Starmer was supposed to be a messianic figure heralding the return of moderate, sensible government.
To his press advocates, it’s a great mystery why voters loathe him. His government was meant to put a halt to the instability of the post-Brexit Tories, returning the UK to a sustainable centre.
In truth, the Starmer project was built on a simple mandate: to win power by any means necessary. Claiming the centre to that end meant waging a war against the left, with Morgan McSweeney taking pointers from his now disgraced mentor Peter Mandelson.
McSweeney set out to take over the party by foregrounding Starmer’s electability. He was Jeremy Corbyn with a rockabilly hairdo, but without the political liabilities that had led to the terrible defeat of 2019.
A mixture of desperation and a yearning for change made many Labour members very susceptible to this pitch.
While the slow march of centrist dads and liberal mums was hard to resist in the early months of 2020, the radical left must face the sobering realisation that plenty of Corbynistas fell for Sir Keir too.
Some of us on the Labour left believed Starmer could be a slightly more media-savvy version of Ed Miliband.
We were wrong to be so hopeful. Starmer made the dorky, ineffectual Miliband look like a commanding statesman.
The Starmer Fantasy
Labour Together needed to conjure up a fantasy to galvanise voters on the left because their energy was needed to win.
Much like hardcore MAGA supporters, supremely confident in Donald Trump’s leadership, Starmer devotees claimed that their hero had a plan for government. Only his was supposed to be progressive.
He was planning a stealth tax to end austerity and fix up the nation’s collapsing infrastructure. He was plotting to introduce proportional representation and reverse Brexit in one fell swoop.
And he was also preparing to banish the cranks of the radical left, the ones who love Russia and loathe NATO, in favour of a sensible foreign policy to defend human rights. Just don’t ask about Gaza.
It didn’t take long for this fantasy to crash against the rocks of Realpolitik.
It’s hard to think of another prime minister who won such a significant majority and plummeted so far so fast.
Even Boris Johnson won a huge victory in 2019 and managed to stay in power longer, while Liz Truss had no mandate and fell faster than anyone else.
Starmer was a colossal disappointment, not because he failed to deliver on promises he made sincerely, but because his mandate was fundamentally negative and its methods fundamentally dishonest. His adenoidal delivery of non-statements failed to mask a clumsy use of state power and contempt for pluralism.
This authoritarian streak was particularly obvious in his handling of protests against Israel’s decimation of Gaza.
Whatever mainstream pundits say, large sectors of the British public sympathise with the plight of Palestinians and were appalled by Starmer’s unflinching support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
This is why it’s almost certain that Andy Burnham will become prime minister now.
Burnham’s rise signals a shift to the centre-left. Superficially, at least, he represents Old Labour with a Northern accent.
Whether he will be able to fix the country and save his party is doubtful. The odds are stacked against him. The UK hasn’t felt this broken in decades. And the public is more impatient than ever.
Still, Burnham’s willingness to capitalise on nostalgia for a more humane time stands in stark opposition to Starmer, who ultimately seemed to stand for little more than power for its own sake.
Those of us who opposed Starmer in 2020 can hold our heads high today. We were right, even if the tide of history initially favoured Sir Keir.
Many Starmerites doubled down during the opposition years, arguing that Labour must win to change things. Fourteen years of Tory misrule were enough.
After all, Britain was crying out for change. Then came the wonderful Orwellian slogan: “Stability is change.”
Status Quo Instability
The racist riots of 2024 soon made it clear that status quo instability was very much still with us.
Perversely, Starmer seemed more invested in continuing the Conservative austerity measures than using his mandate to help Labour’s traditional base. He delayed removing the two-child benefit cap, then made an even more politically disastrous decision.
Anyone could see that cutting winter fuel subsidies for 10 million older people was a terrible idea with serious electoral ramifications. But the Starmer government decided that children in poverty going without food and pensioners freezing in winter was the price worth paying for fiscal credibility.
Even Tony Blair had presided over a recovery for public services, alongside progressive social policies and constitutional reform. Indeed, early Blairism is often remembered with warm optimism. More voters might remember Blair fondly if not for the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
By contrast, Starmer decided to skip this honeymoon period and head straight to late-term Blairism: authoritarianism at home and endless violence abroad.
Starmer’s legacy will be defined by his government’s complicity with Israel’s war on Gaza, from arms sales to the RAF running logistics for the IDF. This might be the worst Labour foreign-policy decision since the Iraq War.
It’s no coincidence that the Starmer government backed repressive measures against protesters, equated direct action with “terrorism”, and arrested elderly people opposing them. Nor that this same government tried to impose digital ID and curtail jury trials.
What next for Starmer? He could stay in Parliament and make some side cash like Rishi Sunak or Theresa May, perhaps take a seat in the House of Lords someday as the Baron of St Pancras. Or he could go straight for the cash like Blair and Johnson.
Just picture it: the book deal, the after-dinner speaking fees, the company directorships, the political consultancy with Central Asian clients and the contract with a global advisory firm. Starmer would be in his element, appeasing the rich and powerful.
Andy Burnham has a great opportunity to jettison Starmer’s unpopular policies and change course. Although this will be difficult, given the material conditions of British society right now, failure to do so could doom the country to a populist right takeover.
Labour could benefit from the split of Reform UK’s vote by Restore Britain, while winning back disenchanted left-wing voters who have gone to the Greens. This is why Burnham’s strategy has the potential to create a new synthesis of populist centrism.
So far, Burnham has said he will respect the Tory fiscal rules to appease the bond markets. He has said he will cut welfare, if necessary, to fund defence, just as he has said he wants to reduce immigration and close the migrant hotels.
This is where he sounds more like a Blairite than his supporters want to admit. Where Burnham differs from the Starmer approach is that he is clearly more enthusiastic about renationalisation of the railways and water, and about public control of energy.
At the same time, Burnham has talked about devolution and radical fiscal reform, including a land-value tax and replacing inheritance tax with a social care levy. There are signs of originality in his political statements.
The same could never be said for Starmer, who seems genuinely afraid of creative thinking. He may once have been a radical student, but he ended his political career as a dreary, robotic leader.
Starmer talked as if he’d made a difference in his resignation speech, but his Britain is a grim place where it’s easier to imagine civil war than functional infrastructure.
This is why Burnham must break with Starmer’s politics, not just his style, or he may well face the same fate. He cannot afford to put the bond markets before the people of this country.
Photograph courtesy of Number 10. Published under a Creative Commons license.
