Recent British prime ministers have routinely been ambushed by reality. David Cameron didn't see Brexit coming. Theresa May underestimated the appeal of Corbynism. Boris Johnson couldn't handle COVID. Liz Truss was removed from office by the financial markets. By calling a snap general election for July 4 – which he will almost certainly lose – Rishi Sunak has discovered that his political gifts are not as extensive as he thought. So what lies ahead for Sir Keir Starmer, the man destined to become the next occupant of 10 Downing Street?
The Labor leader has carefully positioned himself as a moderating force in UK politics; a stable and centrist alternative to 14 years of “conservative chaos” in power. For this, he has been rewarded with a 20-point lead in the polls and the prospect of a crushing defeat of Conservative seats in the summer. One poll, published in early June, even indicated that he could win the biggest majority in Westminster of any British politician since Stanley Baldwin in 1924. But dispatching Sunak's desperate and beleaguered right-wing government will be the easy part. In reality, governing Britain – a country recently characterized by The Financial Times as “poor” with “rich pockets” – will be much more difficult. Starmer doesn't seem even slightly up to the task.
Labour's economic policy – the centerpiece of that opaque group of ideas known collectively as “Starmerism” – is a case in point. In a speech to the City of London in March, the party's shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, laid out what she saw as the main drivers of Britain's decline: the lowest productivity in the G7, a shortage of strategic investment and the crisis long-term regional. neglect. Reeves then hinted at a solution: a new “strategic partnership” between the state and the private sector, an overhaul of the UK's restrictive planning laws and a national wealth fund to help channel cash into industrially disadvantaged areas.
However, in the same speech, Reeves failed to acknowledge the central role played by the City of London itself in amplifying the UK's abnormally high rates of regional inequality. Instead, he praised the British capital's “world-leading financial and professional services”, pausing only to acknowledge the damage banking sectors can do to national economies when left “underregulated”. The omission was revealing. For decades, the City has acted as a vortex for British domestic investment, draining wealth from the country's peripheries (northern England, central Scotland, south Wales) and redirecting it toward the asset-rich English southeast. Or, just as often, leaving the UK entirely and taking refuge in offshore tax havens.
Naturally, the social effects of this system have been devastating. According to consultancy EY, London and its surrounding regions – which are booming – will account for 40 per cent of the UK's economic growth by 2027. The rest of Britain, meanwhile, will continue down the path of conservative stagnation. Under the Conservative government, spending cuts hit poor northern cities twice as hard as prosperous southern ones, amplifying health inequalities and pushing local services to the limit. As the party has made clear, Labor could mitigate these cuts, but it will not reverse them: in the next parliament, budget discipline will take priority over social democratic largesse. As if to underline this point, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the UK's spending watchdog, estimates that, in the absence of substantial tax increases, savings of up to £16 billion ($20 billion) will be needed to eliminate the British deficit in the coming years. years, regardless of who takes power on July 4. Balancing the UK's daily spending is one of the Labor Party's economic objectives. “We will not falter in the face of tough fiscal rules,” Reeves, a Bank of England economist for six years, warned in March.
In this, at least, Starmer has kept his word. In February, Labor abandoned its flagship pledge to spend £28bn a year on a “green investment plan”. Instead, Starmer revealed a more modest commitment: £5 billion a year, by 2028/29, to decarbonise the UK economy. Environmental groups condemned the U-turn. Labor had “collapsed like a house of cards in the wind” under pressure from the climate-denying right, said Areeba Hamid of Greenpeace. But the change was inevitable. Starmer, concerned about the weakness of Labor support, wants to limit the space for Conservative lines of attack. At the same time, four years after replacing Jeremy Corbyn as Labor leader, he remains determined to eliminate any trace of Corbyn's influence within the ranks of his party.
Starmer's attack on the Labor left has produced a bonfire of progressive policies. His initial promises to scrap university tuition fees, raise taxes on top earners, nationalize price-gouging British energy companies and end incremental privatization of the NHS have been scrapped or watered down. He has also made his promise to abolish the House of Lords, the largest unelected legislative chamber in the Western world.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2022, Starmer was emphatic: dissolving the Lords, an institution filled with “Tory lackeys and donors”, would “restore trust” in the British state. “People have lost faith in the ability of politicians to bring about change,” he said. “In addition to fixing our economy, we need to fix our politics.” However, by the middle of last year, repairing Britain's broken political model had fallen off Starmer's agenda. “Constitutional [reform] It takes time and consumes energy,” Thangam Debbonaire, a senior Starmer ally, told The i Newspaper in June 2023. “We have a lot to do to fix a country where nothing works, from getting a passport to fixing potholes.”
Starmer and his team are right to argue that the Conservatives have left Britain in a mess. From Cameron's austerity cuts to Truss's market-scaring fiscal experiments, the UK is now a poorer, weaker and more divided place than it was a decade and a half ago. And yet, despite ditching virtually every policy capable of addressing Britain's problems, Starmer has actually become more, not less, grandiose as the race for No 10 has progressed. 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 started the campaign in May. This rhetoric is not new. In 1997, Tony Blair, celebrating his historic election victory over the Conservatives, asked and answered his own question: “A new dawn has dawned, hasn't it? And it's wonderful.”
But it wasn't wonderful. When Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, resigned in 2010, inaugurating the most recent stage of the Conservative government, New Labor had become synonymous with three things: Iraq, corruption and financial collapse. The United Kingdom did not flourish during the Blair-Brown era, but rather fractured, setting the cycle of national doom in motion again. Starmer – former Director of Public Prosecutions – is a much less ambitious figure than Blair and shares none of Blair's disruptive vision. He has promised a great British renaissance, but has no intention of delivering it. Reality stalks the next Labor government. Decline is the reality of Britain.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
