‘We took tough but right decisions in the budget… because we inherited a broken economy,’ said Starmer today after a close defeat at the Runcorn by-election, and more losses in the council elections. ‘Tough decisions’ is also the phrase Starmer invoked two months ago, defending the announcement that his government would reduce the already minuscule foreign aid budget to 0.3% in favour of raising defence spending. The foreign aid cut was supported by the Conservative Party, with Badenoch going to far as to take credit for it; and as former MP Caroline Lucas pointed out, it’s not a tough decision if everyone agrees with you. What would have been a tough decision, said Lucas, would be to implement a new tax on wealth (as opposed to income), which is not currently taxed to any significant degree in the UK. Starmer got clay feet after Trump’s narrowest election last year, and thought the winds of change were blowing rightwards. The defeat of Pierre Poullievre in Canada last week proves that isn’t the case: ‘Canada First’ lost to Mark Carney’s ‘Canada Strong.’
‘I get it,’ said Starmer in response to local election results in England where Nigel Farage’s party have had a clean sweep of seats won by the Conservatives in 2019. Farage has gone to far as to declare his party ‘the main opposition’ which is purely farcical to anyone with a half a brain and a small smattering of wit. Farage’s party won five seats at the election last year, and within a matter of months lost one of these as the leader’s own ego pushed Rupert Lowe out of the party. With the election of Sarah Pochin in Runcorn, Farage’s party have just squeaked themselves back up over the Greens. However, this hardly a surprising turn of events when one considers that the Labour incumbent who won the Runcorn seat last year, was earlier this year imprisoned for assaulting a constituent. It shouldn’t be hard to win votes off people when the other guys are going round punching voters in the head.
Back on five seats, Farage is still way up in the backbenches; Sinn Féin, with seven MPs, have a more credible claim to being the ‘main opposition.’ It is more accurate to say that there is no opposition, given that the Labour government majority is so large, that Badenoch has proven about as ferocious as a decomposing sheep, and Ed Davey is too busy hangliding.
Nevertheless, Farage has won the momentum of the moment which is enough for media men to torture the public with a drip-drip-dripfeed of speculation that he will be the Prime Minister in four years time. It’s started already, with Andrew Marr in the New Statesman asking ‘Does Nigel Farage own the future?’ The short answer is, ‘no’; the long answer, is ‘fuck no.’
Nigel Farage is the English Jim Allister. Years ago Alex Kane wrote an op-ed column where he described the TUV leader’s personality as ‘like catnip for unionists.’ This is the same effect that Farage has on the English , with his affectation of a ‘cheeky chappy’ persona and carefully cultivated image of himself as a reformer, despite the fact that he a public school-educated banker who is in his every political position a run-of-the-mill Thatcherite. His party has, like the TUV, sailed by on the personal appeal of the leader plus protest votes against the two main party’s, but they have little prospect of going further. At the 2029 election, they will be deliriously lucky if they manage to win a double-digit number of seats.
At the 1983 general election there was so much momentum behind the SDP, who had broken away from Labour, that they were predicted to win 600 seats. In actual fact, they won 6. A close enough prediction: decimal points can be tricky. But 1983 is the context that should be borne in mind for the next four years, as 2029 could be its mirror image. It is assumed that Labour, led by Michael Foot, lost that election and Thatcher’s Conservatives were reelected because Labour had veered off far too far to the left; it’s manifesto from that election has been unfairly recorded as the ‘longest suicide note in history.’ However, it was not a great result for Margaret Thatcher: she lost votes from her 1979 win, and won fewer votes than her predecessor Ted Heath when he led the Conservatives to victory in 1970, and a smaller share of the vote the genuinely popular Tory leaders Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden. Thatcher was kept in power for a decade on 40% of the vote: two thirds of people voted for somebody else.
There is a potential that this is Labour’s turn for the same. Elected last year on a fairly pathetic 35% vote share, the one assurance that Labour have right now is that there is no opposition. The Conservative Party is a hollowed out husk after fourteen years in government as disaterous and they were chaotic, and that party is now being torn asunder by Nigel Farage’s band of pirates on its right and, on the left, Ed Davey’s happy little lifeboat offering safe passage to anyone vaguely sensible. Farage is an existential threat to the Tories, but not at all to Labour: a mere 9% of Labour voters polled, said they were thinking about jumping ship for Farage’s party. If Labour play their cards right they can dominate for the next decade at least.
The danger is Starmer’s clay feet. The main appeal of Farage is from people who are tired of the two party system and think it’s time to ‘give someone else a go.’ In fact, Farage’s party polls better among people who voted for the Greens last year, than it does about Labour voters. Farage’s actual policies have very little appeal beyond the solid Tory right, and aren’t even known amongst the general populace.
You know whose policies are popular? Jeremy Corbyn’s. Farage’s has made opposition to net zero his flagship policy of recent years; polls show that an overwhelming majority of people in the UK favour the move to renewable energy. Farage has also repeatedly says he would favour an insurance-based model of health insurance to the NHS. On every other issue, from nationally-owned industries, railways, to a small majority for free tuition fees, the UK is on Corbyn’s side of the fence. It is also oft too ignored that Corbyn’s leadership saw an explosion in membership for the Labour party, after which it is still the largest party in the UK by a wide margin. There was a real excitement around Corbyn’s leadership, that has not been seen for generations. Yet under Starmer, the baby has been thrown out with the bath water.
The problem is messaging. Labour have had, at best, a rocky start to its first period in government for 14 years. There was no Blair moment of ‘a new dawn has broken,’ but rather a faint shine behind a thick sky of ominous grey cloud as Starmer’s government rolled out a Treasury list of sensible, technocratic reforms like cutting the winter fuel payments and reforming inheritance tax.
All they were lacking bright, friendly-coloured packaging that could sell these reforms better. Winter fuel payments, for example: giving £300 to pensioners, who probably own their own home and have a steady income plus savings, is a bleeding-heart liberal notion rather than a solution to the problems facing elderly people. The biggest problem for elderly people is loneliness, as their social circle starts dwindling naturally with little opportunities for renewal. A creative solution which would tackle both loneliness and fuel poverty would be to invest in public libraries, which were the first casualty of Tory austerity in 2010. This would provide communities with a safe, warm building that is also a social hub; symbolically it would be a direct challenge and reversal of Tory reforms. Not to mention the fact that public libraries, giving all people equal access to knowledge, are probably the purest and most perfect form of socialism that has ever been implemented.
To reinstate Corbyn to the Labour whip would be to put his human face on the technocratic machine of Starmer’s party. Such would be a genuinely touch decision, as the Conservatives would have a field day and the right wing press would hate it. However, Labour have a super-majority in the House of Commons, and four years to go until the next election. Now is the time for tough decisions: when you govern in such away that your every move says you don’t want to be a one-termer, you’re very much tempting fate.
Fionnbharr Rodgers has written articles, poems, and a short story for History Ireland, Northern Slant, Slugger O’Toole; A New Ulster, Blackbird, Blackbox Manifold; and Stoneboat Literary Journal.
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