Keir Starmer has become entangled in his own trap, and has had to use the Labor Party congress held in Liverpool earlier this week to try to escape a popularity crisis whose severity does not correspond to the short time he has been in government. Only 22% of citizens have a positive view of the prime minister, according to the company YouGov. His popularity is barely higher than that of his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, at 18%.
By criticizing the economic legacy of conservative governments, and denouncing an unexpected “black hole” of 26 billion euros in public accounts – which experts consider partly exaggerated – his speech has been forcibly filled with proclamations rigor, austerity and announcements of cuts. The optimism that emerged from the July 4 election victory has been overshadowed.
And when contrasting the measure of his honesty and ethics with the scandals carried out during the Boris Johnson era, the subsequent revelation that the Labor leader enjoyed free suits, designer glasses, football tickets and hotel rooms for several years thanks to the money from party donors (about 120,000 euros) has caused irritation among the party’s bases and early disappointment among voters.
“You have to live up to it”
“If you have built a discourse around the need to raise ethical standards in public life – and I believe that was the correct approach – and you have made it clear that you intend to be stricter and more rigid in that aspect, then you have to “rise to the occasion and set an example,” said Alastair Campbell, the communications wizard who worked side by side with Tony Blair from the beginning, in his daily podcast this week. The Rests is Politics.
The passage of time always gives a veneer of clarity and legend to events that were probably more complex than they are remembered. In the memory of the United Kingdom is Blair’s triumphant walk at the Labor Party congress held in Brighton in 1997, four months after a historic electoral victory that ended 18 years of Conservative governments. New Labor proclaimed a vision that everyone could understand: its will to modernize a country that desperately needed a political, administrative, economic and territorial update.
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Few remember that, just a few weeks after entering Downing Street, a first corruption scandal hit Blair, and put him on the ropes. The Prime Minister intervened directly to lift the ban on tobacco advertising in Formula One, after the sports competition’s billionaire owner, Bernie Ecclestone, had donated nearly a million pounds (1.2 million pounds) to Labor. euros, at the current exchange rate).
In 2001, few remembered Ecclestone. Blair won a second consecutive electoral majority, something never before achieved by Labor.
“In 2029, the Labor Party will be judged by the progress it makes in improving public services. They will need a strong economy and a series of reforms that increase productivity. “Starmer is right to defend the need to adopt unpopular measures now, but he must explain much more clearly why they are necessary, and to what extent they will produce the intended transformation,” suggests David Gauke in the weekly The New Statesman. Gauke, who was Minister of Justice, Work and Pensions or Chief Secretary of the Treasury, left the Conservative Party due to the drift of Brexit and the emergence of a character like Johnson.
A revolted left wing
Starmer has championed all these years, before coming to power, the way in which he radically changed the party he had inherited from his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. The management’s approach was then much more leftist than the current one, and internal currents such as Momentum They helped outline the training discourse.
At the Liverpool congress, which was attended by representatives of think tanks, social organisations, companies and pressure groups to establish contacts with the new power of the United Kingdom, this time the event was not held in parallel. The World Transformed(A World in Transformation), the politics and art festival that Momentum It has always organized independently but in synchronization with the Labor Party.
The party’s left wing resides primarily in unions such as UNITE, whose membership in Labor helps fuel Labour’s funding and activism. In this congress, they have been the most powerful voice against the social cuts announced by Starmer. They were the ones who promoted a motion, which passed with numerous supports, to reverse the Government’s decision to withdraw aid on gas and electricity bills for ten million pensioners. It was a non-binding vote, and the party leadership ensured that the vote took place at the end of the Liverpool match, when it could make the least noise, with a large part of the delegates and journalists already returning to their homes.
And they were also the most critical of Starmer’s promise to use a strong hand against those who defraud the State in the receipt of social aid. Starting with those who continue to suffer sick leave since the pandemic. “If we want to sustain the welfare state, we must legislate to stop aid fraud,” the prime minister said in his speech on Tuesday.
“When you hear a politician talk about the need to adopt harsh and painful measures, and accompany it with rhetoric about alleged social security fraud, you are hearing a literal replica of the speech George Osborne made in 2010 [en referencia al entonces ministro conservador de Economía]″, accused John McDonnell, head of the Economy and number two in the party during the Corbyn years, on the BBC. Osborne was the minister who launched the austerity policies of David Cameron’s Government, which marked the beginning of the decline of public services in the United Kingdom.
By clinging to the discourse of fiscal discipline, Starmer has been trapped by the black hole he denounces. Both he and Minister Reeves were forced to proclaim in their speeches to party delegates that “the era of austerity was not going to return.” A strange and uncomforting promise for some members and voters who trusted precisely that the new Government meant precisely the opposite.
