UK’s Labour Party under Keir Starmer

“You can’t lose an election,” asserted the Labour Party’s new leader, Keir Starmer, recently, “as badly as we did in December and carry on as if everything is fine.” Indeed! Last year, in an historic general election triumph, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party routed the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party by securing 365 seats in the House of Commons. This was the party’s largest win since 1987 when Margaret Thatcher propelled the Conservatives to a massive election victory. The 2019 electoral desecration of the Labour Party led to the resignation of Corbyn and unleashed a torrent of criticism regarding his abject failure to respond to the reconfiguration of British politics along nationalist lines orchestrated by the glitzy Johnson. After the debacle, it was predicted that the Labour Party would need about a decade to manufacture a political revival. However, the appearance of Starmer on the scene appears to have changed everything.

Corbyn, despite his universally applauded attachment to principle, was lambasted for being rigid, inaccessible and precariously left-leaning. He was dubbed a Trotskyist stuck in the 1970s; a leader who lacked the requisite political and intellectual wherewithal to challenge the Conservatives and upend their burgeoning popular support. During his tenure, the Labour Party also got embroiled in damaging controversies relating to anti-Semitism. His nagging ambivalence vis-à-vis the “remain campaign” during the 2016 referendum alienated many Labour supporters. As expected, this bizarre strategy failed unspectacularly and allowed a glib, brilliant, sharp, slick and swanky Johnson to sweep the polls.

Starmer took over the reins of the Labour Party by defeating rivals Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy by bagging 56.2% of the vote. His has devised a multi-pronged strategy to revive the Labour Party. He is trying to connect with the Labour voters on a very personal level by presenting himself as an accessible and flexible leader who could reimagine and reinvent the party. At a subliminal level, he is making endeavours to woo party supporters by listening to them rather than merely talking to them. Astonishingly, the less he speaks the more they understand. This is in stark contrast to Corbyn whose intellectual turbidity prevented him from penetrating the minds of the Labour followers. The underlying message is that without an erudite, responsive and competent leader, the party cannot stage a comeback.

Starmer is also focused on regaining the trust of the once-solid Labour-voting constituencies in the Midlands and north of England. Known picturesquely as the “Red Wall”, these constituencies were won by Conservatives in 2019. This literally jolted Labour. Johnson shrewdly used immigration, economics, patriotism and his familiar Brexit mantra to recast age-old class-driven party loyalties. He skilfully coaxed middle class economic leftists, who are socially conservative and proudly pro-military, to vote for the Conservative Party. Patriotism is an integral part of their political creed. Starmer has painstakingly underscored his own patriotism by paying glowing tributes to the Victory in Europe Day (VE) veterans and emphasised the importance of protecting them from Covid-19. “I am patriotic and I want the Labour Party to be patriotic,” he stated unequivocally in an interview with Liz Bates of Channel 4 News.

Starmer has also used the rampant Covid-19 crisis to reveal the Johnson government’s failure to avert an unprecedented catastrophe. He has successfully conveyed to voters that leadership revolves around vision, planning, meticulousness, empathy, earnestness and strategic brilliance. The flip side of this argument is that Johnson lacks all these qualities and is a dysfunctional PM.

For Starmer and the Labour Party, things are apparently moving in the right direction. Opinium, a London-based market research and insight consultancy, recently conducted a poll to gauge who the people preferred as their PM. Whilst 37% cited Starmer, only 35% favoured Johnson! Even more remarkably, 52% of the voters stated they could see Starmer becoming PM in the future. The game, it seems, is afoot.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 16^th, 2020.

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