It’s safe to say Keir Starmer has not had an ideal first year as UK prime minister. One year on from Labour’s landslide General Election victory, his government is already floundering. Starmer can only bring himself to count “rolling out school uniform projects” and introducing free breakfast clubs among his greatest achievements so far. He has been forced to make u-turn after u-turn, most recently on welfare reforms in the face of rebellion from his own MPs. Yesterday, his so-called Iron Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was caught openly weeping in the House of Commons.
Support for Labour has tanked. As of last week, YouGov polling shows Labour winning the support of just 23% of voters. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s right-populist Reform UK is leading with 26%, and the Conservatives at 18%. On a personal level, Starmer has a popularity rating of just 22% and is actively disliked by over half of the population. The British people have little love for Starmer’s brand of lifeless managerialism, and are increasingly attracted to Farage’s people-first, common-sense populism.
Not that Starmer was all that popular to begin with. Labour’s landslide win last July has often been described as “loveless” or as a “hollow victory.” While it’s true Starmer won a massive majority of 172 seats, he did so with just under 34% of the vote. That’s fewer votes than Labour won in 2017, when it lost to the Conservatives. Faced with a choice between four more years of ineffectual Tory rule, many Brits understandably opted to either give Labour a go or otherwise handed their vote to smaller parties, like Reform or the Liberal Democrats—something that is disincentivised by the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system. But there was never any real zeal for Starmer, who has always been widely recognised as having all the charisma of a filing cabinet.
The only people who were truly enthusiastic about a Labour government under Starmer could be found in the media and commentator classes. They were optimistic that a Starmer government would take us back to the days of Tony Blair and New Labour and technocracy. They hoped it would mark an end to the era of populism and ‘divisive’ politics, kickstarted by the Brexit referendum in 2016.
In the aftermath of last year’s election, there was an expectation among the well-heeled pundit class that dirty, nasty, common populist politics was over now. We could instead go back to having sensible conversations led by grey-suited experts, politicians with PPE degrees, and human-rights lawyers. Broadcaster Krishnan Guru-Murthy boasted about how “After years of personality-driven and chaotic, shallow politics coverage across much of the media, which was largely about instability, gossip and leadership crises, we now have a government with massive majority, widespread internal agreement and no likelihood of massive instability anytime soon.” Lawyer Jessica Simor rejoiced that “competence, rationality and sanity has returned” and expressed her “quiet optimism that good people are now in charge again.” The Guardian went one further and, without a hint of irony, deployed that sickening phrase: “The grownups are in charge.” “We can now feel free,” the author gushed, “to get on with our lives without worrying what the halfwits in Westminster might do next.” Author and journalist Otto English summed up this pompous delusion in a now infamous (and very much deleted) tweet: “It’s nice, isn’t it? The quiet?”
The irony of all this is that Starmer’s supposedly grown-up, stable government hasn’t quelled the populist wave. If anything, its bland technocratic managerialism has only made support for populism stronger. Farage is miles more popular than Starmer in the polls and is more trusted to take care of the economy than Reeves currently is. Reform has been leading the polls in terms of total voteshare for some time now, but recent analysis shows that, were there a General Election right now, Farage’s party would also pick up the most seats in Parliament—though not enough to form a majority government. Voters are desperate for everything that Starmer refuses to do—protecting the borders, tackling crime, and delivering meaningful economic growth.
It looks like Starmer’s terrible, boring reign has even spurred a revival of left-wing populism. Yesterday, newly independent MP Zarah Sultana—who left the Labour Party on Thursday—announced that she and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn would be setting up a new, far-left party. Although Corbyn—now an independent MP after being kicked out of the party over an antisemitism row—was reportedly “furious and bewildered” at the news at first, he has today confirmed the launch will go ahead. This new party will focus on increasing welfare and, of course, the war in Gaza.
Whether either Reform or a hypothetical left-wing populist party can break through the UK’s notoriously unbalanced two-party system is far from guaranteed. Even in Europe, where proportional representation is prevalent, we see populist parties being shut out of power by the cowardly scheming of the old order. Nowhere is this perhaps more clear than in Germany. In February’s federal election, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) came definitively in second place, winning 20.8% of the total vote, behind the Christian Democrats (CDU) with 28% and ahead of the Social Democrats (SPD) with 16%. By all rights, this should have made the AfD the logical coalition partner in a conservative government. Instead, terrified of letting the right-populists anywhere near the corridors of power, the centre-right CDU partnered with the centre-left SPD, to create a government so bland and technocratic it must make Starmer blush. The AfD isn’t even afforded the dignity of becoming the official opposition, despite being the second-largest party in the Bundestag, due to the absurdly undemocratic cordon sanitaire that has been constructed around it. It’s entirely possible that, even if Farage manages to hold onto Reform’s lead until 2028, something similar would happen here. It would surprise no one to see the Tories, Lib Dems or Labour clinging desperately to power in such a way.
Perhaps in some ways we should be grateful for Starmer and his utter incompetence. Had he been even vaguely capable, Britain’s broken political system might continue to limp on for many more years to come. But as it stands, his failure has thrown everything into stark relief. Much to the chagrin of the ‘sensible’ centrists, Starmer hasn’t killed populism. He has only emboldened it.
