Just three months ago, the Labour party swept into power in the UK general elections, winning 412 seats in the 650-member parliament, a gain of 211 from before. It looked like the public was eager to throw out the Conservatives, whose 14 years of control had resulted in all manner of cuts to public services while giving tax and other benefits to the wealthy, something that is pretty much the standard right-wing playbook.
But after becoming the government, swept in with a seeming wave of enthusiasm, within just a 100 days, the popularity of the Labour party and its leader Keir Starmer has cratered and in some polls, he is now less popular than the former prime minister Rishi Sunak, a startling downturn in fortunes..
So what happened? One of the features of the first-past-the-post system in UK elections is that it tends to overstate the popularity of the party that gets the most seats.
A close look at the election results showed Labour’s victory was shallow. Starmer’s party picked up just 34 percent of the vote, compared to the Conservatives on 24 and Nigel Farage’s insurgent right-leaning Reform U.K. party on 14 percent.
The quirks of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, and Labour’s highly targeted campaign strategy, meant despite those closer than expected figures, Labour won 411 seats in the House of Commons while Reform got just five.
“We’ve got a soft underbelly — and there’s a lot of it,” one senior Labour MP put it this week in their appraisal of the risk from Reform, which came second to Labour in 89 constituencies. Like others in this piece, they were granted anonymity in order to speak freely.
But there have also been a mixture of policy and personal issues that have deflated the Labour balloon.
The refusal to scrap the Conservatives’ cap on welfare payments to families with more than two children, introduced at the height of austerity, dealt Starmer his first parliamentary rebellion on July 23.
Seven Labour MPs backed a rebel amendment calling for the policy to be axed. Starmer responded with characteristic ruthlessness, suspending them from the parliamentary party.
Then there is the issue of how Starmer and other top people have accepted gifts from wealthy donors, never a good look, while refusing to scrap the controversial cap on child benefits and slashing fuel payments to as many as ten million people.
After condemning the Tories for its austerity policies that harmed vulnerable people, continuing some of the most controversial of those policies seems obtuse.
One of the government’s first acts was to strip millions of retirees of a payment intended to help heat their homes in winter. It was intended to signal determination to take tough economic decisions, but it spawned a sharp backlash from Labour members and sections of the public.
This led one MP Rosie Duffield to quit the party and choose to sit as an independent.
“Forcing a vote [on the winter fuel payment] to make many older people iller and colder while you and your favorite colleagues enjoy free family trips to events most people would have to save hard for — why are you not showing even the slightest bit of embarrassment?” she wrote in the letter.
The departure of Duffield, who previously clashed with Starmer over trans rights, is a blow to a party that is yet to complete its first hundred days in office after winning a sweeping parliamentary majority in July.
The new government has been consumed by scandal since revelations surfaced that the prime minister and close associates had accepted expensive gifts — including designer clothes — from longtime Labour donor and peer Waheed Alli and other donors. Starmer himself is reported to have accepted £100,000 worth of gifts and has caused further frustration by repeatedly defending his decision.
I wrote earlier about former Conservative minister Rory Stewart who warned Starmer about his ‘Ming Vase’ election strategy, where Starmer avoided laying out any bold vision about what Labour would do once it came into office for fear of alienating segments of the voters and relying instead on the desire of voters to throw the Tories out. Stewart said that it might well work in winning but would hamper them afterwards because they would not really have a mandate for actions. It would be a negative mandate, not a positive one. That seems to have come to pass.
There also seems to be a curious tone-deafness by Starmer about how his actions would be perceived.
It also sat awkwardly with news that Starmer had accepted thousands of pounds’ (dollars’) worth of clothes and designer eyeglasses from a wealthy Labour donor. Starmer insisted the gifts were within the rules, but after days of negative headlines agreed to pay back 6,000 pounds’ (almost $8,000) worth of gifts and hospitality, including tickets to see Taylor Swift.
And that is not all.
[I]t hasn’t looked great that, since April, he has disclosed receiving nearly forty thousand pounds’ worth of gifts in kind—including high-end clothes, eyeglasses, and the loan of an apartment—from a single Party donor. By coincidence, or not, the same donor, a TV executive and Labour peer named Waheed Alli, was given a security pass to Downing Street. The scandal, such as it is, has become known as “passes for glasses.” All of Alli’s gifts, along with other donations, were recorded and itemized, dutifully, by Starmer’s office—the cost of “multiple pairs of glasses” came to two thousand four hundred and eighty-five pounds—and then were seized on by his political opponents as evidence of sleaze and the new Prime Minister taking to the high life. (Since June, Starmer and his family received a total of ten tickets, worth more than seven thousand pounds, to see Taylor Swift, and four more tickets to see horse races in Doncaster.)
…Starmer’s own behavior has been erratic. He has veered between attempting to stay aloof from petty criticism and giving long, overwrought explanations. (The Prime Minister said that he needed to borrow Alli’s eighteen-million-pound apartment during the election campaign so his son could have somewhere quiet to study for his high-school exams. “Any parent would have made the same decision,” he told Sky News.)
Gifts of clothes and designer glasses? Really? Why would someone who earns enough to buy their own clothes and glasses need to accept gifts of those? The fact that these gifts were ‘within the rules’ should have been irrelevant to any politician attuned to the optics of such things. We see the same thing happening with New York City mayor Eric Adams who seemed to crave perks like flying first class on Turkish Airways, staying at luxury hotels in Istanbul, or eating at luxury restaurants, or Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife who seemed to actually demand bribes and luxury gifts.
That politicians can be bought is not surprising. What surprises me is that they can be bought so cheaply. The only reason that I can think of is that while these people’s official salaries are certainly substantial, and they do get other perks, they are not close to that of the wealthy people that they regularly come into contact with. They seem to desire aspects of the high life of those people, such as dining in expensive restaurants, flying first class, staying at fancy hotels and resorts, and dressing like them. To desire such things so much that one accepts gifts of them reveals a shallowness, an insecurity about their own worth, that they think can be masked by such trivialities.
I remember when the Labour party was actually the Labour party. Depressing.
@Rob:
There’s a reason they’ve been out of power. If the party don’t do what it says on the tin, who’s going to buy it? You’re either the party that cares for the little people hurt by the Tories’ “Billionaires First” government or … you’re not.
Labour is truly awful.
As we all know, when money is short,
tax corporations and the richtake money from the elderly. Jesus, the guy is handing the UK right back to conservatives.Yeah, they really are similar to the German social democrats. I’m expecting to have a conservative government here with the next election. And that fuckers have seriously moved to the right with their current leader…
Starmer’s glasses are worth £2,435, about $3000. They are designed to stop you seeing poor people as equals.
It’s even worse if you look at the actual vote numbers, rather than just percentages. Labour under Starmer received a total of 9,708,716 votes in the 2024 election, versus the 10,269,051 they got in their catastrophic defeat under the supposedly incredibly unpopular and un-electable Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.
I presume you mean a capital-C Conservative government? We already have a small-C conservative government.
Dunc@5:
“I presume you mean a capital-C Conservative government? We already have a small-C conservative government.”
Yeah, that’s a part of the problem…
The parliamentary system is inherently flawed.
Can you even imagine if Congress or the Senate had been allowed the right of selecting the POTUS?
It’s pretty clear that the current PM is far too interested in profiting from his position than governing or proffering any solutions to the ongoing economic woes caused by the secession of upper-crust twits who created such a situation in the first place. Tax the king. Tax the lords.
Tax all of the billionaires, corporations, and venture capitalists who are non coincidentally getting richer while the actual people who labor can’t afford to eat, have heat, or buy a reasonably priced home for their families.
@Crip Dyke, 2:
Cryptic. What do you think the reason is?
Well, Labour emphatically were that under Corbyn… and they lost and lost again. When the choice was, in 2017, between probably one of the worst Prime Ministers the UK had ever had (until the next one…) and Corbyn’s very left-wing Labour, the British electorate roundly rejected Labour. Not, in fairness, as strongly as May expected them too -- the 2017 election was one where really, nobody “won”. Except, y’know, the Tories did, in fact, win. And Labour, promising exactly what it says on the tin, lost.
And in 2019 when the choice was between definitely the worst PM the UK had ever had (until the next one…) and Corbyn’s Labour, the British electorate rejected Labour again, this time by a landslide. The UK very obviously does not want a lefty Labour government. Apart from anything else, nothing like that has come close to winning an election in this country for FIFTY YEARS. Corbyn’s manifesto wasn’t just “hey, let’s pretend the last five years didn’t happen” it was practically “let’s pretend the EIGHTIES didn’t happen”. I mean yes, principles, mate, but I’ll trot this one out as I so often do: my left wing principles will be IN POWER, or they will be bullshit. There’s a certain amount of contact with reality you’ve got to have to get anything progressive done. Blair understood that.
It took the Johnson/Covid debacle, followed immediately by the absolute shitshow of the UK’s worst ever PM, followed immediately by the failure of Sunak to repair any of the damage Truss had wrought (although it’s arguable he couldn’t have) before the thick-as-pigshit electorate finally had had enough.
And even then, as has been said, the result belies the fact that it was not the ringing endorsement of Keir Starmer it may have appeared. Four MILLION people voted Reform -- or in other words they looked at the disaster of the last 14 years and said “no, do it HARDER”. Really quite a lot of those people didn’t vote Tory because they hadn’t managed to deport any asylum seekers to Rwanda ffs.
Also, in weak defence of Labour
(a) they’re better than the alternative and
(b) they’re in an essentially impossible position.
Specifically, unlike the Blair government of 1997, which inherited an economy in reasonable shape and a world relatively at peace, Starmer has walked into an absolute car crash both domestically and internationally. Even if he was really good at this stuff -- and I’m not going to pretend I’m expert enough to know whether or not he is -- it’s a practically impossible ask to actually repair the damage the Tories have done to the UK since 2010. (And I am not just talking about Brexit).
He could start, though, by not shooting himself in the foot and again in the side of the head with something like cancelling the winter fuel payments then going to a fucking Taylor Swift concert on a freebie. It’s like he’s trying to be unpopular. Then again, realistically, that’ll be forgotten by the time of the next election.
The other thing worth pointing out is the effect of the media which, owned as it is almost exclusively by right-wing billionaires, takes every opportunity it can to attack Labour. Compared to the shit the Tories were getting up to taking a few freebies is weak sauce indeed. I mean, even now, one of the finalists for the leadership has come out and said that really, autistic kids and those with mental illnesses have had it far too good for far too long and it’s about time all their privileges were revoked and they took some fucking responsibility for themselves.
And if you think I’m exaggerating that to make her look bad, well, see for yourself: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/14/autistic-children-culture-wars-kemi-badenoch
The Overton window has moved so far to the right in this country thanks to the ilk of that woman, and the odious Nigel Farage and his followers whose approval she is clearly seeking, that before long we’ll be teetering on the edge of being as far right as, bod forbid, the Democrats in the USA. Can you imagine?
I agree with those above who have ruefully speculated that Labour may prove to be a one-term government. Not just because they won’t be able to do much to help those in need, but because it’s clear from the number of votes Reform UK got that helping those in need is NOT what a lot of the electorate want. They want the needy punished, especially if they’re brown, or disabled, or neurodiverse, or gay, or trans, or foreign.
I’m put in mind of the introduction Alan Moore wrote for “V for Vendetta” in 1988, when Thatcher was in her pomp.
Alan Moore still lives in Northampton. If I had his money, much as I love this country, I’d be seriously considering taking my family and getting out of this country soon. It’s cold and it’s mean-spirited and I don’t like it here as much as I used to.
I hope Labour can pull something out of the bag over the next four and a half years -- do something eye-catching to bring more of the public along with them, something to pull the teeth of the seemingly once again ascendant far-right. I don’t know what that might be -- I don’t know if it’s even possible, with the mess they’ve been left by 14 years of Tory destructiveness. I said repeatedly over the last couple of years that the Conservative party knew full well they were going to lose this year, and were doing their best to do as much damage as possible before they left so as to make it possible that they’d get back in in 2029 when they could reasonably say “what have Labour achieved?”, because the electorate are too stupid to say in response “not much, mainly thanks to you pack of fuckers”.
I try to be optimistic, I really do. I’m struggling to find justification for it lately.