Six weeks of final stretch to conquer Downing Street

Discipline is the best substitute for charisma. And in politics, if it is not possible to surprise, it is advisable to be predictable. The Labor Party candidate, Keir Starmer (London, 61 years old), the favorite in all polls to be the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has adjusted with Spartan discipline to more than four years of a methodical strategy that has managed to redirect to its formation, from the disaster of the 2019 defeat against Boris Johnson (the worst Labor result in more than eighty years) to the current sweet moment in which everything anticipates that the British left will regain power against the conservatives of Rishi Sunak next July 4, when the polls open. Or is there room for surprise?

“No one who knows closely how an electoral campaign works can say that everything has already been said. You cannot take for granted what the voters are going to do,” Philip Collins, the man who wrote Tony Blair’s best speeches, and who has also helped Starmer build his message, warns Morning Express. “However, I think this time it is easier to predict the result. That budget disaster of former Prime Minister Liz Truss and her head of the Economy, Kwasi Kwarteng [que hundió la libra, los mercados y la credibilidad económica del país], inflation that moved above ten points, or the change in the political climate in Scotland…, these are all events of great magnitude, and it is difficult to think that a campaign can put them back together. The tories They start 20 percentage points behind Labor in all polls. “I think it is more or less certain that Starmer will be the next prime minister,” Collins concludes.

The political analyst points to Scotland, and explains in this way that this Friday, practically the first day of a long campaign, the Labor candidate will travel to Glasgow to participate in an electoral event. “These are the elections of change. But there is no change possible without Scotland (…). There is no Labor without Scotland,” Starmer proclaimed in Gorbals, the historic working-class neighborhood on the south bank of the River Clyde.

From the sixties of the last century until the first decade of the current one, the Labor Party swept Scotland. In his 1997 victory, Tony Blair won 56 of the 72 seats in the House of Commons that corresponded to that territory. In 2019, only 2 of Scotland’s 59 MPs were Labour; 43 belonged to the Scottish National Party (SNP). The rise of the independence movement had pushed the British left to the margins. But the SNP is in low times, with very low support for secession among citizens, a financial scandal that has even affected the party’s legendary leader, Nicola Sturgeon, and three leadership renewals in just over a year. anus.

Starmer knows that it is time to sink his teeth into Scotland and recover a good number of seats, if he aspires to have a comfortable majority in the Westminster Parliament.

“It’s not just that the Labor Party is on the rise and is likely to take a handful of seats from the SNP. There are also very painful divisions within the independence movement,” says Chris Deerin, the weekly’s Scottish affairs expert. New Satesman. “Current calculations indicate that one in five of those who supported secession in the referendum in 2014 [el no a la independencia ganó por un 55% frente al 45% del sí, pero el independentismo comenzó a cobrar auge desde entonces] They would now be willing to vote for Labor in order to expel the Government from tories”Deerin notes.

Discipline and coldness

The event in Scotland is proof that Starmer has a campaign script and a strategy to conquer Downing Street from which he will try not to deviate even a millimeter, unlike his conservative rival, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who gives the impression of act with desperate movements in the first hours of this electoral contest.

And along with discipline, coldness. Starmer has swept from the party any trace of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, who pushed Labor towards left-wing approaches that were excessive for the average British voter. He expelled Corbyn from the parliamentary group when he refused to admit the episodes of anti-Semitism that an independent commission had detected within the party. Finally, this Friday, when the veteran leftist announced that he was going to run as an independent in the July 4 elections, in the London constituency of Islington, Starmer’s pulse did not tremble: he was unceremoniously expelled from the party.

‘Character assassination’

The Anglo-Saxons use the expression character assassination (character assassination) to define the strategy by which the destruction of the rival’s reputation and image is pursued. The Conservative Party, and its candidate, Sunak, have begun to attack Starmer with messages that border on a certain childishness. On the party’s X (formerly Twitter) account, a photo with three boxes and three dolls of the candidate, as if it were Barbie’s Ken: Eco-Keir (with disposable proposals), says one, to remember that the Labor candidate has cut, in the interest of fiscal rigor, the money promised for ‘green energy’; Remain-Keir (the one who supported remaining in the EU); and Left-Wing Keir (The Keir Izquierdista, ‘which is more expensive’, it says on the box).

An almost desperate-sounding attempt by the Conservatives to instill fear in their voters about the possibility of Starmer reaching Downing Street.

Experts say that to win the elections you have to be clear about three things: the achievements of the candidate, the weaknesses of the rival and the proposals for the future. Sunak drags, although he is not the main culprit of all this, the ruins of 14 years of conservative governments marked by austerity and Brexit. More than eighty deputies from his parliamentary group have announced that they do not want to repeat as candidates, thus overcoming the shock that John Major suffered before Blair’s overwhelming Labor victory in 1997. He has been unable, until now, to make a dent in his rival, Starmer, who represents in the eyes of many voters a promise of stability and responsibility in the face of the chaos left by the tories. His only asset, as he has demonstrated in the first hours of the campaign, is to try to sow doubt about the future policies of a left-wing government.

“It already seems clear that the country is ready for a change. The Labor Party’s campaign slogan is this simple: change (Change). But change, to where? We do not know yet. Change with respect to a conservative past, yes, but we still have to find out the content of that change,” admits Collins.

That will be the most delicate part of Starmer’s final stretch in his career to Downing Street. Over six weeks, dose the recipes with which you intend to turn around a country that many citizens see in decline, but without provoking fear or suspicion in a middle class that, by tradition, tends to be conservative.

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