Keir: more than just a lucky general | Tom Hamilton

This article is from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To receive the full magazine, why not subscribe? We're currently offering five issues for just £10..

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It is very important in politics, as in life, not to get ahead of ourselves. In the heady Glastonbury summer of 2017, Jeremy Corbyn was not, in fact, Prime Minister. The fall of the Red Wall was not, in fact, the kind of permanent political realignment that would provide an opportunity for ambitious Conservative thinkers to be elected to safe Conservative seats in the broken heartlands of North East England. Boris Johnson could not indeed change.

At the time of writing, Labour has not won the election, so let's not get carried away. But it seems very likely that it will: or so it seemed. Andprobably when Keir Starmer took over as leader of the Labor Party just four years ago. It's worth asking why and who, if anyone, deserves this credit.

Corbynites complain that Starmer is just a Blairite retread; Blairites say they wish it was

The fashionable response, on both the left and the right, is that this has more or less nothing to do with Keir Starmer: it is a self-inflicted disaster by the Conservatives, attributable in various ways and to doses variables to the personal failures of Boris Johnson, to the myopic. the ingratitude of a conservative parliamentary party which did not want to ignore these personal failures, the confinement and something to do with Bill Gates and vaccines, towards Liz Truss, towards a deep state which did not give Liz Truss the The space she needed for her economic reforms to have their otherwise inevitable transformational impact, to Rishi Sunak promising things he couldn't deliver, to Rishi Sunak not promising more, to too much austerity, to not enough of austerity, of Brexit, of not doing Brexit correctly, of being too right – of not being right enough, of pandering too much to Nigel Farage, of not giving enough peerages to Nigel Farage, of fuck early on the big day.

There is some truth in at least some of them, and a lot of truth in a few of them, and to those with little or no truth we can add “many Conservative MPs believe stupid things like this and that makes them harder.” carry out”.

What they have in common, however, is an assessment of Keir Starmer, sometimes implicit but increasingly not: it can have nothing to do with himbecause he is waste. If he is winning, it is because he is a lucky general, in the right place at the right time, just as his adversaries are collapsing in on themselves in an orgy of political failure, d incompetence and massacres. Labour's 2024 election victory, this argument goes, might as well have been won if the party had chosen to hang a red cockade on one of the field donkeys that Keir Starmer bought for his mother.

Just as the idea that “any other leader would be 20 points ahead” was stupid when anti-Corbyn Labor advocated it under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, so the idea that “any other leader would also be 20 points ahead” advance” is stupid today. It matters whether a government fails or not, but it also matters whether an opposition, and particularly its prime ministerial candidate, is someone to whom voters are willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

It goes without saying that in a parallel universe where Starmer had lost the Labour leadership election in 2020, Rebecca Long-Bailey would now be on the verge of power. Starmer may be lucky, but he is not just lucky. To paraphrase the great South African golfer Gary Player, “the more I don’t promise free internet, the luckier I am.”

The two big questions about whether Starmer made a difference to the Labor Party's prospects are: did he change the Labor Party, and should he have done so? For conservatives, the answers are no and yes. When it comes to criticism of Starmer, on the left of Labor and outside, the answers are yes and no, in the same order. As things stand, the electorate appears ready to answer yes to both questions, and the evidence is on their side.

In fact, one of Starmer's unique political achievements was that his right-wing critics invalidated the attacks of his left-wing critics, and vice versa. Tories complain that Starmer tried to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister; Corbynites shake their heads and say he did no such thing. Corbyn complains that Starmer-led Labor no longer represents the program he led the party on; conservatives cover their ears. Corbynites complain that Starmer is just a Blairite retread; The Blairites raise an eyebrow and say they wish he were.

Starmer Derangement Syndrome is a condition that can affect people of all political stripes; the only defense is to avoid having strong opinions about it. Coincidentally, the electorate does not have a strong opinion on Starmer. And if there's one thing worse for a leader than voters not having strong opinions about him, it's voters having strong opinions about him. They had strong opinions about Jeremy Corbyn, and look where that got the Labor Party.

Labour suffered a heavy defeat in 2019 to a Conservative Party whose own leader’s unpopularity and manifest ineptitude were overshadowed by his own. If the central point of the proponents of downplaying Starmer in 2024 is that his success doesn’t really matter, because Labour cannot lose to an unpopular government that has failed miserably to deliver on almost all the major policies it promised in the last election, that has fallen below 20% in some recent opinion polls, that has a parliamentary party riven by infighting, and that has a new leader with no public mandate: well, you did it last time. Don’t be discouraged.

Every political leader, even Rishi Sunak, has supporters whose enthusiasm for their hero takes them further than the evidence allows, and Starmtroopers have as much propensity for hagiographic excess as any Corbynite, Johnsonite or Swiftie. Starmer has not always been sure-footed in his leadership of the opposition. He has made policy commitments that he has later regretted, such as the now-abandoned £28bn green investment pledge, which dragged on for months.

Keir Starmer's manifesto is to the left of everything that has won an election in my lifetime

His early speech errors on Gaza have gone uncorrected for too long and have had both an electoral and moral cost. He is not the most confident parliamentarian, and his occasional failures to make a point are not always the result of a shrewd KC thinking five times ahead and giving his opponent enough rope to hang himself: some of them have simply been missed opportunities.

But while he has certainly made tactical errors, Starmer’s strategic acumen has been impressive, from opening his leadership in a consensual manner with qualified support and constructive criticism of the lockdown, to encouraging Boris Johnson to make his Partygate denials known and leave them there, and above all, his relentless focus on the voters he really needs to win over, rather than those who make the most noise.

This is of course the source of the left’s greatest criticism of Starmer: he won the leadership by relentlessly focusing on the voters he needed to win in Labour, and then pivoted to the national electorate rather than sticking to a political system. a leaflet whose main appeal was to people who had already been shown to be a minority of a minority. I am not entirely unsympathetic to this view: his ten promises were mostly bad, and he should not have kept them; but it is better to abandon bad policies than to stick to them, and it is better to win than to lose.

After all, Jeremy Corbyn didn't keep his word. any of them of his promises, which perhaps explains why a recent election leaflet supporting his candidacy for independent MP for Islington North places so much emphasis on his role in saving the number 4 bus route.

Some of the policies in the Labour Party manifesto do not go as far as some people on the left of the Labour Party would like, or even – because the factional typology can sometimes be exaggerated – as far as the broad mass of the Labour Party would like, or as far as I would like.

But programs that I don't like, that the broad masses of the Labor Party don't like, and that more or less everyone on the left of the Labor Party doesn't like, have won the last four elections. Keir Starmer's Labor manifesto sits comfortably to the left of anything that has won an election in my lifetime, and if he gets a mandate I am inclined to see that as a promising starting point rather than a betrayal unforgivable.

Labor has spent so long debating arguments that end with whether or not a particular idea would make it into a manifesto, that they have forgotten what arguments that begin with manifestos are like. It will be a novelty for his supporters, members and MPs, to have a Labor government to try to influence rather than a Conservative government to complain about.

There might be more to like about a Keir Starmer government than some of his critics think. But we must not anticipate.