Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
For Labour, the punches keep coming. Just consider the P&O fiasco. All governments find themselves in no-win situations — and in this case it was a choice between losing an investment opportunity or being seen as weak on workers’ rights. A mediocre Prime Minister would have stumbled into one trap or the other, but not Keir Starmer. No, he impaled himself on both horns of the dilemma.
Is he just bad at politics?
Well, it doesn’t look good. According to the latest poll from More in Common, Labour’s ten point lead on election day has evaporated. And according to Ipsos, Starmer’s personal ratings are in free fall. We can also look at the 76 council by-elections since the general election — in which Labour have made a net loss of 13 seats. This isn’t just a “shaky start”, it’s evidence of a government that just can’t get a grip.
And yet, it’s far too soon to count Starmer out.
After all, we’ve been here before. Just three years ago he was reeling from the loss of the Hartlepool by-election. His personal ratings were in negative territory and the pre-Partygate Tory government was still polling at 40%.
The outlook was so dismal for Labour that one could almost feel the complacency seeping into Tory bones. That’s why, in September 2021, I wrote a piece for this website entitled Ten reasons why Labour isn’t dead yet — an observation that proved all too accurate.
With this precedent in mind, I’d like to present ten updated reasons not to underestimate Keir Starmer or his party:
Despite its poor performance so far, the Starmer government is rich in the most precious of all political resources. I’m sure he’d like to forget his first hundred days, but so should we. It’s the next thousand days (and then several hundred more) that we should worry about — a political eternity in which a Labour government controls the agenda.
Barring a catastrophic party split, Starmer has an unbreakable grip on parliament. Remember that with a 2019 majority of 80 we were able to get Brexit done, lockdown the country, impose two unelected Prime Ministers on the electorate, suffer multiple by-election defeats and still retain a working majority up until the bitter end. Apart from Brexit and Covid matters, we did remarkably little with that leeway, but don’t expect Labour to be so shy — and don’t forget that their majority is 174.
This country needs visionary leadership, which I’m not expecting from Starmer. But policy-wise his last three predecessors left so much undone, that there’s no shortage of easy wins to be had.
Take immigration, for instance. Labour could pick-up the options that we ignored — like reducing the acceptance rate on asylum applications to continental levels or using the latest technology to introduce ID cards. As for stopping the boats, Italy has had some success under Giorgia Meloni — hence Starmer’s fact-finding mission.
With Reform UK advancing on the Red Wall, Labour also has a direct incentive to take action — a possibility that would shame the Conservative record.
Sue Gray’s departure was blow to the Prime Minister, but it also serves as an example to his Cabinet colleagues. If not, even she is indispensable, then no one is safe.
Unlike Tony Blair who was stuck with Gordon Brown, Starmer can regard his closest colleagues as an expendable resource. Rachel Reeves, David Lammy, Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner: all of them are high profile, but none of them so popular nor so good at their jobs that they can’t be offered up to propitiate public anger.
If nothing else, Keir Starmer is a ruthless man. Just look at what he did to his “friend”, Jeremy Corbyn. And it wasn’t just Magic Grandpa, but the rest of the Corbynites too. First Starmer joined them, then he wooed them and then he purged them.
The Labour Left won’t fall for that trick again, but with Sir Keir you don’t get a second chance. He may be a poor politician, but he can manage his party in a way that Johnson, Truss and Sunak couldn’t. We’ll see if Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick can do better — but can they do to the Tories what Starmer’s done to Labour?
We don’t yet know how deep the pool of talent is on the government benches. But with such a big majority it is at least wide. There are 411 Labour MPs and, surely, they can’t all be useless.
You might not have heard of names like Sarah Sackman, Josh Simons and Miatta Fahnbulleh, but you will. Even if this government doesn’t produce the best ministers in British political history, it will have plenty of new ones — and in a political culture that puts youth and novelty before age and experience, that’s not nothing.
The government’s capacity for regeneration also applies to the top job. I don’t expect Starmer to go the way of Boris Johnson, but if he does Labour could replace him with someone like Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham or Dan Jarvis. It wouldn’t have to choose the Leftwing answer to Liz Truss.
The corollary of a big Labour majority is a small Conservative parliamentary party — and, indeed, at 121 MPs, it’s never been smaller. Perhaps that’s why the current leadership race has been so carefully orchestrated.
However, unity has been purchased at the cost of clarity. There’s been no reckoning with the failures of the last five years — in which division was the product of bad governance, not the other way round.
If we refuse to identify our mistakes in office, let alone learn from them, how can we present ourselves as an alternative to a Labour government?
For the first time since the war, a Labour government faces not one but two Right-of-centre mainland parties in the House of Commons: ourselves and Reform UK. The Labour benches are full of MPs who owe their seats to this split.
Figuring out what to do about it is another casualty of the content-free leadership race. As a result, our next leader won’t have the mandate to do a deal with Farage (should that prove necessary).
Nothing is more likely to save Labour’s bacon at the next general election than a continued split on the Right — and yet the default scenario for 2029 is a repeat of 2024. Keir Starmer may be an atheist, but I hope he’s thankful, nonetheless.
Of course, Labour has rivals of its own. The difference though is that support for the various Left-of-centre parties is much more efficiently distributed than on the Right.
For instance, these days there are very few Labour-Lib Dem marginals, but all too many Lib Dem-Tory marginals. Furthermore, along with the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Greens, the yellows are standing-by as potential coalition partners should Labour lose its majority.
The road to a Conservative majority therefore runs through a block of MPs who are immune to the unpopularity of a Labour government, but who’d readily put Labour back into government.
I’m going to end where I finished in 2021 — and that’s with the extinction level event awaiting the Conservative Party.
I’m sorry to bore on about this, but we are doomed unless we win back younger voters — among whom Labour continues to enjoy a huge advantage. On current trends that advantage will only get bigger by 2029 — especially if Starmer follows through with his plan to lower the voting age to 16.
As the months and years go by, it’s usual to talk of governments running out of time. But in terms of underlying demographics, Labour — and the British Left in general — is running into time. It’s not too late for the Conservative Party to change this dynamic, but unless we do, every election will become harder and harder to win.
Let’s hope our next leader knows what he or she is up against.