It’s now been roughly a month since Sir Keir Starmer became the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister on July 5. Long enough, I think, to make a preliminary judgment of his leadership. When it became clear that Starmer and the Labour Party had indeed won the U.K.’s general election, as the polls predicted they would for months, there was a whiff of cautious optimism in the air. Starmer was no Jeremy Corbyn, everyone knew that; but he did at least claim to be a socialist, and after 14 consecutive years of Tory rule, almost anything would have been an improvement. Even the Morning Star, Britain’s socialist daily newspaper, said that “serious change may yet now prove possible” with Starmer in office.
Unfortunately, the ensuing month has dashed those hopes. Since taking power, Starmer has pursued a policy agenda that’s barely distinguishable from that of his Tory predecessors. He’s scrapped almost every genuinely progressive idea the Labour Party had to offer, hastened the creeping privatization of the National Health Service, waged a campaign of financial austerity against poor and sick people, endorsed anti-trans bigotry, authorized inhumane “raids” against immigrants, pursued a variety of “tough-on-crime” crackdowns, and cozied up to right-wing media baron Rupert Murdoch, all while purging principled leftists from the Labour bench and installing former Tories. Words are cheap, but actions reveal a politician’s true character. With every passing day, Starmer has proven that the Conservatives’ rule over Britain never really ended at all. Because in every way that matters, Keir Starmer is a Tory himself.
Let’s begin a week before Starmer’s ascent to Number 10 Downing Street. In the lead-up to election day, he and the Labour Party received two highly coveted endorsements: one from the Sunday Times on June 30, and one from the Sun tabloid on July 3. The latter was especially surprising, because the Sun is a notorious right-wing rag which rarely has a good word to say about Labour politicians. (One infamous front page from 2017, for instance, read “Don’t Chuck Britain in the COR-BIN,” complete with a Photoshopped image of Jeremy Corbyn sitting in a trash can. Subtlety is not a strong point for the Sun.) But both papers are owned by Rupert Murdoch, and there’s every indication that Starmer cut a deal with the billionaire media boss. As Eleanor Langford and Adam Sherwin first reported for iNews, Murdoch’s News UK corporation “received private assurances that a Starmer-led government would not pursue Leveson 2,” a new round of government inquiries into the Murdoch empire’s phone hacking scandals and alleged corrupt relationships with the police. Soon after, Lachlan Murdoch—Rupert’s son and heir apparent—bestowed the blessing of his family’s papers on Starmer, with the Sun editorial pointedly mentioning “a free Press and freedom for our journalists” as a principle it expected him to uphold. It’s not clear why Starmer felt the need to make this arrangement, since Labour was already leading in the polls before the Murdoch papers’ endorsement—but make it he did. It was a rotten bargain, severely compromising the British public’s right to an honest press, and a bad omen for things to come.
Once elected, it’s important to remember that Starmer and the Labour Party had—and continue to have—a commanding majority in Parliament. They currently control 404 of the 650 available seats in the House of Commons, compared to just 121 for the Conservatives (and even less for the various minor parties.) This means that, barring major dissent within Labour itself, Starmer could push through pretty much any policy he likes. The situation is strikingly similar to the one Barack Obama enjoyed in 2009, when the Democratic Party controlled both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, with a filibuster-proof majority in the latter. In the pages of the Daily Mail, the arch-conservative commentator and lawn enthusiast Peter Hitchens threw a fit about Labour’s “huge majority,” warning darkly of what “the chilly commissars who’ll control Starmergrad” might do with it.
He needn’t have worried. Like Obama—who continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, maintained the illegal torture camp at Guantánamo Bay, and never prosecuted a single one of the bankers responsible for the 2008 financial crash—Starmer is perfectly at home in the existing social and economic order. He wouldn’t dream of enacting genuinely transformative policies to upend it. In the European edition of Politico, we can find a comprehensive list of all the Labour policies that Starmer once claimed to support, but later walked back or completely abandoned. Abolishing tuition fees at British universities? Gone. Nationalizing the “Big Six” energy companies? Gone. Offering universal childcare to all British children? Gone. Increasing taxes on the rich? Never heard of it. Abolishing the absurd, archaic institution of the House of Lords? Indefinitely on hold. Rent control? Not a chance. And so on, and so on. In place of these ambitious goals, Starmer started speaking fluent Conservative, saying that his priority was “growth, growth, growth” and citing self-imposed “fiscal rules” for why each new program couldn’t be afforded. At one point, he even cited Margaret Thatcher as a figure he admired, saying she had “dragg[ed] Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism.” A deeper insult to the heritage of the Labour Party, which spent nearly twenty years opposing Thatcher as she slashed public services and waged war against trade unions, would be hard to imagine.
By contrast, the policies Starmer has chosen to embrace range from lukewarm to outright reactionary. On healthcare, his Labour government is offering little that his Tory predecessors wouldn’t have whole-heartedly agreed with. As Grace Blakeley recently wrote for Current Affairs, Wes Streeting—the MP for Ilford North, who Starmer has appointed as his Secretary of State for Health and Social Care—is actively in favor of privatizing the National Health Service (NHS), albeit slowly and by degrees. Streeting has publicly called the NHS “a 20th century service that hasn’t changed with the times and isn’t fit for the modern era,” and says that the “miracle of the market” is needed to reform it. He has promised to “go further than New Labour ever did” in this pro-market direction, and to “form partnerships with the private sector that goes [sic] beyond just hospitals.” In other words, to outsource more and more public health services to for-profit companies—a process that has already begun. Purely coincidentally, the owners of some of those companies have donated extensively to Streeting’s election campaigns. The NHS is one of the great achievements of the British labor movement, and arguably one of the only things the British as a group have ever done right. But Starmer and Streeting are willing to see it slowly eroded and transformed into a profit-seeking enterprise, to the detriment of the people who actually rely on it. (Writing from the United States, I can say with some confidence: Brits, you do not want a privatized healthcare system! Resist it at all costs, before you end up paying thousands out-of-pocket for ambulance rides like us!)
On immigration, the picture is somehow even worse. To his credit, Starmer immediately got rid of the Tories’ absurdly cruel plan to deport immigrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda regardless of where they originally came from. This was the bare minimum anyone could expect. But even while he was condemning the Rwanda plan, Starmer accepted the basic premise that immigration is undesirable and needs to be prevented, saying in May that “We have to deal with the terrible loss of control of the border under this Government, we have to tackle the small boats that are coming across.” He even singled out Bangladeshis as a group of immigrants he doesn’t want around, complaining in June that “people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed.” And true to his word, Starmer set out to “tackle” immigration shortly after taking office. His Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, took around 1,000 civil servants who had been working on the Rwanda project and instead deployed them on what she called a “returns and enforcement programme,” promising to make sure “those who have no right to be in the country are swiftly removed.” In practice, what this means is that the Starmer government will be conducting police raids on businesses suspected of hiring undocumented immigrants, like beauty salons and car washes, with the goal of ramping up “fast track” deportations. For any immigrant who doesn’t happen to have their paperwork in order, the Labour Party is nearly as hostile as the Conservative one was. And for this cruel “blitz,” Cooper and Starmer have received breathless praise from the Murdoch-owned Sun.
Immigrants aren’t the only vulnerable group of people Starmer has decided to persecute, either. He’s begun to embrace transphobia too. In general, the U.K. has been gripped by anti-trans bigotry over the last decade or so, driven partly by high-profile media figures like J.K. Rowling and sitcom writer Graham Linehan who talk endlessly about their opposition to transgender rights. (At this point, Rowling may have written more words about trans people and public toilets than she has about wizards.) As journalist Ell Folan notes, the Daily Mail ran 115 articles about trans issues in January 2023 alone, most of them negative, and anti-trans hate crimes rose by a terrifying 156 percent from 2018 to 2022. Transphobia has become a pathological obsession in Britain, leading many people to start referring to the country as “TERF Island.” Now, Keir Starmer is by no means as anti-trans as someone like Rowling; almost nobody is. But his position has gotten noticeably worse over the years. Back in 2020, he wrote on Facebook that “trans rights are human rights” and that “the Labour Party stands proudly with the trans community.” But flash forward to 2024, and he’s now saying that trans women shouldn’t be able to “enter women-only spaces,” in response to a question posed by Rowling on Twitter. (“No. They don’t have that right. They shouldn’t. That’s why I’ve always said biological women’s spaces need to be protected.”) This is disturbing on a few levels—both because it implies that trans women are not actually women, because it suggests that they’re inherently a threat that other women need to be “protected” from, and because the logical conclusion would be some kind of horribly invasive genital-examination process before anyone can use a locker room. Even worse, Starmer recently said that he doesn’t think “gender ideology” should be acknowledged in schools. This is straight from the playbook of U.S. Republicans like Ron DeSantis. It’s exactly the kind of thing that contributes to the stigma, exclusion, and even violence that trans people face today. It’s not entirely clear whether these are Starmer’s actual beliefs, or whether he simply thinks he needs to pander to transphobes to get ahead politically. But either way, the impact is the same, and he should know better.
And then, of course, there’s all the tough-on-crime nonsense. The U.K. wing of the Black Lives Matter movement memorably described Starmer as “a cop in an expensive suit” after he said that “nobody should be saying anything about defunding the police” in 2020, and the label fits him perfectly. In fact, it would be hard to exaggerate his sheer coppishness. Starmer served as Director of Public Prosecutions, the top prosecutor in the U.K. judicial system, from 2008 to 2013—where, to nobody’s surprise, he worked closely with the Conservative government of Prime Minister David Cameron for the final three years. In his meticulous book The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right, Oliver Eagleton has chronicled dozens of truly infuriating acts committed by Starmer and the Crown Prosecution Service during this time. Just to name one example, he helped to criminalize public protest in Britain, encouraging CPS lawyers to pursue charges against any protest where “significant disruption was caused to the public and businesses”—that is, any protest that was effective—and allowing police to classify everything from placards to Thermoses as “weapons” in order to lock protestors up. He also cracked down on alleged welfare cheats, recommending prison sentences of up to 10 years under the Fraud Act, while making no such effort against tax evasion by the rich. For these and other services to the cause of Law and Order, he received his knighthood in 2014.
For Starmer, “Law and Order” is not just a slogan. The man is a congenital rule-follower and snitch, with the mentality of a schoolboy who reports his classmates for smoking and then parades around wearing the sticker he’s given as a reward. He appears to take anything even vaguely resembling “disorder” as a personal affront, and no form of crime is too petty or mundane to attract his eagle eye. During the general election, he made it clear that he had “no intention” of decriminalizing marijuana, which remains a Class B drug in the U.K. system, carrying a penalty of “up to 5 years in prison, an unlimited fine or both” for simple possession. He pledged, with all seriousness, to ban ninja swords and “crack down on online knife sales”—the latest form of a longstanding right-wing obsession with policing so-called “knife crime.” (The roving bands of samurai who terrorize Bracknell must be worried about the sword ban.) In June, Labour also promised to give the police new powers to seize and destroy dirt bikes if they cause a nuisance.
The most disgraceful moment, though, was Starmer’s promise to introduce police “respect orders.” These are just a new form of ASBOs, or Anti-Social Behavior Orders, one of the most infamous policies of the Tony Blair years. The term “antisocial behavior” is a vague one, but in Britain it’s been used to mean behavior that’s mildly rude or disruptive, but not actually illegal—or, if we’re really being honest, behavior middle-class white people don’t like to see. Under Blair, police issued ASBOs for all kinds of absurd reasons, as London journalist Mark Wilding recalls:
Liberty, the human rights campaign group, has pointed to cases such as the Loch Ness man who appeared in court for breaching an ASBO banning him from laughing, staring or slow-clapping. A 13-year-old girl was barred from using the word “grass” anywhere in England and Wales. Tabloids ran stories about a young woman banned from having noisy sex and teenagers prohibited from wearing hoodies.
At times, the laughable nature of some ASBOs risked obscuring their serious consequences. NAPO cited examples including a female sex worker who was banned from carrying condoms within an area which included her drug clinic – where she was issued free condoms. She was later charged with breaching the order. Another case involved an 18-year-old banned from congregating with three or more other youths. He was subsequently arrested for entering a youth club – to attend a session on how to deal with anti-social behaviour.
ASBOs created a de facto police state in Britain, under which the lives of mostly young, working-class people were strictly monitored and controlled. Even Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May realized they were a bad idea, criticizing “the alphabet soup of police powers Labour invented” and scrapping ASBOs as a concept in 2011. But Starmer is actually to May’s right on crime, and sees them as something admirable that should be brought back, only slightly rebranded.
Finally, Starmer’s version of Labour has done little or nothing to depart from the Conservative doctrine of economic austerity. The party has laid out a shockingly harsh vision for sick people on benefits, with advisor Alan Milburn proposing a plan in which people with long-term illnesses would still have to seek jobs in order to unlock “higher levels of economic growth.” Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions under Starmer, agrees with Milburn, saying there should be “conditions to look for work and consequences if you don’t,” and that her department will “shift from being a department for welfare to being a department for work.” (Underneath the Independent article reporting on this return-to-work agenda, one sarcastic comment reads: “Great! While we’re at it, time that the dead shirkers woke up and pulled their weight. Just ‘cause they stop breathing is no excuse.”) More controversially, Starmer has refused to drop the Conservatives’ “two-child benefit cap,” a policy introduced in 2017 that prohibits parents with more than two kids from receiving government benefits and tax credits for Child #3 and above. The cap is like something a Charles Dickens villain would dream up, and according to U.K. charities, getting rid of it would immediately lift 300,000 children out of poverty. As the Guardian strikingly put it, it’s a question of “will the kids eat or not?” And so far, Starmer’s answer has been a firm “not.”
In fact, it’s worse than that. Not only does Starmer refuse to lift the benefit cap himself, but he’s actually punished his fellow Labour MPs for voting otherwise. Late in July, the Scottish National Party brought an amendment to Parliament to finally remove the cap, forcing a vote on the issue. Seven courageous leftists from the Labour bench—John McDonnell, Richard Burgon, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Apsana Begum, Imran Hussain, Ian Byrne, and Zarah Sultana—defied Starmer’s wishes, crossed the floor, and voted with the SNP. The vote failed, and in its immediate aftermath, Starmer “removed the whip” from the seven rebel MPs. For the unfamiliar, the “whip” is a somewhat unique feature of British politics, which allows the leader of a party to unilaterally suspend an MP from that party for any length of time they wish, forcing the MP in question to stand as an independent away from the party bench. It’s a petty humiliation, and in the case of government ministers, prevents them from actually carrying out their duties until “the whip” is restored. It’s also pretty obviously undemocratic, as the whole point of being elected to Parliament is supposed to be that you vote the way your constituents want you to—not the way Keir Starmer does. And needless to say, it’s ten times worse when the vote in question is to keep children from starving.
That’s only one small part of Starmer’s vendetta against the Labour Left. Ever since he took over the party leadership from Jeremy Corbyn in 2020, Starmer has been working to diminish the influence of genuinely left-wing MPs, elevate market-friendly centrists like Wes Streeting, and generally bring Labour closer and closer to the policies of its Conservative opposition. In this way, he’s a natural heir to Tony Blair and the “New Labour” movement of the early 2000s, which Margaret Thatcher hailed as her “greatest achievement” for its embrace of free-market economics. Corbynism was a backlash against New Labour, reviving some spark of working-class radicalism from the embers Blair left behind; now, Starmerism is a backlash to the backlash, seeking to extinguish the light for good.
To drive the point home, Starmer has slowly exiled Corbyn himself from the party, first suspending him in 2020 and finally banning him from standing as a Labour candidate in 2024. This is pretty much unprecedented; for context, it’s as if Joe Biden had expelled Bernie Sanders from the Democratic caucus in the U.S., or Barack Obama had done the same to Bill Clinton. That’s how seriously Starmer takes his anti-Left crusade, and it’s not just Corbyn in his crosshairs. He also tried to block veteran MP Diane Abbott from standing for Labour, before the terrible optics of purging the first Black woman in Parliament forced him to reconsider, and he successfully barred prospective candidate Faiza Shaheen for her views on Palestine. At the time, Shaheen said Starmer’s Labour had “a palpable problem with black and brown people,” and she had a point. Around the world, progressive women of color seem to receive the worst internecine attacks from their own parties; consider the example of Rashida Tlaib’s censure in the U.S. House of Representatives, for which 22 particularly spineless Democrats voted, or Fatima Payman’s suspension from the Australian Labour Party. Sir Keir Starmer, one of the whitest men on the planet, is definitely part of that pattern.
There’s another side to that equation, too. At the same time as he’s been pushing real socialists to the margins, Starmer has invited actual, literal Tories to stand by his side. Shortly before the 2024 election, he accepted an offer from a Conservative MP named Natalie Elphicke to defect and join Labour. It was a shocking turn of events, and columnists like the Independent's John Rentoul took it as evidence that “Keir Starmer is totally ruthless.” That’s one way of looking at it. “Totally devoid of principle” would be another. Elphicke wasn’t just any Tory, after all. Until approximately five minutes before her defection, she was part of the party’s hard-right fringe. As Owen Jones wrote for the Guardian, she “cut her teeth scaremongering about refugees and immigrants,” writing op-eds for the Daily Express where she argued that small boats carrying asylum-seekers “undermine our national security.” She also railed against what she called “militant unionism,” and even attacked football star Marcus Rashford over his advocacy against child hunger. And yet, Starmer welcomed her with open arms. Perhaps he recognized a kindred spirit.
In The Starmer Project, Oliver Eagleton argues that Sir Keir is one of the main reasons the U.K. didn’t get a strongly left-wing Labour government in 2019. At that time, it was Corbyn aiming for the Prime Minister position, and Starmer was in charge of Brexit policy. From the start, his presence caused issues, as Corbyn and his close allies were trying to form a “progressive Leave” agenda, while Starmer was a staunch Remainer. As early as 2017, Diane Abbott reportedly warned Corbyn that Starmer “doesn’t want Brexit done… he wants you done, so he can become leader.” He should have listened. As the election drew closer, the rift grew wider—and Eagleton argues that Starmer orchestrated an “internal wrecking operation” that hobbled Labour at a critical moment, deliberately making public statements that implied a Remain position against Corbyn’s wishes. (For instance, he appeared on the popular Andrew Marr Show shortly before Corbyn was set to make an important speech laying out his “progressive Leave” vision, and deliberately said Britain should remain in “a customs union,” stopping just short of saying it should be the existing European Union one.) Labour’s position on Brexit looked incoherent, neither Leave nor Remain. Finally, Starmer was able to leverage the situation to get a commitment to a second referendum on any Brexit deal, and announced in August 2019 that “we would campaign for remain” when that time came. Labour lost the election that December, and several prominent MPs have argued that Starmer’s Remain advocacy was a big factor, causing a “falling away in support among working-class voters” who had voted for Brexit in 2016. But the defeat did cause Corbyn to step down, and Starmer to take his place, just as Abbott had warned.
Ironically, though, Corbyn’s election result in 2019 was actually better than Starmer’s in 2024. This isn’t immediately obvious, because Starmer became Prime Minister and Corbyn did not. Because of that fact, a standard narrative has arisen in which Corbyn was too far left to be taken seriously, but Starmer’s moderation secured the win. As the New York Times put it, that’s “How Britain’s Labour Party Became Electable Again.” But that’s misleading, as standard narratives usually are. Starmer got more seats in Parliament, it’s true. But if you count by actual votes, Corbyn at his worst did better than Starmer at his best. As Steve Howell points out in the Nation, his 2019 campaign brought in 10.27 million votes compared to Starmer’s 9.69 million. This means that Starmer’s victory is less about anything he actually did or said, and more about the historic collapse of the Conservative Party since 2019. On top of that, the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party split the political right and allowed Labour to cruise to victory with only around a third of the popular vote. So while Starmer has a majority, he doesn’t necessarily have much of a mandate, and it doesn’t actually mean centrism is popular. The whole state of affairs is dangerous, because a tepid status-quo government like Starmer’s creates an ideal environment for far-right parties like Farage’s to thrive—a pattern that recently played out in France, where Emmanuel Macron very nearly lost to Marine Le Pen’s crypto-fascists, and was barely rescued from political oblivion by the Left. Farage is already outflanking Starmer on key issues, including declaring his opposition to the two-child benefit cap. Unless something changes, there’s a risk that prolonged Starmerism could strengthen the far right’s position even further.
In an interview shortly before last month’s election, a billionaire investor named John Caudwell did something really remarkable. On the BBC’s Newsnight, he endorsed Starmer’s campaign, and said the following:
“What Keir has done is taken all the left out of the Labour Party. He's come out with a set of values and principles in complete alignment with my views as a commercial capitalist.”
Soon afterward, Starmer responded, saying he was “delighted” by Caudwell’s praise. But any Labour leader should have seen it as the darkest possible condemnation. Historically, the British Labour Party has been one of the world’s most successful fighting organizations for the working class; by establishing the NHS alone, it’s made life better for millions of people. To “take all the Left out” is to remove its soul. For that reason, many people aligned with the British socialist movement have taken to calling Starmer “Keith” online. It’s a silly meme, referencing Starmer’s bland personality: “A man with all the charm of the pub bore, who’d find himself outperformed by a talking potato sack,” as one article puts it. He looks like a Keith. But the joke also has a second, more serious meaning. “Keir” is the name of Keir Hardie, the Scottish trade unionist and antiwar activist who founded the Labour Party way back in 1900, and built it up from nothing. And because of his many betrayals, the Left of Labour believe that Starmer isn’t worthy to bear it. They feel that for someone like him to even exist within the Labour Party, let alone lead it, is a desecration of everything Hardie, Aneurin Bevan, and the other heroes of Labour stood for. As Sir Keith goes from one new low to the next, it’s hard to say they’re wrong.
