By David Edgerton
A year ago a new government was elected with a small proportion of the vote and a massive majority. It calls itself a Labour government and says its programme is one of change and renewal. It is neither. Keir Starmer and his people did not like the revived Labour Party which arose from the ashes of New Labour. Instead, they built a new party which, like New Labour, was rigidly controlled from the centre, funded by the rich, disdainful of its members and voters and committed to minimal change. In the 2024 election it added a mere 1.6 percentage points to the 2019 Labour share of the vote.
Since then, the party’s polling has collapsed to an unprecedented degree. Though hard to believe today, once upon a time Labour governments used to essentially maintain, and sometimes increase, their vote share between winning and losing general elections. But the support for both Starmer’s party and New Labour has behaved very differently. New Labour’s vote share only fell between 1997 and 2010. Starmer’s party is shedding votes even faster. Polling today shows it would get an even lower share of the vote than in the even more disastrous 2010 and 2015 contests, and even worse than the post-war nadir of 1983.
The last Labour government ended in 1979. In three periods in office (though never truly in power) it changed the country. Never as radical as many hoped, it nevertheless offered an alternative and delivered change. It may not have created the welfare state, but it changed and extended it (not least in the 1970s); it may not have taken over the commanding heights of the economy, but each Labour government nationalised important industries and pursued distinctive industrial policies. The party had serious analyses, often competing ones, of what was wrong with the country and what might be done. It was a distinctly social democratic party and a nationalist party.
It is no secret that the leadership of successor parties have wanted to distinguish themselves from that historic one. Thus we have “New Labour” and Starmer constantly reminding us, with remarkable lack of appreciation of constitutional niceties, that he leads his government. Both are right. These governments are different. For example, neither has a distinctive analysis of the British condition, and no plan to make serious changes. “New Labour” was lucky it could pretend all was fine with the British economy, and it offered tiny pledges for change, and a change of mood. Starmer’s government has swaddled itself in the Tory rhetoric of fiscal rectitude, stability, deregulation, welfare cuts, higher defence spending.
Neither sees the virtue, or the usefulness, of telling the truth, once an essential feature of social democratic politics. Political discourse was deeply corrupted by “New Labour” and of course new depths were plumbed under Boris Johnson. Today, there is a little more honesty in government documents, but nowhere near enough. In the country at large, trust in government as well as dissent from its policies is widespread.
Some say that despite everything, Starmer’s government is social democratic because it raised taxes and spending to fund the NHS and instigated some state investment. But the idea that the Tories would have kept to their spending limits is for the birds. They would have had to do same if it wanted to keep the NHS going (which is what its aged voters wanted) and to get the level of state investment to the minimum necessary levels. In any case the real issue is not the level of spending, but the level of need and how it is addressed. And it is telling that Starmer’s government has chosen defence over foreign aid, welfare cuts over tax rises, prisons over school building, and the same investments supported by private lobbies as the Tories – carbon capture, nuclear, roads, airports. It celebrates minimalist, sometimes damaging trade deals just like the Tory Brexiters did. Fantasies about AI, proffered by interested lobbies, substitute for serious thinking about the NHS.
The recently released industrial strategy promises much the same as Tory industrial policies of the last 40 years – bring in foreign investment, deregulate, stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship. The government is going for growth on the basis of Tory models of the economy. It is telling that Starmer’s article in the Financial Times outlining the proposals contained nothing but the distilled banalities of Thatcherism and Blairism with a touch of Brexiteer fantasising. His and his government’s sad, shop-worn clichés say it all – turbocharging this, kickstarting that, being “laser focused” on something else, mainlining AI, supporting world-leading this and that, creating superpowers. It is not just passé talk, but passé policy too.
Backbenchers have rebelled in the name of “Labour values” to force the government to reverse most of its cuts to the pension (the winter fuel allowance is really part of the universal pension) and to abandon its radical cuts for support for the disabled. But the problem was not lack of Labour values. It was the actual values of the Starmer government. The conceit that because it is “Labour” the government does these things with regret should not wash anymore.
Even those who held out no hope for any economic transformation might have expected a government respectful of the law and of principles of decent government, and supportive of integration with the European Union, and indeed the national interest. But the government has drunk the Brexit Kool-Aid and accepted many of its underlying delusions. It crawled to Trump and played dumb when the sovereignty of Canada and Greenland was threatened. For all its talk about global responsibilities, it protects Israel from Iran and global condemnation but does not protect Palestinians from Israel.
This government has been far more concerned to support the self-image of a foreign country and its army than British rights of free speech or commitment to international law. At a more trivial but telling level it concocted a plot to deny Parliament a vote on Palestine, which the Speaker, to his shame, endorsed. In Parliament, it peddles feeble mendacities about humanitarian concern and its support for a two-state solution; it shows its true aims when it sells arms, provides diplomatic cover and proscribes Palestine Action (a move which most Labour MPs voted for). Raison d’état, they might call it – but it is the raison d’état of foreign countries.
One would have hoped, however naively, that Starmer’s government might have influenced the tone of politics. But far from shifting the centre of gravity of political discourse to the left, it has itself helped shift it to the right – not least by echoing Reform. Many government supporters have over the past year complained of a lack of vision, or even a story, and about Starmer in particular. They have yearned for the government to be true to their vision of what they want it to be; that it ought to be a social democratic, centre-left government. But the government does have a vision, which is what we see it enacting. It is what we see it doing, aping Tories and Reform, changing nothing important, dumping on the same people, at home and abroad, as the Tories did. It is true to itself; it is Starmer’s government.
But it is not just Starmer’s government. It is also the government of its MPs, its financial supporters and many of its members. Party members and MPs can no longer hide behind the idea that the leadership has betrayed the movement. In the days of the old Labour Party such an analysis was tenable. In the days of New Labour and Starmer’s government, it is delusional. If they are anything more than a cynical rallying cry of proxies for leadership candidates, “Labour values” now mean recreating the Labour Party as a party of working people, a party with a distinct and truthful analysis of the state we are in, and a party willing to change it.
[See also: It’s time for Starmer and Reeves to embrace the soft left]