The Labour Party is dead, and Starmer has killed it

There has been a strange refusal to understand the scale of Labour’s collapse. Perhaps because still, somewhere, it is believed that Keir Starmer saved the Labour Party in 2020, and because Labour is in office with a huge undeserved majority. But getting a notional national 17 per cent vote share in the local elections, is easily the worse share of the vote Labour has had in its entire history as a national political party. Losing Wales as it has, where it received 11 per cent of the vote, is no passing malaise.

This is not a sudden development. New Labour and Starmer’s Party has been losing vote share since 1997, from 43 per cent in 1997 to roughly 30 per cent in 2010 and 2015, the same levels achieved by Michael Foot. Labour lost Scotland in 2015. Jeremy Corbyn temporarily took Labour back to Blair and Wilson levels of support, but Starmer’s Party only managed 34 per cent of the popular vote in 2024 and has lost vote share at an extraordinary pace ever since.

Nor can what has happened be seen as the British iteration of a general crisis in social democracy. The revival under Corbyn was based on a social democratic programme. Furthermore, Labour has been losing votes to social democratic parties like the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. Nor did New Labour or Starmer’s Party suffer from a failure to communicate – on the contrary its message has got through very clearly, and the progressive electorate does not like it.

I call it Starmer’s Party for a reason. Keir Starmer keeps referring to “my Labour Party”, and indeed to “my government”. This is new – no previous leader claimed the party as his in this way, nor trespassed on the monarch’s headship of government. More than that, Starmer insists, still, that he and Morgan McSweeney saved the party.

It is a common complaint, from Wes Streeting to the left, that Starmer has no vision, no project. But that is quite misleading. Starmer had an exceptionally strong vision for the future of the country, and a profoundly blinkered one. Starmer’s party abhors the left and wishes for a future without it. He is continuing the New Labour project: to create a new conservative and conformist party. That is, a party with minimal member influence, funded by private donors, committed to maintaining a status quo, and offering remunerative post-political careers for its apparatchiks. It is a party deeply committed to the alliance with the United States, and the one country with which the US has a special relationship, Israel.  

He was not so much committed to growth as dependent on it to keep things going, for redistribution was ruled out. His economic policy is fiscal rectitude, support for innovation and “entrepreneurs”, and subsidies for foreign investment in the UK. Starmer’s Party rejects, with grim determination, public ownership even of natural monopolies. These must remain “investible”. Starmer’s Party’s conservatism extended to being deeply Unionist, even in relation to Northern Ireland. It even started to believe in Brexit, and trumpeted minor trade deals just as the Tories had. It aped the Tories and Reform on immigration.

And, it should not be forgotten, it inherited from the Brexiteers, and New Labour, a policy of using routine mendacity as a central political tool. It has continued the corruption of public discourse, descending to new lows with its dishonest attacks on Green Party policies and opponents of Israel’s policies. It wanted and wants to keep things as they are, and to reward and honour figures like Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, both of whose friendships and business relationships tell us all we need to know about them politically.

So deeply committed is his government to this vision that even as the policies to maintain its rule became irrational from the perspective of the national interest, and voter opinion, it has doubled down on them. It royally sucked up to the United States under Trump, even as he so clearly became the enemy of Europe and of Ukraine. It didn’t criticise when Trump threatened the independence of Canada, an older ally than the US. It made tech deals with him which further compromise British sovereignty, energy supplies, and the NHS. It facilitated the Israeli annihilation of Gaza, giving military aid and political cover, imprisoning British people who dissented, and improperly sabotaging parliamentary debate on the subject.

Starmer’s Party didn’t get economic growth, but continued with the same policies which have failed for 14 years. It cut pensions, and retained the two-child cap, and suspended MPs who objected. It could not even bring itself to think about the nationalisation of water despite the scandalous performance of the private companies, some of which could be taken over practically without payment. This is not a lack of vision, but a surfeit of shopworn thinking, all missing a serious analysis of where we have been, and what the possibilities for action are, or any willingness to mobilise people and opinion in favour of change.

What then of “Labour values”? Is it the case that Labour has been led by an intruder? In that case it is striking how little opposition there has been within the party. MPs always have the option not just of voting down policies they do not like, but of making clear that they might, forcing changes of policy. In any case they should take responsibility for what they vote for. There has been practically no resistance, except from the tiny remaining left faction in the party.

Now, with Starmer’s Party rejecting Starmer, what are the policy alternatives on offer? Very few. To an astonishing extent this leadership contest will be driven by personalities and vibes. As in the case of Starmer, the main qualification for leadership appears, risibly, to be a working-class background, not a policy programme; in the case of Al Carns it seems to be the only qualification on offer.

An exception needs to be made for Andy Burnham who has articulated a limited domestic programme of nationalisation to provide essentials more fairly, devolution and PR, and shown some understanding that a critique of Thatcherism and New Labour is required, as well as one of the British state and constitution. He is notable too for his campaign for a duty of candour in public life, and his complaints about routine lying by political machines. We await his views on foreign policy and on the Middle East. But his campaign remains insurgent, forced to hurdle the forthcoming Makerfield by-election.

It was a very different story when there was a Labour Party, before the 1990s. Labour was a party both of protest and power. There were clear political divisions within the party, well articulated by key figures, which covered the whole spectrum of policy from domestic to foreign affairs, with little overlap with Tory positions. Senior Labour ministers once resigned from government for political reasons, as did Harold Wilson and Aneurin Bevan in 1951.

In the 1950s there was a long-standing argument between the Bevanites, who weren’t just cuddly pro-NHS types, but opponents of grandiose plans for British military spending, German rearmament and British hydrogen bombs. The Gaitskellite right opposed them, but some, notably Gaitskell himself, criticised the British-French-Israeli attack on Suez in 1956, standing up for international law. Starmer’s Party does not even call it out when other countries break equivalent norms. The Bevanites, like Harold Wilson later, wanted to intervene strongly in the economy to improve it; the Gaitskellites thought capitalism was doing fine and that Labour should tax, and spend on welfare. The right were welfarist, the left productivist.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was an equally strong debate between many overlapping positions. This included a clash between anti-nuclear economic nationalists, keen on state planning and hostile to the common market, and those in more in favour of the common market and free market capitalism. Labour was a party that differed on these and other important issues, but also differed from the Tories, for example on radically extending the welfare state, and intervening in industry.

Historic Labour, for all its faults, was a party committed to changing the status quo. It represented the organised working class, among other groups. It was a social democratic party which was committed to understanding and changing the world. Other things have changed drastically since the 1970s, but the key change is not over this or that policy, many of which may or may not now be appropriate. It is rather the shift of reforming energy from the historic Labour party to the New Right.

For over a generation, the parties of ambition and change have been Thatcher’s Tories, and then Ukip, the Brexit Party and Reform. They not only changed things but set the agenda for New Labour, and Starmer’s Party, which essentially ceased, especially the latter, to be progressive or centre-left parties. It is hardly surprising that progressive parties have grown in opposition to both – the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein, all now in office. In England, the Greens are part of the same movement.

The question is not whether Labour values have been usurped by Starmer’s faction. It is what kind of party could be built out of the corpse of Starmer’s party. One option is clearly a more Blairite party: pro-tech giants, the US, and privatisation. But are there any serious options to create a progressive party, one that dares speak out on the issues of the day, that actually communicates with a progressive electorate?  It is hard to see at the moment whether the ambition or capacity exists within it.

It is worth noting that Starmer’s Party is only barely the official party of the organised working class. Whereas Labour had affiliated to it nearly every major trade union, today only just over half of union members are in party-affiliated unions. And even then some may leave. This is hardly surprising:  as it stands its policies, Starmer’s Party’s political instincts, are far closer to those of the Tories and Reform than to the progressive parties that are eating it up. And that is not accidental, or the result of a lack of vision. It was the whole point.

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