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Just why has Keir Starmer’s government proved such a catastrophe? This is a question that must be posed to his cheerleaders, or at least those who were at one time cheerleaders: the road from the last general election is lined with silently discarded pompoms. The idea here is not to rub their faces in a political project that is now both electorally toxic and morally bankrupt, but to determine what happens next.
First off, the failure should be considered absolute. It is projected that a Labour government will drive more than a million Britons into – or more deeply into – poverty through an assault on disability benefits. The same government imposed hardship on many pensioners by stripping away the winter fuel payment, and it refuses to reverse the Tories’ two-child benefit cap, the UK’s biggest single generator of child poverty. Not content with waging war on the poor only at home, the government opened a new front abroad by slashing the international aid budget. It also can’t bring itself to condemn Israel for a single crime – including deliberate starvation – and continues to supply crucial components for F-35 jet fighters to rain more death on Gaza’s traumatised survivors. The government not only demonises immigration and promotes punitive crackdowns, but it also echoes the rhetoric of Enoch Powell. It does all of this while its polling collapses to the low 20s, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party boasting a 10-point lead over it in one poll.
Did Starmer’s supporters expect such an agenda – one as gruesomely reactionary as it is bereft of an obvious electoral base of support? Did they believe it would prove so devoid of principle as to allow Farage to dictate the national political conversation before they’d even completed one year in power? The real problem is clearly this: Starmer, an empty vessel who wanted to be prime minister for its own sake, made a pact with the most cartoonishly Blairite factionalists that Labour has to offer. They sought to apply the political formula of Tony Blair’s government when it was falling apart in the mid-2000s to a completely different context some 20 years later.
One of the main problems is that the Blairism of the mid-2000s was more about vibes than substance. When New Labour first assumed office, its project of humanising Thatcherism at least meant something – and the minimum wage, tax credits and public sector investment clearly reduced hardship and improved lives. The party could even show moral leadership, equalising the age of consent and abolishing section 28 despite polling at the time showing vast opposition to both – alas, trans people today enjoy no such political courage.
But by New Labour’s third term, the government had become more about defining itself against progressives than anything else. Having already infuriated many natural Labour voters by helping George W Bush set Iraq on fire, Blairism became about relishing that it was angering, say, trade unions by extending market dogma into public services, or defenders of civil liberties with authoritarian crackdowns. The more anyone deemed leftish squealed, New Labour advisers believed, the more they were on the right track.
In truth, New Labour’s success at the time depended on a mirage. It could maintain social peace with rising living standards and improved public services thanks to an unsustainable dependence on big finance. As it was, that approach was already running out of road before Lehman Brothers went pop: four years before the big crash, the incomes of the bottom half of the population began to stagnate, and for the bottom quintile actually started to fall. So began what became known as the cost of living crisis. This is what has driven our age of discontent – from Brexit to Scottish nationalism to Corbynism.
After the crash, and out of power, New Labour’s acolytes had nothing to say. They became arsonists, defining themselves purely against the party’s new masters. Ed Miliband sought to grapple with the fact that the world was changing, but the ideas were lacking. In the 2015 leadership election, the Labour right’s barren political cupboard was devastatingly exposed. Jeremy Corbyn assumed the leadership by a landslide precisely because his opponents were bereft of ideas, whereas the left sought to abandon the stifling straitjacket of austerity. The Blairite candidate, Liz Kendall, offered a pitch that could hardly have been better designed to antagonise Labour supporters: combining cuts to the welfare state with more arms spending. Remind you of anybody?
Kendall’s campaign manager, Morgan McSweeney, seemingly learned not to make that mistake again as he drove Starmer’s brazen conning of the Labour membership in 2020. The problem was this: the Labour right had half a decade in exile to produce a new prospectus. It came up with nothing. It dedicated all its energy to burning Corbynism to the ground regardless of the damage that would inflict on the party. (Recall Lord Mandelson, now ambassador to the US, saying in 2017 that he tried to undermine Corbyn’s leadership “every single day”.) Labour did not win in 2017, as we are constantly reminded, but a rational party would have understood that the surge from 30% to 40% of the vote share in just two years after a drubbing was driven above all else by a transformative policy offer.
But the truth is, late-stage Blairism applied to the Britain of 2025 could never be anything other than a disaster. Labour’s ruling faction knows how to destroy but not how to build. Starmer’s original true believers seemed to believe that a general sense of competence was sufficient. But what was really needed wasn’t the “grownups back in the room” – it was a transformative policy agenda to replace a broken system that has stopped delivering social progress. And if that isn’t understood, then don’t be surprised when a Labour government defined by increasing poverty and immigrant-bashing comes crashing down in ignominy.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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