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Flailure to Lead


The date is the 4th of July, 2024. Keir Starmer and the Labour Party have just achieved a landslide election victory. The Conservatives have been crushed across the country, thus ending over a decade of their disastrous rule. Hopes are high among political pundits and those in the Labour establishment as people excitedly speculate about what a Starmer government could mean for Britain. To myself and many outside of the establishment, however, speculation is decidedly more nervous. Many on the left of the Labour Party had watched in horror and contempt for the last months and years as Keir Starmer abandoned many of his commitments, failed to contest the repugnant right-wing framing regarding transgender people and migrants, and generally continued the spineless centrism that New Labour has become famous for. Now that he was in power, how much better could things really get?


Several months later, it seems like the Left was correct in its scepticism. While not nearly on the level of the cartoonishly dysfunctional Truss government or the profoundly corrupt Johnson government, Starmer’s time in power has been defined by marginal, piecemeal policies (that will do almost nothing to solve the issues), baffling stances on salient political issues (that will actively worsen some of the issues), and a level of corruption that frankly I did not anticipate. While he may not be as inconsistent with his positions anymore, Starmer is a far cry from a good statesman, and his government is an even further cry from acceptable.


But, as fun as it is to complain, it’s important to ask why things are the way they are. Some of the faults with Starmer’s government have been issues of incompetence, but to me this runs much deeper. Labour, even while promising only slight deviations from Tory policy and suffering from Starmer’s chronic lack of charisma, won in a landslide in the election because of one major reason: they weren’t the Tories. Regardless of anything else, the negative mandate (to borrow a phrase from a brilliant New Yorker article discussing Starmer) of “anything but the Tories” was so persuasive that all of Labour’s shortcomings meant very little to the electorate. And, while the deviations are slight, a change from Tory policy does mean at least some good being done for the people of Britain.


There’s a catch, however. When your core promise is “we aren’t the other guy”, that usually means you don’t have much of an actual plan (or positive mandate) for when you’re in power. Thus, a headless chicken style of governance takes root, where disorganisation and uncertainty immediately hobble a government that has a great deal of issues it needs to resolve. Keir Starmer’s government is no longer flopping; it’s flailing, and the country will suffer as a result. 


That’s not all. When the largest (debatably) left-wing party in the country fails to provide an agenda that speaks to the needs of British people, other, much more sinister actors will step into the spotlight. In the case of this most recent election, it was Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party - who ran on a far-right, xenophobic platform laying the blame on migrants for all of the issues Britain is facing. While the answers Reform proposes to British woes are at best inaccurate and at worst bats**t, the problems they highlight (with the exception of immigration) are real, salient issues, ones that Labour’s negative mandate is ill-equipped to handle. As a result, Reform gained a shocking number of seats in Parliament, along with a seriously unnerving number of votes in many tight races across the country. Labour won big, but the far-right won bigger.


I’d like to end this piece on a more optimistic note. While Starmer’s first five months have been, to put it bluntly, bad, he still has a lot of time left. There’s a real opportunity for Starmer and the Labour Party to present a genuinely new and compelling vision of the future, one that addresses the most troubling issues facing British people today. This is an opportunity he cannot afford to miss. Stop flailing, Kier, and start fighting, and maybe the next five years will make up for the last fourteen.


Illustration by Sandra Palazuelos Garcia

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