Keir Starmer is the least popular prime minister on record, less than 18 months after being elected. In this sense, he is making history. Few, if any, mainstream political commentators anticipated this situation before the 2024 election. Of course, many on the radical left predicted it several years ago, but who listens to us?
Most journalists want to put it down to casual incompetence: some poorly considered welfare cuts, an unwise diplomatic appointment in Peter Mandelson, the Prime Minister’s lack of charisma. But that isn’t how history works. Governments don’t achieve unprecedented levels of unpopularity without some fundamental mismatch between their governing programme and the will of the people. The people want a fundamental change of direction in the way that our society is managed and governed.
We can argue about what precisely it is that citizens of the UK want to happen, and what they think has gone wrong. Polls present a picture of a fairly confused electorate that never thinks enough is being spent on health, never wants to pay more tax themselves, generally feels the rich should be paying more, doesn’t understand what’s happening in schools or universities but vaguely feels it isn’t working, wants something done about crime even as crime rates are grossly exaggerated, wants major utilities and infrastructure renationalised, absolutely wants draconian controls on immigration, and generally feels that nothing works any more. No coherent government programme could be drawn up from trying to appease all of these sentiments, but that’s exactly what the current one is doing. No wonder it’s floundering.
An overwhelming majority of the public thinks things are not going in the right direction. Under such circumstances, the task of political leadership is not just to be led by polls and short-term voting trends. It is to develop some analysis of what the problems are, formulate a programme that responds to them, and frame a coherent narrative which links the analysis to the solutions, persuading voters to accept this narrative over alternatives. The government’s analysis simply identifies weak economic growth as a cause of public unhappiness. It offers no wider diagnosis of why growth is so weak, or why people are so obviously unhappy in ways that can’t simply be explained by weak growth. This shallow understanding of the situation can only lead to weak and ineffectual solutions.
A more substantial and holistic conceptualising of our moment would suggest that what much of the British public wants is a set of policies that would amount to a decisive turn away from the path that the country has been on since the late 1970s. People want less privatisation, more public ownership, more economic equality, less power for corporations, more for local government and working people. They want a change to the electoral system and democratic institutions that work. They also want a drastic reduction in immigration, but this is the only conservative social policy that actually has clear majority support, no matter what the press and the BBC would have us believe. Mostly what people want is a set of outcomes that could only be delivered by a lot more social democracy, a functioning political democracy, and a final reversal of the decades-long Thatcherite programme.
This government has given them some of that. Its improvements to workers’ and tenants’ rights, its piecemeal renationalisation of rail services, and significant increase in NHS spending arguably amount to a more genuinely social democratic governing programme than has been attempted at any time since the early 2000s, if not the 1970s. Yet it isn’t enough. No wonder Labour MPs are frustrated.
And there’s the rub. People aren’t stupid, no matter what MPs might tell each other in the Westminster bars. The government’s programme amounts to reversing a handful of the most egregious Thatcherite policies of the past few decades, while offering no comprehensive plan to enact the fundamental change of direction that the public longs for.
Meanwhile, the people suffer. The long-term consequences of deindustrialisation in Scotland, Wales, northern England and the Midlands have simply never been addressed by any government, while plants and factories continue to close. For those in work, real-terms earnings suffered a calamitous fall in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, taking years to recover, only to see the value of that recovery wiped out by inflation since 2020. The lives and prospects of young people have deteriorated beyond all recognition, loaded with debt for the privilege of attending universities that have themselves been starved almost to death of necessary funds. Rents and house prices have never been higher, while youth unemployment for graduates and non-graduates is increasing dramatically. Meanwhile, the public realm – from local government, and all of the essential services that it provides, to the police force – is struggling badly. This isn’t just because of 14 years of Conservative austerity. It’s also because the New Labour reforms to public services were a disaster, forcing schools and hospitals to behave like competitive businesses, rather than bedrock institutions for their communities.
Putting all this right isn’t easy, cheap or achievable over night. But that isn’t why Starmer, Rachel Reeves and their ilk will never manage it. They’re never going to manage it because they understand, correctly, that the potential risks of doing so would be enormous. Undertaking such a programme would attract the enmity of a terrifying range of forces: from Donald Trump to the “bond vigilantes”, from the orthodox economists of the Treasury to the owners and editors of the right-wing press. Any government committed to such a programme would have to be willing to defy the US, impose capital controls on the financial markets, replace many senior civil servants, and take on the corruption at the heart of our media institutions. They would probably have to be willing to, for example, take water back into public ownership, without paying the supposed market price for the shares, accepting that this would have a deleterious effect on the “confidence” of foreign investors. They wouldn’t necessarily have to do all of this; but they’d have to be willing to, if that’s what it came down to.
Who knows where this could end? Nationalising Tesco and introducing food rationing? Hopefully not; but no government that is more afraid of that kind of outcome than of simply letting things carry on as they are is going to risk making the break.
Because it’s entirely plausible that’s what it might take. This might well be the country’s worst crisis since the last time a government was forced to introduce rationing, during the Second World War. That’s the kind of scale which might be required for any government finally to take back control of the British economy, to make it serve the people rather than subordinating them to the interests of speculators and property developers. No government unprepared to think like that, risking such disruption, is actually going to do what the public wants. And that just isn’t the job that Starmer or Reeves or the majority of Labour MPs signed up for.
It’s no surprise that people in their positions are unwilling to follow this path. On the one hand, they have never seen themselves as potential history-makers. They don’t want statues to themselves in town squares, like Churchill, Attlee, Gladstone, or even Thatcher. They want the seven-figure salaries and jet-setting lifestyle of a Tony Blair or a Bill Clinton. You don’t get those by trying to renationalise water. They would hardly get to enjoy a quiet, dignified life of public service if they found themselves leading the country in a fight against global capitalist power. There are many countries in the world in which trying to get significant assets transferred into public ownership would see you expelled from government by a military coup, with the support and encouragement of the US. Would any UK prime minister really feel confident that a similar fate would await them? Military men threatened coups against Jeremy Corbyn, not so long ago.
Of course, it might not come to that. There’s a perfectly plausible scenario in which the bond markets and the Treasury are appeased by the simple expedient of a government persuading people to accept tax rises on a scale sufficient to pay down the national debt, rebuild the public sector and implement a green industrial policy. There is plenty of scope for reform of the tax system that could see wealth taxed more, work and consumption taxed less, and a significant rise in overall government income – though the electorate would probably still have to be persuaded to accept some increase in base rates as the price for saving the country.
This, in turn, would have to be part of a long-term plan, and it would have to take more inspiration from China’s successful economic strategy, in which the state plays a leading role in promoting development, rather than Washington’s. To implement such a vision requires a reform to the electoral system, preventing small numbers of voters from wildly affecting electoral outcomes as they do in ours, and a willingness to build a stable progressive coalition to counter the Conservatives and Reform, stretching from the Liberal Democrats to the Green Party. Yes, this would all be difficult to achieve, and, again, would require a kind of strategic vision that professional technocrats like Reeves and Starmer simply are not capable of producing.
You can’t blame them for not wanting to. But if no one steps forward to take on this role, the only beneficiary will be Nigel Farage. He won’t promise to restore social democracy (and if he does, who would believe him?) but he will offer the one other thing that a majority of citizens want: an unprecedented crackdown on immigration. Many voters will accept this, if nothing else seems to be on offer; that’s why Trump was elected in 2024. Any political leader who wants to prevent such an outcome here must be prepared to tell the British public what they already know in their hearts: things cannot go on like this, and however challenging it may be, the country must be taken in a decisively different direction, if it isn’t going to head towards fascism and social breakdown.
Remember that “Keep calm and carry on” poster that was everywhere back in 2010? It was actually designed by British civil servants in case of a successful German invasion during the Second World War. They were unsure the British public would have the stomach for full-scale mobilisation against the Nazis. They were wrong. That’s why the generation of politicians and bureaucrats that had governed Britain between the wars had to be partially replaced by a new one, with a completely different vision, during the pivotal year of 1940. Today’s political class is in a similar position. It cannot imagine itself or the British people standing up to fight against potentially overwhelming opposition, and it has no intention of trying.
But what if Starmer and his advisers were to take all this on board, search their souls, and decide they would, after all, rather be remembered like Attlee and Churchill than the widely despised Blair? Could they be the ones to turn it around?
No. Starmer and his closest allies have associated themselves too closely with direct attacks on the left: the very people who have been calling for such radical change for a decade. The several hundred thousand members who have left or been expelled from the Labour Party since 2020 are politically engaged, and they all have friends, families and social media accounts. That adds up to probably several million British voters who at least know someone who was once a vocal Labour supporter, but now explicitly opposes the government. That several million citizens is exactly the army of advocates and sympathisers that any government needs to have arguing its case in their communities. It’s too late for Starmer, or any politician associated with him, to win them back now.
Who could undertake this crucial task of political leadership? It’s unlikely to be Wes Streeting or some “soft left” MP with a marginally more progressive agenda, either. It could be Zack Polanski, it could be Angela Rayner, it could be Andy Burnham, it could be Zarah Sultana. The truth is that it could be any politician who can actually grasp the scale of the situation and act accordingly. If we do see a Labour leadership election next year, then a crucial question will be whether any candidate can actually put forward a vision, a programme and a strategy that are equal to the task of breaking with the legacy of Thatcherism, while distancing themselves from Starmer’s sectarian war on the left. If they can’t, then the prospects for the immediate future are grim.
[Further reading: Inside the Palestine hunger strike]
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