Britain’s New Liberal Government Faces Big Problems

On July 4, Britain’s Labour Party led by Keir Starmer won a landslide, securing 411 seats in the 650-member House of Commons to a mere 121 for the Conservatives who had ruled for the preceding 14 years. It was a sweeping victory, even if it was won on less than 34 percent of the popular vote.

Following the victory, conventional wisdom suggested a long period of Labour control. Since 1979, every British government has won at least three general elections in a row, and the shortest period of rule, Labour’s 1997-2010 tenure, still lasted 13 years. It seemed fair to conclude that the UK was embarking on a long period of Labour rule and that the Conservatives had plenty of time to sort themselves in opposition.

Three months later, Starmer’s approval rating is pushing the realms of geometry, going from 38 percent approval and 20 percent disapproval in Opinium’s poll from July 17-19 to a negative 24 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval two months later. Another pollster, YouGov, found almost as dramatic a decline, from a 44 percent to 47 percent split in their July 5-8 sample to a 30 percent to 60 percent disapproval figure September 20-22. Polls show the Labour Party’s support dropping below 30 percent a mere three months into their five-year mandate.

Some of the blame can be ascribed to Starmer’s own mistakes and mismanagement. It has been revealed that the man who for years castigated the Conservative Party as corrupt accepted over £100,000 in gifts in the year before he became Prime Minister. These include $4,000 VIP tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, tens of thousands for clothes, and even an £18 million apartment which a donor gifted to Starmer’s teenage son intended to allow the boy to study for his exams in privacy near to his father in London.

When cutting the winter fuel allowances was among the first policies announced by the new Labour government, the optics have been nothing short of toxic.

Starmer has not only failed to bring honesty back to the government, he has also failed to bring order. The highest-ranking former civil servant to ever become prime minister has entirely lost control of the nominally apolitical civil service. His initial chief of staff, Sue Gray, previously the second-highest non-partisan official in Boris Johnson’s Number 10, was the subject of leaks revealing and attacking her salary of £170,000, £3,000 more than Starmer’s. She eventually was forced to resign after less than one hundred days.

Meanwhile, before Simon Case, the head of the Civil Service, had even announced his departure, a full-scale war of succession broke out as outsider candidates, such as former Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, battled with allies of internal candidates in the newspapers through leaks. By the time Case officially announced his retirement at the end of the year, sheepishly insisting it was entirely due to health reasons, the leaks had managed to ensure that there was no candidate whose appointment would not come off either as an example of rank nepotism by Starmer or the defeat of a freshly-elected government by the British “Deep State.”

Without a doubt, the Civil Service exists outside the control of Britain’s elected officials. If Starmer were willing or able to present this conflict as a matter of democratic principle, he might be able to rally the British public behind his government. Politicians across the spectrum have complained for decades of the power wielded by the deep state and its willingness to ignore ministers, destroying through sabotage and leaks those who fought back. In the case of Liz Truss, this “Deep State” even toppled a Prime Minister.

Winning a battle against the civil service is a daunting prospect with public support. Doing so without public support is futile. Winning public support requires framing the clash around some sort of issue where the prime minister is standing as the representative of the electorate against a bureaucracy determined to obstruct the will of the people. The Conservatives did this successfully with Brexit, where slow-walking the process was itself cast as resistance, and then failed to repeat the trick with immigration or “woke” issues where civil servants were able to cast their own obstruction as incompetence on the part of elected officials.

Starmer, however, has not chosen to make his fight with the civil service about its refusal to do anything other than to recognize him as its leader. He is fighting not for democratic control of the civil service by the prime minister, but for his right, as a civil servant who happens to be Prime Minister, to be recognized at the top of the internal pecking order.

His opponents are therefore free to fight not in opposition to democracy, but rather in defense of the chain of command, a principle that commands overwhelming support among bureaucrats while prompting indifference from everyone else. Starmer’s enemies within the Civil Service see an existential assault on one of the key organizing principles of their existence, while the electorate sees the prime minister plunging the entire state apparatus into the sort of chaos the Conservatives reserved for their elected officials.

It is easy to ascribe this failure to political incompetence, much as how avarice could explain Starmer’s scandals. But this would be a mistake. Starmer has been unable to rally the public behind him in his battle with the Civil Service for the same reason his personal finances have become such an issue, and that reason is intrinsically linked to the strategy through which he pursued and won power.

A man who explicitly refused to campaign on any sort of policy or principle other than competence and honesty stands for nothing if he cannot deliver on either. Without a policy that he can dare the Civil Service to implement or obstruct, such a man is the prisoner of the Civil Service, which can ensure he appears incompetent by merely not doing their job.

Starmer’s strategy then, while successful in making him prime minister, ensured he would not be able to govern except as the powerless puppet of others – a lesson that should not be lost on others who have attempted a similar approach, including Kamala Harris, whose campaign is being advised by many of Starmer’s chief strategists. When Harris’s response to any issue on which the public agrees with Donald Trump is to adopt her opponent’s positions, regardless of her past record, she is practicing Starmerism.

In short, Starmerism is to insist that policy does not exist, and politics is merely the question of who is “fit” for office.

Starmer fully supported Boris Johnson’s handling of the COVID-19 epidemic, the Ukraine war, and foreign policy in general. Starmer never seemed to attack the government on its goals. He was ostensibly furious about mass migration, concerned about whether sexual education in schools was undermining parental authority, and very concerned about rising anti-Israel sentiment. He just thought that the Conservatives, with their infighting and corruption, were incapable of controlling immigration, focusing on education, properly handling the war in Ukraine, or reaching agreements with unions.

By agreeing with virtually everything the Conservatives proposed but questioning their competence to implement their agenda, Starmer denied Conservative opponents such as Boris Johnson the ability to unite their party behind issues, while increasing the salience of any personal problems they might have. If politics is about the UK’s relationship with the EU, policy toward Ukraine, or approach to immigration, then whether Johnson properly managed his staff did not matter.

If, however, politics is about who could best implement policy, or who the voters trusted, Johnson’s inability to prevent his staff from holding parties during lockdown went to the heart of his credibility. A leader whose staff did not attend parties, or who was not distracted by his colleagues’ infighting, would do a better job making Brexit a success and arresting illegal immigrants.

Starmer, by erasing policy differences, made the personal failings of Conservative leaders the reason for their failure to deliver any policy, and their infighting the reason the party had to be removed from government.

In the short run, this strategy produced the very infighting within the Conservative Party that then served to vindicate the message. The moment politics became about who in the entourage of a politician is a liability electorally, there was an incentive for every figure to accuse their rivals of being liabilities. The success of the strategy in terms of disorienting the Conservatives then served to keep the left onboard, with polls showing large Labour leads allowing Starmer to sell his approach and himself as the best path to removing the Conservatives from power.

In the long run, the entire strategy relied on the existence of a Conservative government to work, and Starmer’s coalition fell apart the moment he won. When the Conservatives were reduced to an impotent rump, it was Starmer’s finances and ethics that were under the microscope, not those of the Conservatives, and the chaos in Starmer’s office that concerned the public. This might have been mitigated if Starmer could count on the support of a victorious Left, eager to see its policy dreams put into practice.

Starmer, however, had kept the left in line not through policy promises but the prospect of removing the hated Conservatives. With the Conservatives gone, Starmer had nothing more to offer the left.

In fact, Starmer had little to offer anyone. Without the support of the public, he could not hope to win a power struggle with the Civil Service, and without any policies to champion in his battle with the Civil Service, he had no hope to turn it into anything other than elite infighting.

Without the support of the Civil Service, he could not provide the promised competent government that had allowed him to borrow voters who otherwise agreed with the Conservatives on policy.

Keir Starmer has failed to provide anything to anyone, and it is hardly surprising everyone has quickly turned on him.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.