Sir Keir Starmer is becoming a liability to Labour in the same way Joe Biden was to the Democrats in the US presidential election last year. Voters elected both men hoping for a change for the better, but they are too well integrated into the ruling establishment to deliver.
Biden was never articulate and this turned to incoherence under the impact of his advancing age. Starmer has no such excuse, but his ineffectiveness as a communicator opened up a doorway for Reform UK to march through in the elections on Thursday. His inadequacy as a leader matters much in an era of populist nationalist politicians who cultivate a personality cult and can best be fought by a charismatic opponent.
Few electoral earthquakes have been less surprising than the one we have just experienced. Starmer gained his enormous parliamentary majority last July thanks to the wave of revulsion against the Tories. But he promptly dissipated goodwill by making a series of classic political errors.
Despite the massive unpopularity of his predecessors, he largely continued their policies at home and abroad. He unwisely tried to beat Reform at their own game by sounding tough on immigration, but this tactic seldom works because a right-wing party can simply become more right-wing.
Nigel Farage and Reform also had the extraordinary advantage of competing against two parties recently discredited by failure in government in the eyes of the public.
There was something comically self-destructive about the way that Starmer and his Cabinet kept blaming everything that went wrong on 14 years of Tory austerity – and then doubled down on the same much-detested policies by reducing winter fuel payments for pensioners and personal independence payments for the disabled. Labour voters were disillusioned, and the public left with a sense that the Government did not know what it was doing.
The Government’s explanation for Austerity Mk 2 is that the state of the country’s finances is so bad that it has no choice but to introduce cuts. There is a lot to be said for this argument, while the deep crater left by the explosion touched off by Liz Truss in 2022 makes the UK’s economic reputation more fragile than ever.
But Starmer’s jeremiads about the condition in which the Tories left the economy were overdone, giving the impression that the UK ship of state was not just in a bad way but was holed below the waterline and in imminent danger of sinking.
Yet there is a deeper danger now emerging – which is that just the possibility of a Reform victory in four years’ time will guarantee a period of rising political turmoil and division.
Liberals need leaders
One of the big benefits of Labour’s decisive defeat of the Tories in 2024 was that it looked likely to end the years of self-destructive political chaos that had started with the Brexit referendum in 2016.
Some argued at the time that, if Labour did not achieve anything, the far right would have an opportunity to gain power, but nobody expected this to happen so speedily.
Such an outcome was not inevitable. Combating populist nationalist movements is a difficult political art, but Labour never made up its mind if it wanted to try to steal Farage’s political clothes, or to launch a full-scale attack on Reform as made up of dangerous extremists.
The Democratic candidate in the 2024 US election, Kamala Harris, made the same mistake in the presidential campaign last year, when she wobbled after calling Trump “a fascist” and “weird”. Her campaign managers lost their nerve, shilly-shallied, and never pressed home the attack.
Compare this timidity with the aggression shown by the urbane central banker, Mark Carney, the new Prime Minister of Canada thanks to his robust response to Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the nation becoming a “cherished 51st state” of the US. Canadian Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre – a few months back considered a shoo-in to win – lost his parliamentary seat, which he had held for 21 years.
Progressive and liberal opinion can rally, but it needs a leader to whom it can rally, as happened in Canada. Starmer and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, have never looked like people likely to disturb a status quo which so many voters detest.
Their Civil Service and judicial backgrounds mean that their instincts are not geared for this type of fight. Trump-type political leaders like Nigel Farage specialise in dealing with and exploiting the media. Opponents without these skills are at an immense disadvantage.
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Some optimists will argue that Reform winning the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, and doing spectacularly well in mayoral and council elections, does not mean that their march towards power will continue on an upward trajectory over the next four years.
On the other hand, it is difficult to see how they will be stopped by the Labour Party under its present leadership.
Starmer and Reeves are not uniquely inept, but they are typical products of political elites in the US and Europe which are in deep trouble. They repeatedly fail to fend off populist-nationalist attacks from Blyth to Bucharest as globalisation fails to deliver for much of the population and goes into chaotic reverse.
Could the turmoil in Europe give Starmer the opportunity to resurrect himself as a national leader?
Twenty years ago, European think tanks were full of people studying integration, while the chances of disintegration were ignored. The EU was portrayed by admirers as a sort of improved version of the US or UN under a benign and expert leadership.
Many still view it that way, but look at the failure of the EU or Nato to cope with, still less produce solutions for, crises in Ukraine, Gaza or the US under Trump.
European national divisions are too great to produce coherent policies, so the outcome of repeated EU meetings is solely to declare passive unity. Starmer proudly presides over meetings of “the coalition of the willing”, begging embarrassing questions about what precisely they are willing to do.
Disapprove though they do of Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine, the EU states have not produced an alternative – for the very good reason that they could never agree on one.
Starmer has presented himself as one of the leaders of European resistance to a hypothetical Russian invasion along the lines of the Red Army in 1945, but there is something phoney about this – given the poor performance of the Russian army in the war so far. His Churchillian posturing has demonstrably not produced any political dividends for him, as the election has just shown.
Already, the Starmer Government has a lame-duck feel to it, despite its massive majority. Commentary saying that this week’s elections were of historic importance may be more correct than most such claims.
Many who previously shied away from Farage’s old Ukip party as fascistic, see Reform to be a much more normal party which need no longer be a pariah. This is an important development.
The success of Reform is bad news for the UK because populist-nationalist parties are essentially propaganda machines, peddling fake solutions for real crises.
Further Thoughts
The world has responded with some perplexity to the deal on minerals and rare earths known as the US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund. It appears to be a win for President Volodymyr Zelensky, since he is back on speaking terms with Donald Trump, who is no longer demanding that Ukraine pay back past aid through mineral exports.
But nobody is likely to be digging vastly expensive mines in Ukraine until the war is over, so what exactly has Zelensky or Trump gained? The agreement establishes an investment vehicle – inoperative for the present – but gives Ukraine no security guarantees against Russian attack.
Yet it has another, not so obvious, significance: it may mean that the Trump bid to end the Ukraine war, which has created such an international rumpus in the last couple of months, has ended, at least for the moment, in near complete failure.
From the White House’s point of view, the usefulness of the investment deal may be that Trump needed some concrete achievement – such as this agreement – to mask his diplomatic frustration.
The war, which has already killed or wounded more than one million Ukrainians and Russians, will grind on with no sign of it ending. There is a military stalemate on the battlefield, though Russian forces are edging forward and might launch a spring or summer offensive.
But it is important to notice a huge military development during this three-year-old war which is of great geopolitical significance. As in the First World War, the defence – be it Russian or Ukrainian – is generally having the upper hand over the attack.
In the 1914-18 war, it was the machine gun and heavy artillery which gave the defence the advantage. In the Ukraine war, it is the drone and the mine which make an advance over open terrain so costly in terms of casualties.
The hypocrisy of the UK Government when it comes to the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza continues to know no bounds.
By chance, I was in the House of Lords chamber this week to hear a government statement about the visit of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa, an obscure and uninfluential figure, who nevertheless had meetings with both Sir Keir Starmer and the Foreign Secretary David Lammy. His presence helps the Government pretend that it is doing something to alleviate the misery of the five million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, while doing nothing in practice.
The statement read out in the Lords said that “during the visit, we reaffirmed our unwavering commitment to advancing a two-state solution as the only pathway to achieving just and lasting peace in the Middle East, where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in peace, dignity and security”. Of course, the two-state solution has been dead for at least 20 years and everybody knows that, including the British Government.
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But suggesting that it is alive and well – despite the bloodbath in Gaza and destruction of Palestinian cities, towns and villages in the West Bank – enables the Government to avoid condemning the greatest war crime of our century, with 100 children being killed or injured in Gaza every day since Israel resumed its air strikes on 18 March, according to UNICEF.
In case anybody in Washington or Tel Aviv should still care where the UK Government stands – or fails to stand – on Gaza, the Foreign Office has warned senior British lawyers that they risk sanctions from the Trump administration for advice they provided to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Israel’s actions in Gaza.
The Financial Times writes that “several senior lawyers involved in the ICC’s war crimes case against Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant have received the warnings from Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, according to people familiar with the matter”.
Cockburn’s Picks
The elimination of Syria as a united nation state has been an ongoing process since the Arab Spring in 2011 which marked the start of the Syrian Civil War.
Little noticed by an outside world absorbed in the doings of Trump and the Ukraine war, the disintegration is now reaching a point of no return as Israeli aircraft struck at will in the heart of Damascus on Friday, according to a report by Al Jazeera.
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