Starmer’s real leadership crisis

In my previous post I advocated ‘counting to a hundred’ as an antidote to the hyper-frenetic news cycle. That advice would have served the media well during the subsequent frenzy of speculation about the imminent demise of Keir Starmer’s premiership. As the economics (and politics) writer Simon Nixon described it, this episode was a “breathless media circus [ending] in an embarrassing anti-climax” which raised “some awkward questions about the nature of British political journalism”.

It is certainly true that the media are addicted to political drama and spectacle, gleefully recycling rumours and anonymous briefings, and calling it reporting. It’s an approach embodied by the giggling fatuity of the BBC’s Political Editor, Chris Mason, treating politics as a cross between a spectator sport and a game show. Mason isn’t the only offender, of course, but he is one of the worst and, because of the status of the BBC, probably the most balefully influential. At all events, the consequence of such an approach is negative in a double sense. It saturates the airwaves with silliness, and it denudes political discourse of serious analysis, in this case of the real leadership crisis face by Starmer.

The truncation of the political leadership lifecycle

Nevertheless, the vacuity of political journalism is only one component of a wider shift in political culture, a shift within which the timescale of political leadership has become much more truncated even as, and perhaps because, British politics has become more ‘presidential’. A few decades ago, Harold Wilson remained leader of the Labour Party despite losing the 1970 election and went on to become Prime Minister again. As Labour’s Opposition leader, Neil Kinnock lost both the 1987 and 1992 elections before stepping down. Since those days, losing an election has become an automatic trigger for resignation of the leader of the governing or main opposition party [1].

Alongside that there has been an upsurge of resignations whilst in office. These, too, happened in the past, but were generally occasioned by ill-health (if sometimes only as a pretext), as in the cases of Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Harold Wilson. More recently, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair resigned between elections for (very different) political reasons, but in both cases after long periods in office. It is only since 2016 that there has been a rapid churn of serving Prime Ministers, with David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss all resigning between elections, and it is undeniable that this was largely a direct consequence of Brexit. Part of Starmer’s pitch to the electorate in 2024 was to end that roiling instability, but perhaps it is now embedded that every political crisis now becomes a leadership crisis. If so, that is yet another piece of Brexit damage.

A Starmer ‘reset’?

Of course this is not, in itself, a sufficient explanation of the travails of Starmer’s leadership, a subject I will return to when, as seems highly probable, he does eventually have to resign. For now, one interpretation of last week’s leadership ‘crisis’, and the defenestration of Morgan McSweeney it led to, is that it will both require and allow Starmer and his administration to be ‘bolder’ in disowning Brexit and building closer relations with the EU. That interpretation is given some plausibility by Starmer’s statement at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years any more”. It may also explain why last week Rachel Reeves explicitly accepted that “economic gravity is reality” (i.e. that geographical proximity is a key driver of trade) and that this mandates closer relationships and regulatory alignment with the EU.

Both statements were, in their way, striking. However, it is far from clear that they mean anything of substance in terms of policy or, which is really the same point in a different way, that they mark any change from the existing Labour ‘reset’ policy. If they have any significance, it might be as waymarkers in the glacial progress towards a time when Brexit is unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly, in the way that happened with the once highly divisive issues of ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’.

However, it should not be assumed that this progression is automatic and there are many reasons to doubt that it will be. It has become commonplace to cite the figure that 56% of the British public think that leaving the EU was a mistake, but it is equally remarkable that 31% think that it was right (and that 13% don’t know). That is very far from Brexit being ‘unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly’. Moreover, in an excellent post on his Substack newsletter discussing Brexit as a “collective folly”, the author and journalist Matt Carr points out that “a credulous population that believed Brexit would make the country great again, is now poised to pursue the same outcome with the same man who lied to them before.”

A new Lowe

Carr is referring, obviously, to Nigel Farage and the Reform party, which continues to lead in all recent opinion polls, with 24% to 32% of the public supporting it. As always, it bears saying that, in the British electoral system, and with a fragmented vote for the other parties, this means that a Reform or Reform-led government is a real possibility. But, even if this does not come to pass, the important point is that a really quite sizeable minority of the population are committed to what I call Brexitism. Not only that, but there are multiple signs that for some this is taking increasingly extreme forms.

This extremism was underscored by last weekend’s launch of the ‘Restore Britain’ party by the MP Rupert Lowe (initially elected for Reform but thrown out of the party after a row with Nigel Farage). Lowe created Restore Britain last year as a ‘political movement’, but its transformation into a party seems to be an attempt to draw together various other fringe parties and groups, including Ben Habib’s Advance UK, another splinter group from Reform, which is supported by Tommy Robinson (despite the report linked to, it is not entirely clear whether he has actually joined). Lowe’s new party has already been endorsed by Elon Musk.

This is an important development, since Restore Britain is, by any definition, a far-right party, and has already attracted enthusiastic support from those who are openly fascists. Lowe, despite his all too obvious lack of charisma, and despite his attempt to project a cuddly image, has become their figurehead because of the viciousness of his rhetoric. Indeed, his rallying call for the new party (warning: link to X) has a decidedly fascistic tang to it: “we will only accept those who share our values, and understand the painful decisions that will need to be taken. People know what we stand for. If you don't have the stomach for it, don't bother.”

The roots of the launch of this new party go back some time, and I wrote about them in detail about a year ago, also making the prediction that “the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years”. From that point of view, one consequence of Restore Britain may well be to siphon off small but potentially decisive numbers of Reform’s core vote, making a Farage election victory less likely. It has certainly already led to a vitriolic exchange between Lowe and Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, of which perhaps the most amusingly ironic feature is the ex-professor bemoaning (warning: X again) that Restore’s “ecosystem is riddled with white supremacists, antisemites, racists and conspiracy theorists”, prompting the gamey response from Lowe than Goodwin is “full of turquoise s***” and that Reform’s “deportation policy is p***-weak” [2].

But, piquant as it may be for observers to see these two deeply unpleasant people, and their respective parties, squaring up to each other, that should not blind us to the fact that, whatever happens electorally, something profoundly dangerous is unfolding.

The far-right’s ‘cultural turn’

For what is at stake is not just the working out of the incipient splits in Reform that I referred to a year ago. The period since then has seen an ever-more overt ethno-nationalism, along with literal street violence outside asylum hotels and symbolic street violence of the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign (discussed in more detail in a previous post). At the same time, the far-right has become increasingly vociferous not just about immigration but about the supposed cultural or civilizational ‘erasure’ of the English and/or British, flames which have been fanned from across the Atlantic by Trump and his administration as well as by Musk.

One reason this is a significant shift is because it moves the terrain away from immigration levels, which have been falling for some time, to the idea of cultural – for which read racial – ‘purification’ and, in policy terms, to mass deportations which, indeed, is Lowe’s principal policy offering. But this has not arisen in a vacuum. It is both the cause and consequence of the normalization of, inter alia, the claim that multi-culturalism has failed, the claim that there is or has been ‘uncontrolled immigration’, the conflation of immigration with asylum-seeking, and the idea that Britain is being ‘invaded’ by ‘young men of fighting age’.

It is within that context that supposedly respectable people like the Brexit-backing tax exile billionaire, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, feel able to come out with noxious comments about Britain “being colonised by immigrants”, notwithstanding his subsequent mealy-mouthed non-apology, and for others to insist that, even if the language used was ‘unfortunate’, he “has a point”.

Labour’s complicity

That context has not simply been created by far-right social media crusaders. It has been aided and abetted by the Labour government, most egregiously by Starmer himself, in his disgraceful ‘island of strangers’ speech, and by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s hard-line anti-immigration policies. One feature of the latter which is of particular importance is the proposal to change the rules governing current immigrants, in terms of the period before indefinite leave to remain can be sought, which, unlike measures to curtail new immigration, is at least the country cousin of deportation in the sense of having a retrospective effect (which, as I discussed in a post last October, crosses a very significant line).

Here, too, Starmer’s recent leadership crisis may herald a shift. He was quick to criticise Ratcliffe’s comments, which perhaps would not have happened had McSweeney still been in post. And it may well be that the crisis will give fresh impetus to internal Labour opposition to the Mahmood proposals. Even so, it is hard to envisage the present government decisively and wholeheartedly challenging the anti-immigration narrative. Yet, ironically and predictably, net migration looks on course to become negative this year (and, despite the claims of Farage and others, this is not because of an exodus of British people).

The effects are already being felt by businesses, public services, and universities. The latter are particularly affected by another damaging conflation, that of overseas students and immigrants, and, in another irony, the impact is already being felt in ‘left-behind’ areas like Southend, with the closure of a campus of Essex University which has experienced a 52% fall in international student enrollment. With that goes not just job losses in universities, but all the knock-on effects on local businesses. Britain is self-immolating one of its greatest economic, cultural and soft power assets, and its economy generally, in the name of controlling immigration and yet, in perhaps the greatest irony of all, two-thirds of the public believe that immigration is still rising.

The challenge for Starmer

From this perspective, it is simply wrong for Starmer to say that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years anymore”. Even if by that he meant only that Britain was open to international, and especially European, partnerships than it had been under the Tories, and especially in the security and defence domain, it still does not really make sense since, as I’ve pointed out many times before, Britain cannot be a reliable member of such partnerships whilst Brexitism flourishes domestically.  And Brexitism will continue to flourish whilst what would otherwise be a very small minority of ethno-nationalists are able to frame the terms in which immigration is discussed and immigration policy is enacted, or at the very least to pull the framing of those terms towards their own.

This is the real crisis for Starmer’s leadership (or at least one aspect of it), rather than the superficial drivel trotted out by political journalists like Chris Mason. It is a challenge to him not simply personally but philosophically, in that it entails a shift from what we might call the ‘McSweeney’ approach of ‘responding to voters’ demands’ to the more profound sense of leadership as the task of shaping, and in the process sometimes challenging, those demands. With McSweeney gone, Starmer has a chance, perhaps his final chance, to rise to that challenge. Whether he has either the personal or philosophical capacity to do so is doubtful.

 

Appendix

It doesn’t fit into the focus of this post, but I do want to record yet another tombstone in the graveyard of Brexit hubris. This week the Financial Times reported (£) that the government has “quietly shelved” the programme to build a high-tech frictionless border following years of delays and spiralling costs. This was the project announced in December 2020, in the final days of the transition period, which was to create (of course) “the most effective border in the world by 2025” and was explicitly claimed as a Brexit benefit giving a “once in a lifetime opportunity to transform our borders” (Michael Gove) now that Britain was “free to seize the opportunities that come with being a sovereign nation once again” (Priti Patel). I’ve discussed this project several times in the past, for example in May 2022 when I expressed pessimism about its costs, delivery time and functionality. That pessimism turned out to be optimistic in assuming that it would, eventually, be implemented.

It’s worth recalling this not just as yet another Brexit failure but also because for years during the Article 50 negotiations Brexiters insisted that it would be perfectly possible, even easy, to create ‘alternative arrangements’ for a high-tech frictionless border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This, they claimed, made the Northern Ireland Protocol unnecessary, and a ruse designed by Dublin and Brussels to thwart Brexit. The quiet death of “the most effective border in the world” is a fresh reminder of just how dishonest and ignorant all these claims were.

 

Notes

[1] Theresa May isn’t really an exception in that, whilst she did not win the 2017 election outright, she did not lose it per se and was still able to form a government with DUP support.

[2] As ever, my suppression of ‘rude’ words isn’t due to any prissiness on my part, but because including them can lead to problems in sharing/ linking to this blog.