Can Keir Starmer Turn It Around?

If there is hope, does it lie in the polls? According to Ben Walker in the New Statesman the answer is ... perhaps. There's no hiding Keir Starmer's collapse in poll ratings over the last six months, but just as the nauseating Tory triumphalism carries the possibility of demise, can the green shoots of revival be espied among Labour's numbers?

Sifting through recent polling by Redfield and Wilton, Ben noted 39% of voters did not know what Labour stood for, and 37% don't yet know enough about Keir Starmer to make a judgement. And while we got excited over shadcab shenanigans, barely anyone knows who the Starmerist dramatis personae are - though Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper are better recognised. He adds that of those who didn't vote in 2019 some 65% haven't made their mind up. Ben concludes, "... voter uncertainty is high and many are actively unwilling to write him off. All of which means the Labour leader still has an opportunity to persuade them to vote Labour." Therefore Keir's unknowability is ... a bonus?

Let us assume a scenario. Labour more or less carries on in its current vein, and starts unveiling its policy menu which is an updated but overly statist Labourism. Come the general election it trades heavily on being the "change" party and the sole means of booting out the Tories. Could it work? Events dear boy, events would determine the outcome, but one thing the leader's office would bank on is the unknown quantity factor because the public might look upon Keir with fresh eyes, like what they see, and rally behind him. After all, that happened in 2017 - not that this election and its lessons ever existed as far as the Labour leadership are concerned. If this is the strategy, then Ben's observations might carry a frisson of optimism.

I'm less than convinced Keir could pull off such a feat at the moment. And that's because he's demobilising Labour's base. One of the key take homes of 2017, and why the party did unexpectedly well wasn't just an alignment between the party's programme and the inchoate desires and interests of a rising class of workers, but because the base were enthused and were able to act as force multipliers and attractors. It wasn't Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, or John McDonnell making the party's case that mattered so much, it was the hundreds of thousands of members and supporters agitating and persuading among their friends, families, workmates, and randoms on the train and at bus stops. It was the subterranean process and movement of masses that confounded expectations. It was a weapon the Labour right came to understand, and why they put a great deal of effort into blunting it for factional reasons. And lo, come 2019 it was nowhere near as effective.

But Labour needs this enthusiasm if the party is to stand a chance. The next election, like the last two, won't be fought over a centre ground that is fetishised all the more its imaginary quality is revealed. There is nothing wrong with trying to win over previous Tory voters, but this has to be done in conjunction with turning out those who stayed home in 2019, winning back people that have bled to the Liberal Democrats and Greens and the SNP, and increase the turnout among those layers who are well disposed toward Labour. This is a difficult task made all the more improbable by a leadership who is channelling Peter Mandelson of late 1990s vintage and thinks its strategically important component of left wing voters will snap to attention to get the Tories out, leaving it free to weigh in as the party of social conservatism with 1945 Labour characteristics to win over Brexit supporters. It won't work.

The only way the situation can be turned around is not by proclaiming socialism from the roof tops, but by recognising who Labour's core support is, look at how they were consolidated behind the party during the Corbyn era, and learning how appeals to economic radicalism, social justice, and fairness can keep them aboard while cutting through with the Tory types Starmerism is overly concerned with. Attacking the Tories on raising tax and trying to outflank them from the right will not cut the mustard. In the age of a politics made more conditional, Labour is going to have to start wooing and listening to the people it has spent the last year bashing, because if it doesn't there won't be a last minute ballot box surge, there won't be a Labour government, and the remainder if the decade is for the Tories to do with as they wish.

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