Starmer could steamroll through left-wing measures thanks to landslide majority
Keir Starmer has won a very strange kind of landslide majority, based on just 34 per cent of the popular vote at a low turnout election in which the Right was bitterly divided.
Yet he is still entitled to be congratulated for taking on the awesome responsibility of being Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It is in all our interests that he should make a success of it, even if we greatly doubt that he will.
Labour can hardly be said to have received a golden legacy from the outgoing Conservatives. The public finances are in a mess, the prisons are overflowing and under-resourced, NHS waiting lists are at near-record highs, the economy is locked in an apparently interminable cycle of low growth, and border control is a shambles.
With a vast array of more than 400 MPs assembled at his back, it would be tempting for Starmer to use his crushing majority to steamroller through all kinds of left-wing measures that were never mentioned in his manifesto.
He could, for example, try and completely unpick Brexit before it has had a chance to work. The British constitutional settlement would allow him to do that and yet we must hope he does not. Because it would be fundamentally to misunderstand the fragility of the mandate Labour won on Thursday: miles wide but inches deep.
If he governs instead as the moderate and calming influence he presented himself as in recent weeks then he may even find he starts to grow on the near two-thirds of us who voted for other parties. But if he reverts to a more left-wing tribal guise, any honeymoon period accorded him is likely to be short indeed.
Starmer may have the makings of a dull prime minister, but as they say in sport, you can only beat what is in front of you. And he was more than good enough to dish out a drubbing to Rishi Sunak and the Tories.
Many Tory voices were yesterday warning right-of-centre people who did not vote for their party that they would come to regret it. Rather than denouncing the electorate, they would do better to ask themselves why so many who supported them five years ago could not bring themselves to do so again this week.
The thesis being advanced by former MPs on the “One Nation” wing would have it that they lost so badly because they lurched too far rightwards. That is a comical misdiagnosis when one considers their recent performance on most of the big issues: raising the tax burden to an 80-year high, presiding over enormous immigration levels, failing to stop the boats bringing illegal migrants to our shores and letting dangerous offenders out of jail early. Even where more trenchant positions have been adopted, such as on welfare reform or defence spending, they were reached very late in the day.
Clearly, the many hundreds of thousands of former Tory voters who backed the Reform party of Nigel Farage on Thursday did not do so because they felt the Conservatives had become too right-wing. The very opposite is true. As former Cabinet minister Andrea Leadsom was heard to exclaim after seeing her party trailing in third behind Reform in several early results: “Perhaps we have not been conservative enough.”
Reform’s manifesto offered much bolder policies on tax cuts, policing, ending mass immigration, stopping the boats and coming off the cripplingly expensive carbon net zero treadmill. And it captured the public imagination.
In truth, Farage was by far the most dynamic force in the election and his decision to stand in it, after initially saying he wouldn’t, transformed the complexion of the contest.
His achievements in getting a cluster of Reform MPs – including himself – elected, securing around a hundred runner-up slots which will serve as target seats for next time and topping four million votes – all in just four full weeks of campaigning were stunning.
Without him at the helm of Reform, there is every chance that Sunak could have got a squeeze of the smaller party’s vote share going and ended up with a hung parliament. There is no point, however, in Tories seeking to blame Farage for Labour’s win.
Erstwhile Tory voters wanted to punish the party and simply preferred the policies of somebody else. That is the essence of democracy. If the Conservatives cannot offer a more inspiring set of policies next time then Farage may eclipse them altogether.
So they must now seek passionate conviction politician of their own to lead them back to the promised land of power. Salvation will not be found by offering a Lib Dem-light prospectus on the mushy centre-ground. Instead, we demand to be inspired. And if they cannot do it then we know a man who can.
