Labour torn between Left and Right

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer may well have a plan to turf out the Tories at the next general election, but if he does it’s an extremely cunning plan, so cunning that many in the party and the country struggle to know precisely what it is. At the recent party conference, he said he would bring back the 45p tax rate for the highest earners and described the Tory’s trickledown economic proposals as a “pisstake,” the sort of comments potential Labour voters want to hear. But Starmer, like some other top politicians on both sides of the divide, has something of a history of making bold statements, and even pledges, when it suits, only to ease back from those promises further down the line. Disquiet in some sections of Labour ranks, particularly on the left of the party, has escalated in recent months, after their leader explicitly repudiated 10 policy “pledges” he made during the 2019 leadership election, covering subjects such as public ownership and supporting workers’ industrial action. And now, with the Conservative government, if probably not the entire Tory party, shifting ever further to the right, some on the left of his own party feel that Starmer should be working much harder to grab back the “traditional” Labour voters in those previously safe “red wall” seats so spectacularly snatched by Boris Johnson in the last election. Perhaps Starmer feels there no longer are “traditional” labour voters and that the red wall has crumbled once and for all.

Starmer defends his actions by saying that Labour must move away from being a party of protest, and that if it is to transform Britain it can only do so if in power. He claims he has changed the party to “face the voters”, and said in a Channel 5, Jeremy Vine television programme interview: “I’m focused entirely on winning the next general election. We can talk about what we’re going to do uphill and down dale. Until we win an election, we won’t do it.” Brave words, perhaps the pragmatic approach to getting his party back to power, but clearly not everyone agrees, as Labour lost nearly 100,000 members in 2021 and ended the year with a £5m deficit. And Starmer’s sudden fierce opposition to his shadow front bench members joining striking workers on picket lines brought equally ferocious criticism from both trade union leaders and some of his senior MPs. While Labour took a huge lead over the Tories in opinion polls during the dying days of the Johnson premiership, some argue that this was, in part at least, less down to Starmer getting it impressively right, and more down to the former prime minister getting it increasingly wrong. What the polls will indicate now that Truss has taken the Tory reins remains to be seen, but Starmer might do well to remember that as he bids to attract new, traditionally centre-right voters, he’d best not neglect those traditionally on the left.