Keir Starmer and a revolution in the cause of stability

The Labour leader is criticised as unexciting. Voters want to see Britain restored as a normal country

Electoral earthquakes hold the promise of political revolution. Think Clement Attlee’s defeat of Winston Churchill’s Conservatives in 1945 or Margaret Thatcher’s rout of Labour in 1983. Keir Starmer’s prospective victory over Rishi Sunak on July 4 is shaping up to be a similar landslide. But instead of commotion, the Labour leader is offering a revolution in the cause of stability.

Attlee’s triumph at the end of the second world war marked the replacement of the laissez-faire market economics that had delivered depression and unemployment during the 1930s with nationalisation and the welfare state. Thatcher’s success nearly 40 years later marked a turning of the tide against state interventionism and the resumed march of economic liberalism.

Starmer too is promising change. The word is emblazoned on every Labour campaign poster and podium. Senior Labour figures have been programmed to repeat it every 20 seconds or so. And it is working. Even before the entry into the contest of Reform’s Nigel Farage, the polls were pointing to a swingeing Labour win. The latest surveys (though they should be treated with caution) suggest that the Tories could see their numbers at Westminster reduced to double figures. 

Starmer, though, is not promoting another great upheaval. Instead, Changed Labour, as he likes to call it, would assume in government the mantle of small “c” conservatism. It has been the assumed role of the Tories to serve as guardian of Britain’s institutions and norms, even if Thatcher displayed a Maoist streak. The party’s historic task has been to uphold hierarchy, order and tradition as the champion of the monarchy, parliament, the judges, and the church.

The pursuit of Brexit and its implementation put an end to that. Boris Johnson lied to the late Queen Elizabeth, Michael Gove poured scorn on once-respected experts, and Liz Truss cast what her predecessors would have counted as the establishment as part of a grand conspiracy of the elites against her short-lived premiership. The Brexit Tories, as Gove put it, preferred to listen to “the people”.  Sunak, a politician always out of his depth, was simply lost in the psychodrama. 

Starmer had picked up the mantle of moderation. In place of Tory turbulence his “change” pledges the return of sober, predictable and broadly centrist government. After the depredations of recent years, the challenges, economic and political, are manifest. The prize is Britain’s return as a “normal” - you might almost say conservative - democracy after the chaos and political bloodletting that gave it five prime ministers in eight years. 

Starmer’s steady sobriety is sometimes compared unfavourably on his own side to the dynamism of Tony Blair before the Labour landslide of 1997. But the then Tory incumbent John Major had not pulled the house down. In any event, Blair’s bold “New Britain” never quite delivered the revolution it promised.  

Starmer, a lawyer by profession and a social democrat by instinct, harks back to a brand of Labour well understood by leaders such as Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. He sees himself as speaking for what, a couple of generations ago, was called the respectable working class - voters who expect government to moderate the excesses of the marketplace and defend the weak, but who also believe firmly in self-improvement, patriotism, respect for the law, and strong communities.

Blair always wanted to shake the kaleidoscope. Starmer is committed to putting the pieces back into place by rebuilding a stable economy, reinstating respect for rules and in restoring Britain’s international standing. Changed Labour is more attentive to the party’s working class roots than the self-consciously middle class aspirations of New Labour.

This is not a pitch calculated to send voters rushing cheering to the voting booths. The Labour campaign could do with a little more obvious enthusiasm. The pitch for normality, however, fits the temper of the times. Voters as well as business have had their fill of swings and swerves.

The big danger for Starmer is that a landslide election victory will raise unrealistic expectations that the derelict public realm bequeathed by Sunak can be quickly rebuilt. There is no money left, Labour’s chief secretary to the Treasury wrote when the party was defeated in 2010. Sunak has spent the past year handing out IOUs.

There will be room for for the new prime minister to step out of the straitjacket of the Labour manifesto with a bolder approach to spending, borrowing and taxation. The return of ministerial competence in the conduct of the state’s affairs will make a difference. So too will the restoration of civilised relations with the nation’s European neighbours. But the change sought by Starmer will be a decade in the making.