The next British election is due in 2024. By that time the Conservatives will have been in office for 14 years – the second-longest period of incumbency since World War II. (The longest was the 18 years of the Thatcher-Major government.) It has been a time of political turbulence and social upheaval unequalled in memory: Brexit, COVID, the energy crisis, and, of course, the endless Tory civil wars. The mood for change will be powerful.
The new(ish) Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has had impressive success in knocking his party into shape, wresting back control from the extreme left and presenting it as a credible alternative government. Unlike his odious predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, a cartoonish neo-Trotskyite right out of Monty Python, Starmer carries himself like a prime minister. The fact he is as dull as ditchwater does him no harm. After the reckless flamboyance of Boris Johnson, his dreary, earnest style conveys calmness and dependability.
New Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to restore the trust of the Jewish community.Credit:Getty
And there’s nothing like a knighthood to give a socialist respectability. The fact that Labour’s leader spent several years as Britain’s most senior criminal prosecutor blunts the Tory edge on law and order.
Even Starmer’s unbearably sanctimonious wokeness probably helps him, at least in London and the south of England, where the Liberal Democrats compete with Labour for the middle-class radical vote. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak lacks the idiosyncratic, jingoistic populism that gave Johnson a bridge to old-style Labour voters in the industrial Midlands and north of England.
Although he has an impressive backstory and boundless talent, neither Sunak’s metropolitan sophistication nor his vast family wealth make him a relatable figure in traditional Labour heartlands. Faced with a choice between the dreary Starmer and the chic Sunak, they will revert to traditional voting habits.
Simply because Corbyn was so far from the political mainstream – a Hugo Chavez-loving anti-Semite who wanted to take Britain out of NATO and despaired at the fall of the Berlin Wall – the mistake is sometimes made of assuming Starmer is another Tony Blair. He is not. Blair’s political brand was “the Third Way”: essentially a kind of left-liberal centrism reminiscent of Emmanuel Macron. He even once spoke of himself as an economic legatee of Margaret Thatcher.
Starmer is a democratic socialist in the tradition of Harold Wilson.Starmer is a much more familiar type of Labour leader: neither a crazy crypto-communist like Corbyn nor a New Age consensus-builder like Blair, but a democratic socialist. A Starmer government would be significantly more left-wing than that of Blair – more redistributive, less market-oriented, more disposed to the renationalisation of industry. And more constitutionally radical.
If it’s a choice between the chic British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the dreary Keir Starmer, the Labour heartland will revert to its old traditional voting patterns.Credit:Getty
A glimpse of that radicalism was seen this month with one of Starmer’s first substantive announcements for his 2024 manifesto: the abolition of the House of Lords. To us, the House of Lords seems preposterously anachronistic and almost offensively undemocratic. Unlike Australia, with our written constitution and foundational parliamentary democracy, Britain’s unwritten constitution has evolved organically over centuries from a feudal absolute monarchy to a modern elective democracy.
Abolish the Lords? Britain’s PM-in-waiting should be careful what he wishes for
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18.12.2022
The next British election is due in 2024. By that time the Conservatives will have been in office for 14 years – the second-longest period of incumbency since World War II. (The longest was the 18 years of the Thatcher-Major government.) It has been a time of political turbulence and social upheaval unequalled in memory: Brexit, COVID, the energy crisis, and, of course, the endless Tory civil wars. The mood for change will be powerful.
The new(ish) Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has had impressive success in knocking his party into shape, wresting back control from the extreme left and presenting it as a credible alternative government. Unlike his odious predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, a cartoonish neo-Trotskyite right out of Monty Python, Starmer carries himself like a prime minister. The fact he is as dull as ditchwater does him no harm. After the reckless flamboyance of Boris Johnson, his........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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