As anniversaries go, this one is grim. One year ago tomorrow, UK voters went to the polls to deliver a landslide Westminster majority of 172 seats to the Labour party. This week, prime minister Keir Starmer experienced the most humiliating of three major U-turns.
This one not only gutted his proposed reform of disability payments and blew up his government’s cherished fiscal rules. It also undermined his political authority.
From now on, a hobbled Starmer will rule, despite his colossal majority, in a new coalition with backbenchers who have tasted power they are unlikely to relinquish and who have shown they have very different ambitions from those of their leadership.
There had always been a paradox at the heart of Labour’s landslide. Due to the UK’s capricious first-past-the-post voting system, it had been achieved on the back of a popular vote of only 34 per cent, a much lower share than the party received in 2017, when it lost to the Conservatives. Now, however, according to a recent YouGov poll, Labour has the support of only 23 per cent of voters. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, new standard bearer of the right, leads at 26 per cent,with the Conservatives drifting and rudderless at 18 per cent.
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Starmer has been in apology mode. Only hours after becoming prime minister, having outlined ambitious plans for the “change” agenda Labour was elected on, he had warned that “things will get worse before they get better.” And they did. Now, he admits, he had “squeezed the hope out,” adding: “We were so determined to show how bad it was that we forgot people wanted something to look forward to as well.” The vision thing was, and is, missing.
He also apologised for his Enoch Powell-like comments about the dangers of the country becoming an “island of strangers”, blaming a scriptwriter for the overreaction to Farage.
Will humility and mea culpas mollify angry voters? Probably not. The party needs an ideological reset, with many backbench MPs pressing for a turn to the left.
Now the welfare cuts retreat will inevitably mean uncomfortable tax choices for the centrist party leaders, like a wealth tax, to bridge the £5 billion hole left in the budget. Backbenchers point to polling that suggests voters would react favourably to a tack to the left, with one poll finding that nearly 15 per cent of Liberal Democrat supporters and 10 per cent of Greens say they would consider voting for Labour. In contrast, the same poll shows only 1 per cent of Reform voters and 3 per cent of Conservative Party voters said they might do so.
One thing is clear, though: more of the same is a recipe for disaster.
