By Madeleine Kearns
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Last December, the Labour Party suffered its worst defeat
since 1935. In the run-up to the election, the party’s manifesto received heavy
criticism for being unrealistic, overreaching, and unpersuasive. Former Labour
Party leader Tony Blair described it as “promising the earth but from a planet
other than Earth.” But what really doomed the party was its leader — Jeremy
Corbyn.
Sir Keir Starmer — who succeeded Corbyn on April 4 —
certainly seems to be an improvement.
Starmer’s skepticism of Corbyn was evident early on. He
did not initially back the former leader and was later part of the effort to
oust him in 2016. When this failed, Starmer served as shadow Brexit secretary
and helped guide the party toward a more coherent stance on Brexit.
The son of a nurse and a tool maker, Starmer attended a
grammar school and then Oxford University. A human-rights lawyer, he was the
director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013. As National Review’s
Kyle Smith wryly observed, Starmer is “younger and handsomer” than Corbyn and
is even rumored to have been the inspiration for the fictional romantic lead,
Mr. Darcy, in Bridget Jones’ Diary. Still, he faces an uphill struggle.
To win in the next election, Labour will need to swing 10 percent of the
electorate.
So far, Starmer has managed to sidestep the toxicity of
the Labour Party’s ongoing civil war. His parliamentary career began in 2015,
after the Blair-Brown era had imploded in the controversy of the Iraq War.
Distancing himself from this contentious era, Starmer has made an end to
illegal wars one of his top priorities. At the same time, he has managed to
distance himself from the more radical, progressive “Corbynista” wing within
the Labour Party. He has apologized unreservedly for the anti-Semitism and
vowed to root it out. His new shadow housing secretary has said that Communists
are not welcome in the party. And Matt Pound, head of a Corbyn-skeptic group
Labour First, was another Starmer appointment. Pound is a self-described
“full-time” organizer against the “hard left.”
“Never again can Labour be a party that millions of
people feel they cannot trust to govern, to manage our economy, or to keep our
country safe,” Starmer said earlier this month, positioning himself as a more
moderate, unifying figure. But can he achieve this while still maintaining
Corbyn-era leftist policies? Starmer intends to re-nationalize the railways and
utilities, increase taxes on top earners and companies, abolish university
tuition fees, and “put the green new deal at the heart of everything we do” —
all reminiscent of Corbyn’s 2017 election manifesto.
Starmer has called his party to never lose sight of the
“voters ‘lent’ to the Tories in 2019.” He has argued that the coronavirus
pandemic has exposed the “desperate fragility of the state’s safety net and the
unfairness of a broken system: from our chronically underfunded NHS and care
service to our woefully inadequate social security system and the lack of
protection for our self-employed and small businesses.”
The trouble is that the Tories had already thought of
this before the crisis struck. Even in the last election, Johnson worked hard
to distance himself from the controversial years of Tory austerity. Starmer has
said that he intends to “stand up for universal services and defend our NHS.”
But Johnson’s government has done the same. The Tories’ most recent budget
offered the biggest spending splurge in decades. And the pandemic has only made
the conservatives swing even further to the left. The chancellor, Rishi Sunak,
recently indicated that the government would establish a coronavirus
jobs-retention scheme for all employers, covering up to 80 percent of wages, as
well as injecting £7 billion ($8.7 billion) into the welfare system.
During the Blair years, the Labour Party combined social
liberalism with more centrist economic policies. Now, Johnson’s conservative
government occupies that popular spot. Given that socialism has not been
politically viable in Britain for nearly 50 years, and given that the Tories
have swung hard to the left, Starmer’s biggest challenge may be that his brand
is irrelevant.
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