Yet, befitting a low key election there's nary a sign it even happened. Starmer has said he wants politics to tread lightly on everyone's lives, and that begins with his victory. The turnout at 59.9% was the second worst since 1918, and Labour's victory is on the fewest votes won since the advent of mass suffrage. With only one in five of the electorate voting for the triumphant "changed Labour" in exceptionally advantageous circumstances has been brushed off by our new powers that be. Asked about his sandcastle majority at the first Prime Minister's press conference, Starmer simply said "we won a mandate." Which is evidently going to be the line for the next five years. It seems Peter Mair's Ruling the Void was less a warning about the decline of democracy and more a user's manual as far as Morgan McSweeney was concerned. The fact Labour polled fewer votes than even in the disaster year of 2019 doesn't trouble the party's supporters at all. Indeed, they've replied in their hundreds to this viral tweet demonstrating how unbothered they are about it.
There is a difference between winning a mandate and winning legitimacy, which are points you can find in all the right wing Saturday and Sunday papers. The Sun's post-election editorial issued not-so-coded warnings to Starmer, saying there was no popular appetite for "left wing radicalism" despite the huge majority. And it's something we're going to hear quite a lot from Nigel Farage, who unfortunately triumphed in Clacton. Indeed, the Reform leader/proprietor contributed more to Labour victory in dozens upon dozens of seats than anything offered by the party. The Labour leadership can try and ignore this, but parties with shallow roots must treat each passing breeze as a danger lest they get toppled over. Again, it's worth remembering that despite the critique of New Labour's support being a mile wide but an inch deep, it weathered 13 years in government and handsomely won an election, on numbers not dissimilar to Starmer's, after the deeply unpopular invasion of Iraq. And even when it was dumped out of office the Tores were unable to govern on their own. "Changed Labour" can only look at Blair's victories with envy. If that wasn't bad enough, the coalition Starmer's Labour pulled together is fast decomposing, as evidenced by the loss of seats to the Greens and left independents, and the primary motivator of those who voted Labour according to pollsters was an entirely negative "get the Tories out".
Will this affect how Starmer will govern? I suspect not. A majority is a majority, and a win is a win. At least that's what they are telling themselves. The problem is, as our new PM is about to find out, running a government is not like managing an institution. The opposition the government are going to face, whether it's from the left or the right don't share its illusions about its mandate. While it is true that Starmerism is a programme of state renovation and modernisation designed to restore the very legitimacy Labour are now lacking, the experience of all past governments is support tends to wane, not increase in office. If everything goes right and the economy remains stable, the state does get fixed, public services work better, and the pledges in the manifesto are achieved Starmer could buck the trend. But what will test Labour is how it meets opposition within parliament and without. Never mind Starmer wanting to tread lightly out of preference, the political road ahead is littered with eggshells and landmines.
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8 comments:
It would be all over for Labour very quickly if refugees from Gaza ever head towards Europe in numbers.
The Blair governments benefited from a boom economy (the tail end of the long bubble) and a huge void of opposition.
The Starmer government really does not have either of those things. Nice to see signs of them knowing it - "we won a mandate" is a humble turn of words indeed following such a landslide.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Reform's vote was comparable to UKIP's in 2015 - it was only a surge if the years in between, when the Tories became Blukip, are counted. For the Tories, the rupture that they postponed for nearly 10 years (at a staggering cost to the country and most of the people in it, who are rightfully angry, even if some of them have absolutely no understanding of what has happened) has finally completed.
North of the border, the SNP appear to have finally paid the price for delivering no movement whatsoever towards independence under Sturgeon and her successors. I don't think that the independence question is really going to turn out to be settled.
The Tories, unfortunately, can bounce back faster than they have any right to. While a good few of those Reform voters will never trust them again, all of them have seen the "vote Reform, get Labour" scare line come true right in front of them.
Anonymous above has I think got it right: the question of independence for Scotland is far from "settled". "Seemingly" in your own sentence is the most important word in it - and I'm relieved it's there.
Yes, the SNP have had significant losses but part of that is accounted for by the strong desire in Scotland to get rid of the Tory government. A Savanta poll showed 81% of voters in Scotland had that as their biggest factor in voting compared with 73% in UK overall; 14% in Scotland were motivated by wanting a Labour government compared with 21% in UK.
For some time now, support for independence has been polling ahead of support for the SNP; they're not the only pro-independence party in Scotland and perhaps more significantly, the issue is becoming decoupled from party loyalty. Some polls have shown up to 30% of Labour voters for example are in favour of Scotland regaining its independence and becoming a normal country.
I really don't see the real mission of Starmer and his cronies as any sort of 'state modernisation' and 'restoration of legitimacy, Phil. I can never understand why you repeatedly claim it is. Listen to the decidedly strange Rachel Reeves sloganising yet again over the last few days, and her 'big idea for growth, is just the same old trickle down economics and tearing up of all that pesky red tape, that has enriched the superrich and impoverished the rest of us across the Western world since the 1980's . As for Wes Streeting bringing in the evangelistic , now hugely wealthy, health service privatiser consultant , and ex Trot, Alan Milburn, to 'advise' Streeting on dealing with the NHS 'collapse', The writing is on the wall for the end of our NHS as a free , publicly owned, service for all in short order.
Starmer and his cronies are simply glove puppet stooges of global corporations, especially the military industrial component, carrying on where 14 years of the Tories left off. Four or five years down the line the 'legitimacy' of the current political class and their facade democracy will have utterly collapsed for vast swathes of UK citizens, and very likely usher in he scapegoating radical far right, on the ruins of our old welfare state and broken public realm generally. But Starmer and his cronies, as with the Blairites before, will all go on to very well-remunerated sinecure jobs , for a job well done - as all of Blair's old Cabinet cronies did.
My heart filled with despair when I saw some of the advisers and Ministers appointed by Starmer - Milburn, Alexander, Smith - architects of New Labour's policies that opened the door to Cameron and Osborne and enabled them to say, ' We are only continuing New Labour's privatisation/ marketisation/PFI approach.' And while out of politics they have not been shy in selling their knowledge to asset strippers like PWC.
We shall have to see whether it is a government that suffers from hubris and believes that it is full of political genius, magical fixers, people who never drop a ball, etc.or just good political operators who have haad a comparatively friendly press and no major conflicts to face.
I suppose, too, in Scotland it will now be necessary to await Father Time reducing the 'No' voters each year and the SNP capitalising on the failure of the Scottish Labour MPs to have any influence over Starmer and in any conflict between the City of London and Scottish interests the former winning out.
To take the last sentence in the comment above first, the reality will be those voters, now, thinking "Vote Tory, Get Labour". Reform can only grow stronger, and split the Tories, as the Tories are facing two opposite ways.
The Conservative rump left, can bounce back quickly, by merging with the Liberals, creating a new pro-Europe centre-right party like many of those in the EU itself. As Starmer continues to tilt at windmills by charging after a reactionary nationalist petty-bourgeoisie he can't win over, the pro-EU, Blair-right wing, will itself be driven in the direction of that new centre-right formation, much as Ummuna et al tried under Corbyn. The majority will collapse, as Labour also splits, under the weight of the contradictions of its support for Brexit.
By contrast, Blair benefited not only from the ability to use low interest rates and inflated asset prices, but also from the start of the new, global long-wave upswing after 1999 that led to higher interest rates, and crashed those asset prices in 2007/8. He also benefited from EU membership and free movement of labour.
Starmer has to deal with asset prices ready to crash again as interest rates rise, which would rise even more if the borrowing required to support faster growth was undertaken, and all of the disadvantages in those conditions of being outside the EU, lack of free movement and so on. I heard the Tory Tim Montgomery yesterday talk about if the government wants higher wages to fuel increased consumption and growth, controlling immigration is necessary, so that employers have to train and pay higher wages to UK workers. Wrong, if the labour does not come to them, the capital will simply move to the labour in the EU, where the market is seven times larger, and the other costs of production are lower, and rate of profit higher.
Hey, what happened to the amusing AI-generated-early-20C-political-pinup image that was originally the header to this article?
OK, it bore only the barest resemblance to Saint Keir, but it was still funny.
I agree with most of the depressing forecasts for a future Labour Govt as expressed by the comments above. However, my biggest concern (apart from climate Armageddon) is 'liberal interventionism'. I fear Prime Minister Starmer is much more likely to support greater military intervention in Russia than his predecessors. This hubristic intent to intervene as the 'good guy' in foreign wars is a worrying latent disposition of right-wing Labour.
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