Starmer must keep eye on centre

Tony Blair’s Labour Party promised “cool Britannia” but it’s gruel Britannia for the UK if new prime minister Sir Keir Starmer does not focus, and fast, on the problems that won him Thursday’s election.

“The people have spoken, have voted for change,” Sir Keir said on Friday. And they said it loudly. Labour is projected to hold 410 seats of the 650 in the House of Commons, with the defeated Conservative Party expected to have about 130. The question is how will the first Labour government in 14 years use its majority to deliver on the voters’ commission to kickstart the growth needed to fund the British welfare state.

There is not a lot that is great about Britain just now: gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2024 was only 1.7 per cent up on pre-Covid 2019, and the International Monetary Fund predicts 0.5 per cent growth this year. Public sector net debt in May was a touch under 100 per cent of GDP, the highest in 60 years. And at the start of the year the National Statistics Office reported nearly half of all adults reported their cost of living was up month on month, commonly driven by cost increases for food, power and fuel.

Sir Keir’s challenge is to focus on what the voters want – prosperity and national pride – and defy social engineering distractions. This will not be easy. The new prime minister is cursed with a huge majority, all but ensuring an ill-disciplined backbench, with some MPs echoing party activists and heeding former leader Jeremy Corbyn’s fantasies of socialism at home and solidarity with dictators abroad.

The danger for Sir Keir is that he will govern to placate activists in the party and their mates even further to the left. On Friday night (AEST) Mr Corbyn seemed assured of holding his seat, now sitting as an independent. Sir Keir’s majority in his own electorate was halved, with voters defecting to an opponent of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

Sir Keir’s success will depend on his not making Anthony Albanese’s mistake and assuming this win is an endorsement for his personal agenda. Mr Albanese has learned that voters did not share his enthusiasm for the Indigenous voice to parliament, and is learning that they prefer keeping the lights on now to promises of green energy in the future. The humiliation of French President Emmanuel Macron’s party in last weekend’s parliamentary election by Marine Le Pen’s populist National Rally makes the point. As does the election to the House of Commons (with three colleagues) of Reform leader Nigel Farage, who dislikes immigration as much as he successfully loathed the EU during the Brexit referendum.

Sir Keir, a human rights lawyer by trade, will quickly lose support if voters decide his government is not focused on the “pound in their pocket”, as Labour prime minister Harold Wilson said in the 1960s.

Labour did not win because voters have embraced a vision for Britain, as Tony Blair delivered in 1997. The Conservatives failed because they had lost the voters’ confidence. Defeated prime minister Rishi Sunak is a decent, competent man but not the psephological superperson needed to save his government. The spills and scrapes of 14 years in office (governing through Covid did not help) made this election very difficult for the Conservatives to win. The memory of five prime ministers in four years, including Liz Truss, who lasted seven weeks, made it harder. What decided the defeat in detail was the way the Tories talked tough on the issues that mattered most to pragmatic voters, but did not deliver – controlling immigration, fixing the health system and ending the decline in their standard of living.

They also failed the existential exam for political parties: knowing and explaining what they stood for. As Greg Sheridan writes in The Weekend Australian, “the Conservatives got into so much trouble with their base partly because they could never work out whether they were a low-tax, free-market party or a big-spend, big-tax, big-government right-of-centre party, like many US Republicans and much of the populist right in Europe”. Britain’s new Labour government must now decide how it can stay true to its ideals while convincing voters that it understands, and will respond to, their needs.

The election result bucks a trend sweeping Europe, where voters have swung sharply to the right, while Britain has swung sharply to the left. But there is a sting in the tail with the better-than-expected showing of Mr Farage. If Sir Keir and his colleagues fail to deliver, Labour voters will not stay rusted on. And Mr Farage, or politicians like him, will welcome them.