Keir Starmer entered office on 5 July as only the fourth Labour leader in history to win a parliamentary majority. At the outset of his leadership in 2020 – after the party’s worst defeat since 1935 – there were few who anticipated that he would join this select group. Mr Starmer would privately observe that he had to do the work of Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair in a single term. But he succeeded.
The breadth of Labour’s victory merits reflection. It became the first party since 2001 to win the most votes in England, Scotland and Wales. As such, it has reaffirmed one of its founding missions: to unite working people across national borders in the multinational British state. Labour also won a majority or plurality of seats in every English region – something achieved by no party in modern electoral history. Though its share of the vote was modest (33.7 per cent), Labour attracted a remarkable cross-section of support.
In the weeks since the party’s victory, it is not only the composition of parliament that has changed but what George Orwell called the “social atmosphere” of the country. After years of Conservative decadence and dysfunction, there is a more serious and hopeful mood. International partners, public-sector workers, businesses and voters are being treated with a respect too often lacking over the last decade.
“Socialism as I understand it,” wrote Harold Wilson in 1964, “means applying a sense of purpose to our national life: economic purpose, social purpose, and moral purpose.” It is this spirit that Mr Starmer’s “mission-led government” has sought to harness.
The 40 bills contained in the King’s Speech on 17 July demonstrated the ambition of the new administration. Labour has embraced an active and strategic state of the kind we have long argued for. As Chancellor, Rachel Reeves has placed industrial strategy at the heart of economic policymaking. In an era when the US, China and the European Union all use state intervention to protect national interests, the UK cannot afford to stand apart.
Public ownership has returned as a legitimate tool of policy through the planned creation of Great British Energy and the renationalisation of the railways. Workers’ rights will be expanded through the abolition of zero-hours contracts, the banning of “fire and rehire” and the extension of full rights to employees from day one. The aim is not only to protect workers but to boost growth: companies will be incentivised to invest in technology and training rather than relying on cheap labour (business investment in the UK is the lowest in G7 for third year in a row).
Mr Starmer and Ms Reeves are “pro-business” but not in the unqualified sense that some on the left suggest. Business is viewed as a social partner rather than a master to be appeased or an adversary to be confronted.
The size of Labour’s majority (172 seats) affords Mr Starmer the space for long-term reform. After a decade of instability – the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 Brexit vote, the Johnson fiasco, the Truss debacle – order has returned to British politics.
But in an era of electoral volatility, huge challenges remain. Across the West, Labour’s centre-left sister parties are becalmed: the Democrats are in danger of losing the presidency to Donald Trump; Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats are polling behind the hard-right Alternative for Germany, and Anthony Albanese’s Australian Labor may be evicted from office after just one term.
Yet Mr Starmer and his team are at least alive to this threat. As the Prime Minister remarked in his speech at the New Statesman’s summer party on 22 July: “You only have to look across the Channel at Europe and you see nationalism and populism in all its forms and all its strengths. And do not think for a minute that that could never happen here. It could – and it might – if we fail in our project of delivering change”.
The anti-complacency mindset that guided Labour in opposition has been taken into government. Having eschewed ideological gimmicks and populist slogans, Mr Starmer’s wager is that patient, pragmatic reforms will deliver lasting benefits. Success depends on navigating severe political and economic obstacles. But for the United Kingdom, after a dismal decade, the novelty of a serious government that tries is welcome enough.
[See also: The war on democracy]
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024