Editorials

The Irish Times view on the British Labour Party: Moving to the centre

Starmer believes best way to win friends for party is to show willingness to take on the left

Keir Starmer’s mantra is that Labour’s manifesto must be a realistic programme for government, not an abstract wish list. “Shouting slogans or changing lives?” he responded to one heckler. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA Wire

Fri Oct 1 2021 - 00:05

Is British Labour now ready and able to emulate its German cousins and win the next general election?

Although leader Keir Starmer tried to make steps towards electability at the party conference this week in Brighton, voters remain largely unconvinced. Headlines still report a divided party largely turned in on itself, and reflect mystification at Starmer’s inability to address more than perfunctorily the fuel and cost-of-living crises that are preoccupying people.

Boris Johnson, leaning on his 80-seat majority, is by no means guaranteed his longed-for decade at Number 10, but he will have taken comfort from a conference which did little enough to show Labour as a government in waiting.

Starmer, like former leader Neil Kinnock – also once an avowed leftwinger – has been convinced that the best way to win friends for his party, notably in the press, is to show a willingness to take on the left and its sacred cows of nationalisation and grassroots democracy.

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In both these regards Starmer was successful in Brighton, although, many fear, at the expense of leaving him still lacking an electorally appealing big-picture vision, except perhaps in his support for a high-spending green new deal. His return to a form of Blairism was signalled in the praise delivered for the records of Blair and Brown, much applauded and politically inconceivable in the last 10 years.

Starmer’s mantra that Labour’s manifesto must be a realistic programme for government, not an abstract wish list – “Shouting slogans or changing lives?” he responded to one heckler – is seen by the left as code for the abandonment of promises that smack of radicalism, of Corbynism, like the nationalisation of energy companies.

Yet, his critics warn, he may actually be walking away from the party’s base: a Survation poll presented at Brighton recorded 69 per cent of potential Labour voters agreeing that “the economy is rigged against ordinary people”, with 74 per cent wanting more public ownership of assets.

Whether the revival of the parties of social democracy and their allies internationally will be accomplished these days by a return to New Labourist centrism and methods is doubtful. These are different times.

Joe Biden and Olaf Scholz, both firmly on the right of their respective Democratic and SPD parties, have shown that accommodation with left and its programme rather than internal confrontation can lay the basis for successful united electoral campaigns.

But Starmer has convincingly demonstrated that, right or wrong, he has the support of a clear majority of his party – the standing ovations drowned out the intermittent heckling, while delegates also raised the bar for future leftwing candidates for the leadership. As Labour sympathising columnist Polly Toynbee observed "One good – very long – speech can't win elections, but it can change the weather."

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