With a crushing 20-plus point lead in the opinion polls, all the signs are that Labour leader Keir Starmer will be the PM after the general election on 4 July, called by Conservative incumbent Rishi Sunak yesterday.
The stars are aligned for Starmer. Rival progressives are in abeyance: the Liberal-Democrat party has lost the all-things-to-all-people shine that its name implies, while the Scottish Nationalists have coalesced into a residue of bitter personal opportunism.
He has only one problem. The Conservatives have thoroughly tested his policies. And they’re not working too well.
Rishi and his Conservative predecessors couldn’t (or wouldn’t) deviate from the broad orthodox playbook of higher deficits, monetary laxity, poorly-focused Covid spending, stealth tax increases, special-interest driven regulation and green central planning. With the result of fifteen years of low growth.
It leaves few serious opportunities for a leader of the political left – and none which are remotely easy. Here’s a realistic list:
- Slowing the Conservative dash to be the first major country to net zero.
- Using Brexit freedoms to open and deregulate Britain’s economy.
- More intrusive and less environmentally-friendly urban and infrastructure development.
- Cutting back on plans to improve defence capability.
- Doubling down on Conservative migration restrictions.
- Increasing taxation.
To be clear, Starmer is not in the position of Chris Luxon, quietly chipping away at the most egregious manifestations of the status quo and trying to build favourable political momentum.
But Starmer’s problem is common to all developed democracies caught in the net-zero low-growth trap, namely that the electorate’s special interests are either too great and/or too contradictory to be resolved in a satisfactory political compromise under the current rules.
Sunak’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, roughly managed the job back in 2019 with a promise of reconciling post-Brexit economic growth with a net zero paradise. But even before party political infighting knocked him off his perch, he failed to appreciate the political difficulty of achieving the necessary change. And his defenestration suggests his colleagues had even less acumen.
Partly because of this, it looks like Conservatives will have to share a chunk of their 2019 electoral base with the Reform party. In the post-Johnson era, the former Brexit party has been regularly polling in double digits, as Rishi tried to refurbish the compromise his party had repudiated.
It’s hard to see Starmer finding the job any easier. He may occasionally find himself regretting that Brexit makes him responsible for UK policy. In Europe, most of the substantive laws are now made at the (non-accountable) European Union level, while at the national level, accountable representatives get a little more personal protection from the existence of MMP-style electoral systems.
But Brexit and Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system is likely to make for an outcome that is clearer and more pronounced.
Of course, it doesn’t answer the question of which way Starmer might choose to jump if he wins: a wishful version of more-of-the-same (perhaps on the lines of Jacinda’s first term); a less tentative wokeism (Jacinda’s second term?); or perhaps even an empirically-based quest for growth (it seems too much to expect a Douglasite repudiation of the status quo).
Then again, despite the opinion polls and first-past-the-post, he might not get that choice, if the electorate projects its own unwillingness to abandon special interests into a hung parliament.
Either way, the Conservatives seem to have earned a spell in opposition for forgetting the truism that only left of centre political parties can successfully ignore their political base for long.
Point of Order 