When Britain’s Labour Party gathers for its annual conference in Liverpool next month, its main task may be tamping down overconfidence about next year’s national election. Almost everyone expects Labour to oust the ruling Conservatives after 13 turbulent years in power. If so, it would cap a remarkable reversal in Labour’s fortunes engineered by party leader Keir Starmer, who would become Prime Minister.
Starmer, who was featured in a May conference co-sponsored by Progressive Britain and my organization, the Progressive Policy Institute, grasps something that eludes many U.S. Democrats: It will take more than a new economic offer to bring working class voters back to Labour. Restoring hope for working people, he argues, also requires building prosperity on a strong social foundation of “stability, order and security.”
Starmer took over following the shattering 2019 election when the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to its worst drubbing since 1935.
Since then, Starmer, a London lawyer, has calmly and methodically exorcised his party’s ideological demons and nudged it back to the pragmatic center. The latest YouGov poll shows Labour with a commanding 22 point lead over Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Tories.
As Starmer is the first to admit, Labour has gotten a big assist from the Tories. A long bout of austerity, the drawn-out and divisive fight over Brexit, Boris Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal and fall during the COVID shutdown and the ensuing succession fiasco with Liz Truss have all fed growing public fatigue with Conservative governments.
