For anyone on the right, a Labour government under siege is one of the most reassuringly familiar sights in British politics. The party’s intermittent attempts to rule this country usually face regular policy controversies, proliferating enemies and relentless press attacks. There are often deteriorating Labour poll ratings, panicky government communications and policy lurches to the right. Minor scandals are magnified and ministers forced to resign. Despite attempted relaunches, Labour’s sense of momentum in office begins to ebb away. The many people hostile to the party look up the dates of coming elections and lick their lips.
From Labour’s first short-lived governments in the 1920s and its struggling ones in the 1970s to Gordon Brown’s gloomy premiership in the late 2000s, most Labour administrations have become beleaguered sooner or later. No matter that the Tories have often been more out of their depth in office, as Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s administrations have recently reminded us: it’s Labour that is most associated with government as crisis management.
Not even six months old yet, Keir Starmer’s government has entered this lonely phase even faster than most of its predecessors. Third behind the Tories and Reform UK in one recent poll, Labour has governed against a backdrop of almost constant bad news, from a slowing British economy to the election of Donald Trump. While the government has introduced some decently designed and necessary policies, such as improving workers’ rights, it has failed to combine these reforms into a compelling political narrative. Starmer has yet to turn himself into a premier who voters want to listen to.
But something deeper lurks behind the widespread contempt for his government. It’s there in the recent petition, signed by almost 3 million people, calling for another general election because “the current Labour government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election”. Successful parties have always broken some manifesto pledges, as they switch from the necessary optimism of electioneering to the necessary realism of governing. The practice has been broadly tolerated – until now, with the petition effectively claiming that Labour’s huge parliamentary mandate is invalid. It is a reminder that for many Britons, Labour governments are never really legitimate. As a diner at the Savoy hotel in London said on hearing about the party’s 1945 landslide: “They’ve elected a Labour government, and the country will never stand for that.”
Even left-leaning Britons sometimes share this doubt about Labour’s right to rule. Despite the party having won four large majorities since 1997, compared with the Tories’ one – in the unusual, Brexit-dominated election of 2019 – it is still common to hear Labour supporters lament that this is a Conservative country. Only during Tony Blair’s long reign did this deep modern fear of the Tories lift a little. For half a dozen years, until the Iraq war disaster, there was not the usual sense of a Labour government on borrowed time. You didn’t have to like all Blair’s policies to find this a welcome change.
In theory, the size of Starmer’s majority and the Tories’ deep unpopularity ought to make his government more like Blair’s than previous, more embattled Labour regimes. Starmer should easily be able to pass legislation and brush off parliamentary rebellions. There should be no danger of him being pressured into an early election, or enduring a leadership challenge. After 14 fraught years of opposition, Labour voters ought to be able to take a break from anxiously following day-to-day politics.
Yet, unlike Blair, Starmer has never had the support that a truly secure leadership and government require. The 33.7% of the vote with which Labour won power – the lowest for any British majority government – haunts Starmer’s premiership. Nor does he have Blair’s great advantage of governing during stable times. The latter’s administration was preceded by six and a half years of low-energy Tory rule under the placid John Major. Over the equivalent pre-Starmer period, the Tories burned through four prime ministers. Supporters of all parties are now used to feverish politics, with prime ministers anointed, discredited and discarded as fast as football managers – while the public attitude to all governments increasingly defaults to contempt.
For some voters, being perpetually disappointed by politicians is, paradoxically, a comfortable position: it means they can avoid thinking about whether the things they want from governments – better public services without tax rises, for example – are actually compatible. But for a Labour administration, this avoidant, almost nihilistic public mood makes the already difficult task of governing without being seen as Britain’s “natural party of government” even harder.
The mood may pass. Voters could gradually get more used to Starmer’s government, as it gains in experience and, hopefully, competence, and begins to feel less alien – less like a mere Labour interlude. The sheer length of time until the next general election has to be called – four and a half years – means that Trump’s presidency and the current populist surge across Europe may be over before Starmer has to persuade voters to give his government a second term. By then, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey may seem more tired as public figures, and even less appealing as alternative prime ministers than they do now.
But simply to hope that Labour’s position improves with the passage of time or a change in the political weather is hardly a reliable or inspiring strategy. Effective governments make their own weather. For this administration, it could simply mean creating a few months of relative calm, with no big scandals, obvious errors or damaging internal disagreements. Or Labour could attempt something more dynamic: laying out a clearer plan for the country, and reining in some of the corporate interests, such as the privatised utilities, that blight so many lives.
Either way, Labour needs to stop its troubles in office dominating the headlines. If it can do that, the other parties’ divisions and dilemmas will begin to preoccupy the media instead. But if the “struggling” label sticks to this government for much longer, it will be too late to pull it off.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
