Yves here. Your humble blogger is not remotely expert enough on UK politics to discuss the long-overdue departure of Starmer and the new Labor leadership contest in any detail. Nevertheless, this article has some points that strike me as sour notes and will hopefully stir informed discussion. For instance, it makes a naive comparison between the decline in Corbyn’s popularity ratings and that of Starmer, when Corbyn (like Sanders but more obviously so) was on the receiving end of a massive media campaign against him, centered on bogus charges of anti-Semitism.
An article sent by Micael T may serve as a useful counterpoint. From Anti-politician Starmer leaves after reviving the 90s. From the top:
Less than two years after his record election victory, Keir Starmer’s ideology-free project has run aground. His political legacy is the victory over Corbynism, the imprisonment of pensioners and a lack of vision that makes Tony Blair appear utopian.
When Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday morning, few mourned. Even his most devoted supporters can no longer muster any enthusiasm for the empty package of platitudes that the Starmer project was from day one.
To understand how someone so teflon-like, with no previous experience as an elected politician, could become prime minister, one must recall the context in which his career began. It was as an associate of Labour’s left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn that Starmer first made a name for himself in politics – after a long career as a prosecutor where he, among other things, brought left-wing political activists to justice.
That background in the Corbyn camp initially gave Starmer’s project a certain left-wing veneer, although he himself did his best to get rid of it. When he was elected party leader after the 2019 election defeat, it was not long before Sir Keir showed where he really stood. Corbyn was expelled from his own party and the hundreds of thousands of members who had joined Labour under his chairmanship, making the party the largest in Western Europe, were either silenced or kicked out if they had not already left of their own accord . In retrospect, it is hard not to see this as Starmer’s main legacy: to restore Labour as a centrist party.
When Labour won a landslide election victory in the summer of 2024, it was more a result of the Tory party having broken up after almost 15 years in power than any enthusiasm for Labour’s new programme. It was certainly more left-leaning than it had been for a long time, a result of the general influence of the Corbyn era on the political landscape on the left. But how little could really be expected of a Starmer government became clear even before it took office .
Less than a year after Liz Truss’ disastrous experiment with unfunded tax cuts in a high-inflation environment in the autumn of 2023, Starmer’s advisers had learned their lesson: all expansionary programmes would be put on hold – voters would understand that they could not expect much, because this was a responsible government. In many ways, the Starmer era was a political re-enactment of the 1990s. Accountability and austerity once again became watchwords, surface was prioritised over substance, politics became a matter of communication rather than action, change was a word overused in interviews rather than actually worked to achieve.
The difference, however, is that none of the third-way socialists of the 90s even come close to Starmer’s total lack of vision.
By Nicholas Dickinson, Lecturer in Politics, University of Exeter. Originally published at The Conversation
Keir Starmer has resigned as leader of the Labour party, and so in time as the UK’s prime minister. In the end, despite his numerous assurances that he would fight on, after Andy Burnham’s resounding win in the Makerfield byelection, the pressure on Starmer became too great to withstand. It makes him the sixth British PM in a decade to stand down.
The immediate cause of his decision was the final collapse in support for him in the party and in cabinet, clarified in private conversations over the weekend. In setting out his plans, Starmer has avoided the avalanche of resignations that toppled Conservative PMs Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
The overall aim seems to be a more orderly transition – “with good grace” – than those under recent Conservative governments. Yet his emotional statement reflecting on his time in the highest office still highlights a leader who knows he has failed.
Starmer was not popular the day before he walked into 10 Downing Street. On the eve of the 2024 general election, his net satisfaction rating with Ipsos stood at minus 21. This was a historic low for an incoming prime minister. While 31% of the public said they were satisfied with his performance, 52% were dissatisfied, marking the first time a leader had secured a parliamentary majority while holding a significantly negative approval rating.
Yet in the environment of British politics since the Brexit referendum, such figures hardly seemed unusual. Starmer’s predecessor Rishi Sunak entered the 2024 campaign with a net satisfaction score of minus 56, according to YouGov.
At the time, I argued that Starmer would likely see an upsurge in popularity having actually achieved a Labour victory after 14 long years. In 1997, Tony Blair enjoyed a record-breaking honeymoon with satisfaction ratings soaring to plus 60 in the months following his victory. Even David Cameron saw his approval leap to plus 21 shortly after forming the coalition in 2010. The office of prime minister typically confers a halo of competence on its new occupant.
Starmer’s popularity did indeed improve. But only to a kind of tepid neutrality. In the immediate aftermath of the election, his net favourability rose to plus 3 in Opinium’s first post-election poll, while YouGov recorded a similarly rapid recovery to roughly break even. Unlike the sustained euphoria of the Blair years, Starmer’s “bounce” was in absolute terms a shallow recovery that barely lifted him above the water line before the tides turned once again.
At the same time, measured by his majority, he seemed in an unassailable position. Yet the same could have (and indeed was) said of Boris Johnson. Following the 2019 election, talk was of the Conservatives securing a “decade of dominance”, arguing that the structural realignment of the “red wall” had created a near-permanent Tory majority that would keep Labour out of power until the 2030s. In the event, Johnson was out just over three years later and the talk now is of Conservative extinction.
A Dangerous Pattern
Where did it go wrong for Starmer? Paradoxically, the answer may be found in the fate of his predecessor as Labour leader. Jeremy Corbyn’s record now looks similar to Starmer’s. Between 2017 and 2019, Corbyn’s personal ratings plummeted from a competitive minus 11 during the 2017 campaign to a disastrous minus 44 by the time of his 2019 defeat. By then, the strategic ambiguity that once held his coalition together collapsed under the pressure of Brexit.
Starmer’s rise and fall took almost exactly the same period of time. And it happened for a set of reasons uncomfortably similar for either side of the Labour party’s ideological divide to admit. In both 2017-2019 and 2022-24, Labour’s fragile polling lead was driven less by enthusiasm for the opposition and more by a collapse in government competence. As data from the 2024 “loveless landslide” illustrated, Labour secured around 64% of seats on just 34% of the vote – the lowest share for any majority government in history.
Just as Corbyn was squeezed by the populist-right Brexit party and pro-EU centre party the Liberal Democrats in 2019 over its middle-of-the-road position on Brexit, Starmer faced a similar pincer movement in the mid-2020s. On one flank, Reform UK eroded the Labour vote in post-industrial heartlands; on the other, the Green Party and pro-Gaza independents successfully targeted urban progressives. The Greens ended up quadrupling their MPs in 2024 and independent candidates secured historic wins in Labour strongholds.
Labour’s electoral results in office reflected this – byelection losses to both Reform UK and the Greens, disastrous local election results in England, and failing to dislodge a struggling and scandal-plagued Scottish National Party north of the border.
Fittingly, this latest resignation took place almost exactly ten years to the day of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Make no mistake, the divides created and solidified as a result of the Brexit moment are still at the heart of British politics – even if many people have forgotten the details of that dispute.
As Professor Tim Bale has recently argued, British politics is best seen as an example of two-bloc polarisation. Voters are locked into broad identity-based camps and Brexit position is the key underlying variable. Yet this reality is obscured by the fact that these blocs are internally fragmented and only occasionally address the issue directly.
While voters may occasionally unite against a common enemy, they remain deeply divided on other aspects of policy, leaving leaders like Starmer (or Corbyn, for that matter) trying to hold together a sandcastle coalition that crumbles the moment the tide comes in.
Good riddance.
What sort of politician would deliberately eradicate the highest membership of any political party in Europe at a time when everyone is bemoaning the rise of the “far right” and social apathy?
A compromised deep state Zionist implant. That’s who.
Sadly, his likely legacy will be Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting as leader.
Both outcomes are acceptable to the corporate masters.
The brainwashed public will happily embrace “change” and soon be surprised that nothing different will happen.
Very depressing.
Streeting declared for Burnham. The contest seems to be over.
Soon we will be able to celebrate a half century of Thatcherism in the UK.
i’m not a great admirer of corbyn, but he energised the labour party and boosted its membership to half a million, he could have won the 2019 election but he was stabbed in the back by all the blairites with the mossad office at the israeli embassy on speed dial. millions in zionist money was spent to destroy him with a bogus anti semitism campaign, because he wanted to ban arms sales to israel and recognise palestine. cia director pompeo said corbyn “would be stopped” from winning an election. when labour did badly, the labour blairite backstabbers like jess phillips were practically wetting themselves with glee. they much preferred a tory government under johnson to a labour one under corbyn.
Neoliberal professional politicians are destined to be unpopular no matter the colour of the party.
Considering all eligible voters, the landslide was actually won by “no vote” with 40%, Labour was c.20%, and the Conservative vote was split by Reform.
The issue for the UK is that after decades of neoliberal decline and brain-washing, there is no politician that has any clue on how to diagnose, let alone address, the causes of this decline. And anyone with a remotely socialist platform would be eviscerated by the media – as no doubt will happen to Zack Polanski if he gains any traction.
So if / when Burnham fails, the “acceptable” fallback will be Reform’s scape-goating of immigrants as the cause.
The future of leaders in the United Kingdom and other Western nations will likely be bleak as long as they pursue anti-Russian and pro-Israeli policies that offer no benefits.
They are put in place to destroy and they are pulled out just before the pitch-forks come out.
Unless decent people will start to engage in politics themselves or show up with the pitch-fork (extra points for guilloutines) and the first public outing of the next destroyer, this will go on until UK and every other country trapped in this nightmare is fully destroyed and all wealth is transferred to oligarchs and the population is in a euthnasia program or debt slaves
Dickinson’s article is remarkably vapid. It overlooks almost everything including the economic and fiscal constraints all British political parties adopt as natural law (it’s all Thatcherism all the time) and the bogus but successful and indeed ongoing Labour antisemitism which hunt.
In Links yesterday was this short article from the NLR’s Sidecar blog that I liked https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/tweedledee
I keep coming back to electoral systems, but this situation is nearly inevitable when you have a system (FPTP) that makes it almost impossible for non-geographically concentrated smaller parties to displace incumbents. It can work fine if the main political groupings are viable either in terms of external politics or internal cohesion, but once this breaks down, they simply become rotting hulks preventing any change and all ‘politics’ becomes an internal system of back stabbing. There is every incentive for Labour insiders to focus on blocking alternatives while engaging on endless internal personal squabbles. The inevitable result is a long series of inept leaders with no real interest or capacity in actually running a country. And its almost impossible to change things – Labour and Tories are essentially zombie organisations that exist only to self perpetuate.
The only real alternatives are on the non-English fringes. But on the same day Starmer had his Brutus moment, two significant regional parties had their own court issues – yesterday Peter Murrell was convicted of embezzlement of SNP funding and a prominent Brexit personality, ‘Sir’ Jeffrey Donaldson was found guilty of child abuse. The rot is everywhere (in both cases, there are plenty of ‘rumours’ of wider issues).
In a wider sense, the UK is in a deep economic bind. It is locked in a low growth path, but without the sort of social cohesion that allows a country like Japan to manage the relative decline. In theory, the Parliamentary system is supposed to give the sort of stability that allows a government to make difficult decisions (this is the core of the argument against electoral reform), but neither party has shown the capacity to take on the necessary level of structural re-engineering. Even if you don’t accept the MMT arguments about debt, there is a lot of areas of fiscally neutral pension, tax and social welfare reform that could theoretically be carried by any competent government, but which seems to have become fundamentally intractable. And there is no political tradition in the UK of the sort of cyclical internal revolution that has allowed countries like France to dig itself out of its own holes.
The UK political system as it stands is in an advanced stage of collapse, with three overtly right-wing parties, Restore, Reform and the Conservatives and three which are not overtly right-wing, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. The First Past the Post voting system gives any one of these six parties a chance, at least in theory, of forming the next government or at the very least affecting the outcome of any election. To complicate matters further, Nationalist parties are significant in Scotland and Wales, and Northern Ireland is, as usual, a world of its own. With a mendacious media, both traditional and social, and foreigners intervening in political affairs from the US, Israel and Russia, it is a toxic mess with no group of people really fully in control (if you exclude ‘oligarchs’ as a category).
Because, in part, of demographic trends and the consequences of Brexit, the economy is set on a downward trajectory so any government is faced with the decision : ‘where are we going to take the pain? Raise taxes or cut spending?’ . The response from the electorate (many of whom are largely living in cloud-cuckoo land) is going to be ‘not here. Cut Taxes. Increase spending’.
Where matters go from here is arguably anyone’s guess. I fear it will not be good.
This was Middle East Eye’s take:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/once-keir-starmer-had-beaten-left-he-had-no-plan-government
Not that it is better in other European countries.
Nice wrote up of Starmer but since when do “decent men” not pay their way? (“decent man” – everyone’s favorite positive expression on Starmer, ignoring his early scandal of his eyeglasses and suits).
The next UK PM will be the 7th PM in ten years, I think. Stable politics. Maybe they should give up neoliberal economics guided politics. People are tired of being made poorer. Just an idea. (One that also applies to the US.) / ;)
The English regions are many and various, and we have different accents, we speak different versions of roughly the same language, and our identities are determined by place and class. I think of myself in terms of the town I grew up in Lancashire and West Fife where I spent substantial parts of my childhood with mt father’s side of the family. I became a Londoner because that is where my employer wanted me to live and work. I think Burnham made a crucial point when he campaigned on the idea of place.
Over the years, MPs have grabbed whatever seats they can that will take them to Westminster, and few grew up in or near their constituency and the only association that have with is that they campaigned for election there and succeeded in representing that seat or, more usually not. It’s a situation where the cream is supposed to rise to the top but Britain’s misfortune is that shit rises faster than cream, poisoning the milk.
The most effective reform we can make is stop the pretence that government is about churning out legislative follies with little discussion and an almost total lack of comprehension on the part of legislators, and get down to governing the country by applying existing legislaion or the common law. We lack governance whilst our parliament overflows with puerility and our defence, foreign policies and much of our internal politics is determined by foreign governments and their agencies.
One quick and sensible solution is to scrap the House of Lords as it stands and have it perform it’s original function representing the key interests of the country, which lie in the cities, counties and towns, and have one or more members representing the interests of their region or town sitting, at most, two days a week. It will be an effective way to bring the not so deep state involved in the direct democratic governance of their constituents and to begin to shovel some of the elements of the deep state under the bus an bring those remaining into the light.
I’m afraid the author lost me in the first sentence, with “record election victory”.
IIRC from Mercouris commentaries, Labour won something like 2/3 of the constituencies with only about 1/3 of the popular vote. They won because of the (well-deserved) collapse in the vote share of the Conservative Party. The Labour Parliamentary supermajority was an artifact of the FPTP system, combined with Tory collapse. This was not a “record victory” in any sense of political strength of the Labour Party.
I hope that a genuinely representative people’s party can emerge in UK.
Former MP George Galloway really unloaded on Starmer saying ‘I danced on his political grave. He has turned the United Kingdom into an authoritarian hellhole.’ He went on to say-
‘“He’s a creature of the deep state,” Galloway said, referring to Starmer’s work as Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service prior to his election to Parliament in 2015. He added that Starmer had “a whole string of deep-state preoccupations,” citing what he described as “the injustice to Julian Assange” and the decision not to prosecute BBC presenter and serial sex offender Jimmy Savile.’
https://www.rt.com/news/641984-starmer-authoritarian-hellhole-galloway-sanchez/
He also pointed out that more people have been being jailed and arrested for social media posts than in any other country in the world. Add to this his gutting of the UK budget so that all that money could be sent to the Ukraine and his protection of the Israeli genocide and the picture is complete. Worse Prime Minister ever.
Galloway’s view regarding Starmer is a widely held one in the UK, for once.
I suspect Starmer will use his last month or two as PM to try to set in place some particularly foul policies that his international donors want in the UK — Stalinist internet censorship laws and contracts with Palantir — before flying off to get paid by those donors a la Blair.
On his resignation day, he authorised the first attacks on Russia proper using British-fulfilled Storm Shadow missiles.
That’s pretty foul, binding Burnham and the rest of us to actual war on Russia.
I wonder if Oreshnik uses a more up to date DVLA database for tagetineg than Romanian rent boys apparently do?
Gary Stevenson predicted a year ago that both Starmer and Trump would fail because they are not addressing the real issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCnImxVWbvc
The whole Brexit imbroglio is purely a manifestation and an acceleration of the overall chaos. It’s not the root cause. “Ordinary” people have not seen real income growth for a generation whilst rentiers in both the private and public sectors make hay. The lack of income growth matters owing to expectation and the general lack of an alternative model for these regimes to claim legitimacy in our secular age. At the same time, institutional capacity in both sectors is in terminal decline. Elites are broadly in denial. Why would they not be? Things work for them.
Similar issues across all of the West including the U.S. The various political systems then work in different ways to exhibit them. We are seeing a succession of Prime Ministers, for example. Some countries see unstable coalitions. The U.S. gets MAGA.
Even after the disastrous 2019 election, Corbyn had won more votes for Labout than Starmer did in his landslide victory of 2024 (10M vs 9M). This just goes to show how unrepresentative FPTP is.
The UK’s economy is on life support. Its engine, financial services, still hasn’t recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. What little industry was left after Thatcher’s ponzi-scheme financialization of the economy is now dying in no small part due to some of the most expensive energy in the world.
In the short to medium term, there is only one lever a government could use to boost growth, which would be to abolish the planning rules that block housing construction and lead to the second worst real-estate market in Europe after Italy (from the buyer’s point of view, not property owners who obviously approve of NIMBY policies that keep their property values high).
The other lever would be to accelerate the transition to renewable energy, contra what swivel-eyed loons in the Tory and Reform parties funded by hydrocarbon interests want. The UK actually has a fair amount of wind power available to reduce the cost of electricity, but that power is mostly in Scotland and East Anglia, and rural Tory NIMBYs have successfully blocked the construction of power lines needed to take that power to South-East England where most of the demand lies. The situation is so absurd they are now building undersea cables to route around NIMBYs.
Since wind and solar are intermittent, the UK also needs grid-scale power storage, whether batteries or pumped hydro like the Coire Glas project. This would obviate the need for expensive gas peaker plants that lead to high prices because in the UK electricity prices are set at the marginal price. Unfortunately, potential operators like those of Coire Glas are demanding guaranteed prices at today’s excessively high rates, which would completely defeat the purpose, and UK state capacity has atrophied so much due to Thatcherism that the State can no longer intervene and build it itself.
Majority Without a Mandate, Richard Seymour, July 5, 2024. The opening paragraph:
Keir Starmer achieved his goals though, purging the left completely from Labour and turning the judicial system into a tool for state terrorism.