From the desk of… How Keir Starmer overwhelmed Britain’s conservatives – The Ukiah Daily Journal

It says a lot about the new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer: after reviewing the various possible slogans for his Labour Party, which is expected to win a landslide victory in Thursday's elections, Starmer summed them up in a single word: “Change.”

His parsimonious choice suited a man for whom discipline in the pursuit of victory is no vice and who has shed a boatload of ideological baggage to make his party an acceptable vehicle for protest. He understood that victory would depend far more on voters' anger at 14 years of Conservative government (and five Conservative prime ministers) than on their affection for him. That didn't bother him.

Starmer is perhaps the most underrated politician ever to achieve such a triumph. Since becoming leader of the British Labour Party in 2020, his critics have described him as lacking vision and charisma. They have also accused him of tailoring his views to political circumstances and of emphasizing everyday issues that interest voters rather than broad themes that fire up the faithful.

Almost all of his supposed flaws turned out to be virtues that his party needed and his country needed. Former prime minister Boris Johnson oozed charisma, but voters decided he was unserious and too willing to bend the rules. Starmer, a strict man who once served as the country’s chief prosecutor, presented himself as the antidote.

Extremist ideology helped sink the Labour Party in the 2019 election under Jeremy Corbyn. Having secured the party’s leadership by being sufficiently left-wing, Starmer systematically purged his party, including Corbyn himself, while pushing for moderate parliamentary candidates and including centrist voices in key positions in his shadow cabinet.

Ideology has also proven to be the bane of the Conservatives, whose popularity has been falling in the polls since Johnson’s breach of Covid-19 restrictions was exposed in the “Partygate” scandal. But large swathes of public opinion completely abandoned the Conservatives during Liz Truss’s 44 days in office, when her proposals for radical tax cuts spooked global financial markets.

Outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a more conventional fiscal Conservative, seemed a good fixer. But the divisions within his party were too sharp, and Sunak proved powerless. Calling an early election was his latest miscalculation.

Never has a safe pair of hands looked so safe. The fact that two of Britain’s most market-friendly publications, The Economist and the Financial Times, unusually backed Labour says it all. Everyone wanted “change.”

If underestimating Starmer was a mistake before the election, underestimating his chances of success would be equally reckless.

It is true that the problems Starmer faces are formidable. Unlike Tony Blair, who came to power in a landslide victory in 1997, when the times were booming, Starmer will be trying to turn around a deeply troubled economy. His central campaign promise was to accelerate economic growth, which explains why he won far more approval from business than Labour leaders generally.

He chose not to be given a mandate for radical policies. Instead, he campaigned on five popular – if broad – “missions”: high growth; safe streets; removing “barriers to opportunity”; making Britain a “clean energy superpower”; and making Britain’s health system, crippled by Tory austerity, “fit for the future.” He even scaled back his clean energy spending proposals, fearing that he would give the Tories targets that could be accused of fiscal irresponsibility.

But the moderate nature of these promises suggests that Starmer has grasped the challenges facing progressives of all stripes in this period of distrust of institutions, including government. And while he has learned from Blair and presented himself as a moderate, Starmer is a progressive and knows the limits of Blair’s old formulas.

One of Starmer’s obsessions is to bring working-class voters back to the Labour Party, which, like the social democratic parties elsewhere (and the Democrats in the US), has lost many of its traditional poorer constituencies. This is the fundamental conundrum that the left and centre-left must solve.

“I grew up in the working class,” he said at his party’s convention last fall, pledging to govern on behalf of “working people in the parts of our country that are ignored, neglected, overlooked as sources of growth.” They have borne the burden of an “era of insecurity,” he said, promising to alleviate it.

He opposed Britain's exit from the European Union, which a majority of British voters now regard as a mistake. But he has not promised that it can be easily fixed. He knows that a return to a more rational European policy will take time and attention on both sides of the Channel.

This is a difficult moment for politicians who are temperamentally moderate and philosophically progressive. The likely strength of the far right in next Sunday’s French general election is a warning. Many of the voters Starmer won on Thursday are borrowed candidates, just as Johnson’s Conservative majority in 2019 was built on shallow foundations.

Starmer acknowledged that voters in all democracies are wary of grand promises. “People need hope,” he told the Financial Times, “but that hope has to be realistic.” It’s a good starting point for advocates of change.

Follow EJ Dionne @EJDionne on X (formerly Twitter).

Originally published: August 14, 2024 at 06:25