I promised recently that having written about the challenges that the centre-right face, I would turn my attention to the centre-left. My aim in these articles is not to promote a specific political position but rather to try and help us be clued up as to what is happening in the political world.
As I’m writing this, it’s Tuesday 12th May. The Labour Party took a drubbing in the local elections and after another failed reset, Sir Keir Starmer is under intense pressure to resign. Whether or not he goes, I would suggest that the Labour Party will face the same ongoing challenges. Starmer may not have been up to the job but the underlying problems are party wide not just personal.
However, it is perhaps worth picking up on what has gone wrong with the Prime Minister. I think that there are a few issues here. First, Starmer got into power primarily by defining himself in terms of who he is not. He became leader of the Labour Party by not being Jeremy Corbyn but also not being Tony Blair Mark 2. He wanted to draw a line under Corbyn’s leadership and particularly the perceptions that antisemitism had been enabled, that terrorists were friends and of general chaos. However, he was not offering a Blairite agenda. He wasn’t a visionary and that was meant to be a plus point. If anything he was managerial, a safe pair of hands if a little boring.
He then went on to define himself as not being Boris and not being Liz Truss. That could have been trickier when Rishi Sunak became PM. However, by that stage confidence in the Conservatives had collapsed. Sunak turned out to be inept at politics as well, though I suspect history will look more favourably on his record in terms of beginning to correct some of the mistakes made.
This brings us to the third issue. Starmer was lucky in terms of timing. He was up against the Conservatives at the end of a political cycle. They were tired after 14 years in office. They had navigated the country through the post credit crunch years and through the pandemic. They had also taken on Brexit and any of those things alone was going to be a challenge. He was up against broken opponents.
The result was that Starmer won a landslide because the right were divided, the Conservatives deeply unpopular and the first past the post system tends to give big majorities. It was not because he or his party were popular.
Unfortunately, Starmer does not appear to have recognised that this was the case. He has acted and spoken as though he not only won a large majority but also as though he won a majority of the popular vote.
Now this is where Labour’s travails mirror the Tories. Over the past twenty years they have been seeing their core vote decline from around snout 30 percent to half of that. The Conservatives under May and Johnson built a new alliance on the right, aa fragile one that they probably will not get back soon. Labour have not yet worked out how to put such a coalition together.
I have some views on how Labour could recover, or at least how a centre/centre-left option could become visible again. I will share some of those thoughts in a later article. In the meantime I think the thing they need to start with is understanding what has gone wrong. This means that they need to realise that the wheels had come off already, even when they were winning their majority.
Faithroots 