As widely expected, Keir Starmer resigned as UK’s prime minister and it is widely expected that newly minted MP Andy Burnham will become party leader and thus prime minister around September when the formal leadership process is completed. Burnham will then have about three years in office to try and turn around Labour’s fortunes before the next general election is due. The question is whether Burnham will take the lesson’s of Starmer’s fall seriously enough to drastically change course.

Starmer’s biggest problem was that he gained the Labour Party leadership in 2020 with his 10 pledges that outlined a progressive agenda and then, after winning the leadership, systematically abandoned them, as this document by disappointed supporters carefully details. This analysis compares his original pledges with his platform for the 2024 election and finds a significant shift towards neoliberalism.

Starmer subsequently held that in the end he did not really deviate very much from what he pledged back in 2020, his platform upholding the “vast majority” of the pledges. However, his shifts of stance in relation to the pledges as a whole, the undeniable alteration of specific pledges, and much else in his rhetoric and conduct (like his stance toward the Labour left), conduced to those skeptical of Starmer viewing him as having cynically postured as a “socialist” with a social democratic platform simply to win the leadership, then subsequently showed his true, “neoliberal,” colors.
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Nevertheless, it is at least the case that Starmer has set aside his once-promised means for realizing these goals, generally while offering much more modest responses to problems that have not got smaller since 2019-2020, such that if not the man then at least the platform he presents can safely be regarded as having shifted a very great way rightwards from what he presented when campaigning for the party leadership. Accordingly there are considerable grounds for those who supported Starmer on the basis of his pledges to regard him as having betrayed their trust, and for those who had been distrustful of him from the start to regard him as having lived down to their worst expectations as a Labour right figure who cynically posed as a leftist to squeeze a more genuine leftist out of the leadership as a prelude to bringing the party back to the right; and have grounds to wonder just how much further right a Starmer-led Labour Party might end up moving amid the stresses of actually being in government in a time of crisis in which, under pressure, Starmer and his colleagues have consistently looked right rather than left.

Meanwhile, from the standpoint of broader conclusions about twenty-first century politics with significances extending far beyond this one Manifesto, this election, and for that matter Britain, Starmer’s conduct can seem added evidence that, for all the talk of the “end” of neoliberalism to be seen in the press and in scholarship these past several years the ideology, economic model, theory of policy known by that name, continue to endure in spite of all its practical failures, and the discontents they have aroused. Elites continue to cleave to it almost as much as ever they did, while politicians like Starmer at best modify their rhetoric and tweak their practice not for the sake of a shift away from neoliberalism, but to hold on to as much of neoliberalism as possible in a world scene far less conducive to that system than it seemed to be in the years of the 1990s, when under an “unipolar” order “globalization” seemed unstoppable, and bound to the exploding potentials of an “information age.

But Starmer did win a big majority by running a ‘Ming Vase’ campaign where you carefully avoid offering any real program of change for fear of alienating specific sectors but just coast on bland generalities in the belief that voters are going to vote for you because they are sick of the Conservatives. That worked and Starmer won without a real plan or even ‘the concepts of a plan’ (as Trump might say) and then afterwards did not create one either, instead governing reflexively, responding to issues as they arise. The problem with that approach is that one’s reflexes tend to follow one’s core beliefs and in Starmer’s case, it was neoliberalism. The main thing he seemed to care about and relish most was getting rid of leftists such as Jeremy Corbyn from the party and that enabled him to tack more freely to the right.

But that has proved to be his undoing. While it is true that some events such as the negative economic impact of the US-Israeli attack on Iran was beyond his control, his leadership on other issues was severely wanting.

Perhaps no one could have steered the party through all this. But even Starmer’s closest allies and supporters will accept that he was very much at fault. No modern prime minister has looked so well-suited to the job on paper and been so fundamentally inept in practice.

“Starmer didn’t know what he was doing in three ways,” said Anthony Seldon, the historian who has written biographies of every PM from John Major to Rishi Sunak.

“Firstly, he never worked out what the job was – what does the prime minister do? Secondly, he never knew what he wanted to do, above all not on economic policy. And thirdly, he didn’t know who to appoint.

“Once you’ve got those three things happening it’s never going to work. It’s just a question of how quickly the wheels come off.”
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Much of Starmer’s work, the ally said, was based on his central belief in fairness. Others, however, argue that a key reason for his failure was the lack of an obvious political belief system.

“A core philosophy is the thing that holds you together when it’s falling apart,” Runciman said. “Margaret Thatcher was the exemplar of this. But with Starmer, I couldn’t see it, and it never emerged.

“If your reason for being in government is ‘We’re more competent than the other people’, that doesn’t work when the shit hits the fan.”

Starmer is very much like his counterparts in the US Democratic party leadership. They are neoliberals to the core. They know that there is a rising tide of progressive feeling among their party members and they fear it because it threatens them and their wealthy donors and supporters. Their goal is to try and persuade voters during election campaigns that they are listening to their concerns and then, once in office, to find ways to thwart those hopes and satisfy the oligarchic interests that they share while still claiming to represent the interests of ordinary people.

Burnham is to some extent a blank slate since he has not held high national office. He seems to have some charisma, something notably lacking in Starmer. He also seems to be sensitive to pressure from below, which is a good thing. But we will have to wait and see if he does the standard neoliberal two-step of saying one thing to win elections and then doing something else once in office.