Labour’s last try? (Not only) Great Britain in search of a courageous leader

Barely two years after its decisive victory at the last general election the British Labour Party is in dire straits. Bad results at the recent local elections and the listless performance of prime minister Keir Starmer have led to a leadership race in the party which is currently governing the country to the deep disenchantment of the electorate. Looking for a new face at the top and new policies for its political survival, the Labour Party’s internal divisions but also its intellectual vacuity have come to the fore. After six prime ministers in 10 years the attempt to change the country’s leader whilst being in power has become a very British spectacle. Yet Labour’s current quandary also seems to be symptomatic for social democrats in other European countries. And the similar unpopularity that has befallen other leaders like the German Chancellor seems to be pointing to more structural changes that make governing democratic polities from the centre ever more difficult. 

Britains premier Keir Starmer had been elected as an anti-dote to a succession of conservative predecessors who are now being judged as not up to the job, chaotic, outright dumb and finally too elitist. As a former public prosecutor, he seemed to be competent, predictable, trustworthy, intelligent and down to earth. Starmer was an “unpolitician” or “a man with no history” who was to rescue the United Kingdom after the failures and shenanigans during 14 years of conservative rule. 

But after a year of timid decisions, numerous policy U-turns and disastrous political appointments the public started to turn sour. You could not blame Sir Keir Starmer for the negative economic consequences multiple international crises had for the British electorate, but just being a decent but indecisive leader was obviously not enough to deal with the external shocks and internal challenges of a “broken Britain” which had started to crumble since the financial crisis of 2008 if not earlier. Not even to mention the self-inflicted national catastrophe of Brexit. 

Thus, Starmer was deeply unpopular when at the local elections on May 7th voters ran away from Labour in droves. 22 % of the party’s former supporters went to the Green Party which has positioned itself further left; 16% turned to the pro-EU Liberal Party and 6% to the anti-EU, anti-immigrant but locally most successful “Reform Party” under its mercurial leader Nigel Farage, the populist architect of Brexit in 2016. And when Starmer’s health secretary Wes Streeting resigned one week after the electoral disaster, the pending leadership contest in the Labour Party was finally triggered. 

And for a change, the savour is supposed to come from the North of the country. Andy Burnham is the successful three-term mayor of Manchester and has many things the current prime minister is so obviously lacking: a northern accent, street credibility, excellent communication skills and high popularity in his city but increasingly also in the Labour Party. According to current polling he would beat all declared and possible contenders from inside the party. There is just one problem. To run for party leadership and then be appointed as new PM you need to be a member of the House of Commons which Burnham isn’t. At least not yet. But he might be by the end of June when he has won the local byelection in nearby Makerfield from which the current Labour MP has just thankfully resigned. 

That means that the 55-year old mayor now has to run election campaigns for two different audiences at once: one for the parliamentary seat in Makerfield, where the councillors of Farage’s right wing Reform Party have just been getting 50% of the votes across all wards; the other one for the Parliamentary Labour Party and then for the party’s membership which will finally decide who becomes the next premier; provided Keir Starmer steps back at all. If that sounds complicated to you, you are getting the proper picture of the mess the United Kingdom finds itself in today: of a Labour Party once more riven by its different factions, of a government in domestic crisis and of a country outside the EU yet having to deal with the economic, military and geopolitical consequences of two wars between Eastern Europe and the Middle East. 

Just looking at the position and choices of somebody like Andy Burnham – if he is going to be the UK’s next Prime Minister or not – you can see what has gone wrong with Britain. And you encounter the wider problems of social democratic parties in Europe, given the current limits of governance in highly indebted western countries with a population polarised by social media; where even the most decent leader like Keir Starmer can receive such a flood of venom and abuse. 

So, provided Andy Burnham manages to win in a parliamentary constituency where two thirds have voted for Brexit and a rigid immigration policy and where half of the voters now favour the right-wing Reform Party - where is he going to take the Labour Party? What does he promise to whom? And what could he possibly deliver? 

First and most important, the economy. Here Andy Burnham is promising to repair a “broken Britain” which in his view was originally damaged by Margret Thatcher’s revolution of privatisation, deregulation and austerity during the 80ies, followed by the financial crisis of 2008 and the idiocy of Brexit in 2016. Instead, he is suggesting “a business- friendly socialism” with private-public partnerships which he has used to improve public transport and housing in Manchester. He said he would have a “relentless domestic focus” and that he will not try to turn the United Kingdom to the EU. That puts him against his probable challenger Wes Streeting of the party’s right who has just come out for “Rejoin” if only to make it hard for Burham to win the “Leave”-seat in Makerfield; and against Labour’s hard left which would go as far as nationalisation, a general wealth tax and price controls. 

On the issue of immigration Andy Burnham has been mum since the Starmer government has already strengthened the country’s anti-migration policies, hoping that the number of arrivals will keep going down after having grown dramatically under the previous conservative governments despite often their racist rhetoric. 

And then there are the unresolved issues at the core of the British political system: devolution and the electoral system. After the Blair government installed regional parliaments in Scotland and Wales in 1999 Labour thought it had capped the support for nationalist parties calling for independence referenda. 

Yet at the communal election this May Labour lost the control of the Welsh Parliament to the Nationalist party Plaid Cymru with the Reform Party coming in second. After having dominated the west of the country for 120 years this is a historic defeat for the Labour Party. And in the working-class belt of Scotland’s once industrial cities Labour also lost much of its support to the Scottish nationalists and to the Reform Party. As a result, Andy Burnham seems to be in favour of further devolution, but in general the Labour Party has no clear idea how to win back its one-time save seats in Scotland and Wales. 

Next there is the first-past-the-post electoral system which gave Keir Starmer a landslide-win with two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons based on just one-third of the national vote. No wonder that neither Labour nor the Conservative Party have in the past seriously thought about moving to a system of proportional representation as demanded by the smaller parties. Andy Burnham has now suggested a change to the electoral system knowing that this will be incredibly hard to achieve. 

And finally, defence. where there seems to be a national consensus: that the Kingdom’s defence forces are unprepared and underfunded, and that this needs to change. But so far nobody knows if the mayor from Manchester would continue Keir Starmer’s strong stance on foreign and defence policy, which even the premier’s political enemies have been applauding. But with debt interest payments being almost double of defence spending any increase in the defence budget will be at the cost of social spending. Another hard choice for any government, but particularly for Labour. 

The official eadership race inside the Labour Party has not yet begun, but it is already clear that there will not be much to choose between Burnham, Streeting, Starmer and other possible contenders. The “battle of ideas”, some people have been hoping for, is all over the media but without intellectual depth and fought with soft gloves as it was when the party went for the “save hands” of Keir Starmer. 

The reasons for this lack of alternatives are manyfold. The structural defects of the political system - devolution and the electoral system - are too deeply ingrained to be addressed by a government that has just three years to go. And the worst self-inflicted political wound of post-war-Britain, Brexit, is still too raw to suggest a major new operation. Here the public’s polarization allows only the kind of careful rapprochement with the EU which Starmer has been suggesting, if not in a clear and acceptable way for Europe. 

Yet the country’ biggest problem has been the lack of economic growth and productivity gains over the last two decades. This has turned politics “into a nightmare of fiscal pressures and affordability crises without end”, writes Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. With the highest yields for 10-year gilts in the G 7-countries, increasing state debt is no longer a realistic option for British governments. When the former conservative prime minister Liz Truss tried her hand at tax relief and presented an unbalanced budget in October 2022 the bond market’s dramatic reaction made her the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. If Labour or anybody else want to spend more, they need to tax more. 

Thus, any future Labour leader must come out with a clear and convincing plan for tax reform. All Labour candidates are in favour of shifting taxation from income to wealth. Keir Starmer had won the party’s leadership with a proposal to increase the income tax on the top 5 % of earners and some other leftish policies only to forget about those once in government. But it is not only the British Labour Party that has failed to come up with a coherent, progressive but realistic tax reform. You will have to to Zoran Mamdani’s New York to find a politician of the left who is seriously attempting to introduce new taxes on wealth within the constraints of the respective markets. 

The next party leader might be Labour’s last try. In July 2024, after 14 years of conservative misrule, the party of Clement Attlee, Harald Wilson and Tony Blair had won a majority of 164 seats in parliament and a clear mandate to turn things around. Yet for the reasons described the government under Keir Starmer has not risen to the task. After the recent loss of 1500 council seats and of the control over 38 local councils deep into its heartlands the Labour Party is facing the biggest crisis in its post-war history. 

At the same time Labour is encountering the same problems as social democrats and parties of the centre (Volksparteien) elsewhere who can no longer deliver what they promise and what their label once stood for. It is no accident that Starmer’s German counterpart Friedrich Merz has become as unpopular with his Conservative Party (CDU) loosing support in all political directions. And this despite Germany being inside the EU, less dependent on the bond markets, and with a coalition government under an electoral system of proportional representation - very different conditions but with a similar political dynamic in both countries. One of the big unanswered questions is to what extent social media have made governance from the centre harder if not impossible. And what to about it..

The most likely scenario for the United Kingdom is therefore a new prime minister Andy Burnham who will campaign for policies very similar to those his predecessor did not dare to implement. Things will only improve if Britains next prime minister will find the courage to follow the narrow path between redistributing wealth and angering the bond markets. Otherwise, Burnham after Starmer will be the same like the German “Ampel”-coalition of Chancellor Scholz being replaced by the current two-party government of Chancellor Merz: oozing timidity and breeding total disillusionment at the political centre - most likely to be followed by a government of the far right.