Recent British prime ministers have been regularly caught off guard by reality. David Cameron didn’t foresee Brexit. Theresa May underestimated the appeal of Corbynism. Boris Johnson failed to deal with Covid. Liz Truss was forced out of office by the financial markets. Rishi Sunak, who called a snap general election for 4 July that he will surely lose, has discovered his political talents are not as great as he thought. So what awaits Sir Keir Starmer, destined to be the next Prime Minister at No. 10 Downing Street?
The Labour leader has carefully positioned himself as a moderate force in British politics, a stable centrist alternative to the “Conservative mess” of 14 years in power. That has paid off as he has a 20-point lead in the opinion polls and is on track to suffer a major defeat in the Conservative seats this summer. One survey published in early June even suggested he could win the most Westminster seats of any British politician since Stanley Baldwin in 1924. But defeating Sunak’s beleaguered right-wing government will be easy. But actually governing a Britain that the Financial Times recently described as “poor and rich” will be much harder. Starmer doesn’t seem the least bit qualified for the job.
Labour’s economic policy is central to and a case in point for the opaque mass of ideas collectively known as “Starmerism.” In a City of London speech in March, the party’s shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, cited the lowest productivity in the G7, a lack of strategic investment, and a long-standing neglect of regions as the main causes of Britain’s decline. Reeves then suggested solutions: a new “strategic partnership” between government and the private sector, reform of England’s restrictive planning laws, and a sovereign wealth fund to help funnel money to industrially disadvantaged regions.
Yet in the same speech, Reeves failed to acknowledge the central role played by the City of London itself in amplifying the UK’s unusually high regional inequality. Instead, she praised the UK capital’s “world-leading professional and financial services” and mentioned only briefly the damage that the banking sector would do to the national economy if it were left “underregulated.” This omission was curious. For decades, the City of London has acted as a vortex for UK domestic investment, funneling wealth away from the country’s periphery – north England, central Scotland and south Wales – and redirecting it towards the asset-rich south-east of England. Or, just as frequently, it has flowed out of the UK entirely, into offshore tax havens.
Naturally, the social impact of this system is devastating. London and the surrounding areas are booming, accounting for 40% of the UK’s economic growth by 2027, according to the consulting firm EY. Meanwhile, the rest of the UK will continue on the path of Conservative stagnation. Under a Conservative government, spending cuts have hit poorer northern cities twice as hard as wealthier southern ones, widening health inequalities and pushing local services to the limits. As Labour has made clear, they may ease these cuts, but they will not reverse them. In the next parliament, budgetary discipline will take precedence over social democratic generosity. As if to underline this point, the UK’s spending watchdog, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, estimates that without significant tax increases, savings of up to 16 billion pounds ($20 billion) will be needed to eliminate the UK’s deficit over the next few years, regardless of who is in power on the 4th of July. Balancing Britain’s day-to-day spending is one of Labour’s economic goals. “We will not waver from strong fiscal discipline,” Reeves, who served as economist at the Bank of England for six years, warned in March.
At least in this respect Starmer is keeping his word. In February Labour abandoned its flagship pledge to spend £28 billion a year on a “green investment plan”. Instead Starmer announced a more modest pledge to spend £5 billion a year on decarbonising the UK economy by 2028/29. Environmental groups denounced the change in course. Areeba Hamid of Greenpeace said Labour had “surrendered like a house of cards to the wind” to the pressure of climate change deniers. But the change in course was inevitable. Starmer worries about the softness of Labour’s support and wants to limit the Conservatives’ room for attack. At the same time, four years after replacing Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, he is determined to purge the party of any vestiges of Corbyn’s influence.
Starmer’s attack on the left wing of the Labour Party has led to an explosion of progressive policies. His original promises to abolish university fees, raise taxes on high earners, nationalise Britain’s price-gouging energy companies and end the gradual privatisation of the National Health Service have all been abandoned or watered down, as has his promise to abolish the House of Lords, the largest unelected legislature in the Western world.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2022, Starmer stressed that dissolving the House of Lords, an institution full of Conservative cronies and donors, would “restore faith” in the British state. “People have lost faith in politicians’ ability to deliver change,” he said. “As well as fixing the economy, we need to fix politics.” But by the middle of last year, fixing Britain’s broken political model was off Starmer’s agenda. “The Constitution is a very important tool. [reform] “It takes time and it drains energy,” Thangam Devonair, a Starmer ally, told the i Newspaper in June 2023. “There’s so much work to be done to fix a country where nothing works, from getting a passport to fixing potholes in the roads.”
Starmer and his team are right to argue that the Conservatives have screwed up Britain. From Cameron’s austerity to Truss’s market-threating fiscal experiments, Britain is a poorer, weaker and more divided country than it was 15 years ago. But despite abandoning almost every policy that could address Britain’s problems, Starmer’s rhetoric has grown rather grandiose as the battle for the prime ministership progresses. It’s time to “turn the page” on the Conservatives’ decline and embrace “a decade of national renewal with Labour”, he has said repeatedly since Sunak launched his campaign in May. Such rhetoric is not new. In 1997, Tony Blair celebrated his landmark election victory over the Conservatives by asking and answering his own question: “A new dawn has dawned, hasn’t it? And it’s a wonderful thing.”
But it wasn’t great. By the time Blair’s successor Gordon Brown resigned in 2010 and the most recent Conservative government was formed, New Labour had become synonymous with Iraq, corruption and financial ruin. Britain did not thrive under Blair and Brown, it broke apart, and the cycle of national ruin started again. Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions, is less ambitious than Blair and does not share Blair’s destructive vision at all. He promised a great rebirth of Britain but is not going to deliver it. The reality awaits the next Labour government. Decline is Britain’s reality.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
