fall into managerial speak. The populists – I don’t like their values but they are crystal clear on them – they’re picking those fights every day, we have to be in a similar place for our values.”
As deputy prime minister, Lammy – who I can reveal will do PMQs for the first time next week with Starmer away at Cop (making him the first black man to do so) – has become more central to the government’s political direction.
Call it punchy progressivism. It’s Wes Streeting denouncing Pochin for racism live on the BBC; it’s Ed Miliband telling Elon Musk to “get the hell out of our politics and our country”; it’s Richard Hermer, a man proud to own the “progressive” label, standing up for judges and the European Convention on Human Rights.
One way to view Starmer’s new political direction is as a return to his liberal-left roots. It’s no accident, then, that the Prime Minister now finds himself aligned with those who have known him longest: Miliband, who helped him win selection as a Labour candidate in 2014; Hermer, his former Doughty Street colleague; and Lammy, another fellow lawyer who chaired Starmer’s leadership campaign.
This doesn’t represent an embrace of unqualified progressivism. Lammy also uses his piece to praise Danish Social Democratic leader Mette Frederiksen, who has embraced tough immigration controls, and declares that Labour “must be a somewhere party – for a specific people and a specific place – and not an anywhere party” (echoing the thesis of the proudly post-liberal David Goodhart). As the Greens advance, expect cabinet attacks on their willingness to leave Nato to ramp up.
It was the Defence Secretary, John Healey, who cocked an eyebrow this week. “I live in Rotherham, I’ve served the people of Rotherham for 28 years. If I was down at the Masons pub talking about the ‘progressive consensus’, people would just look at me like I’m mad,” he declared in response to Labour’s new deputy leader Lucy Powell (Healey, intriguingly, is viewed by some MPs as a potential leadership candidate from the party’s old right).
Starmer could, after all, have chosen a different path. He could have stood by his “island of strangers” speech, refused to give way on welfare cuts and launched new challenges to Labour’s liberal assumptions. But for now, it is the party’s progressives who are set to shape its future.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
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