This is the second of two pieces on Keir Starmer and the future of the UK. You can read the first here
Every time I write about the Labour party readers respond with a despairing wail, “why are its leaders so frightened?”
Consider the state of the political battle, and you will understand their exasperation.
Labour has an average poll lead of 20 per cent.
The Conservative government is an embarrassment to itself and everyone who voted for it.
Keir Starmer will be the United Kingdom’s next prime minister, and it is not wholly fanciful to speculate that he will command a crushing majority.
And yet a right-wing rabble that has wrecked this country still has the power to dictate the terms of trade.
Wherever you look you see Labour politicians retreating. They have torn up their commitment to a green spending programme. They won’t even talk about reversing the UK’s withdrawal from the Europe Union. Meanwhile Conservative ministers announce tax cuts, even though the public services are collapsing and Russian imperialism demands increased defence spending. Instead of challenging Conservatives, Labour meekly promises to go along with their schemes.
Roy Hattersley, the party’s deputy leader in the 1980s, said that Labour did not suffer from the corruption of power but from the “corruption of defeat”.
Lost election after lost election sapped the party’s self-belief and made it timid when it needed to be bold. His remark has a contemporary relevance given that Labour has lost four elections in a row since 2010 and been through the trauma of a far-left takeover.
You show its leaders polls saying that it now has the largest leads in 30 years, and they don’t believe them. They think that on election day enough people will be scared by tax rises and wokery into suppressing their doubts and voting Conservative yet again.
There is a revealing passage in Tom Baldwin’s biography of Starmer, which shows the effects of defeat
It is 2015 and Starmer has been a radical lawyer and Director of Public Prosecutions. Everyone who knows him says he is a driven man, who wants tangible achievements to his name.
He decides to go into politics and gets a safe Labour seat in inner-London. He wants the power to change society, and is certain that Ed Miliband will win that year’s general election, and give him a government post.
The Conservatives were only in office because of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. They had presided over a failed austerity programme. Surely Labour could kick the scoundrels out and renew the nation
As it was, the Conservatives won a majority by whipping up baseless fears that a Labour government would be in the pocket of Scottish nationalists.
The defeat of 2015 had an outsized significance. Convinced that conventional centre-left politics had failed, Labour activists spun off into extremism. Puffed-up by his unexpected victory, David Cameron became so lost in hubris he called a referendum of the UK’s membership of the EU in the expectation born of Old Etonian entitlement that he must win it.
As for Starmer, he learned to be wary
“I never wanted to become an MP for the sake of it,” he told Baldwin ‘I thought Ed was going to win. Five years of opposition felt a very long time, it’s like a prison sentence. There is nothing that reduces you so much as knowing you can only make noise and not change.”
Can we therefore expect that the next Labour government will have been corrupted by defeat? That its timidity will leave it unable to cope with the multiple crises of global warming, war in Europe, and the UK’s decline?
I know I am going to regret writing this. I know you will throw these words in my face for years to come. But I believe the next Labour government will not be a footnote in history but a success.
Here’s why
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