Owen Jones: My verdict on Keir Starmer's first 100 days

These fateful words, tweeted by a Keir Starmer-supporting author just six days after Labour’s electoral triumph, did not, it must be said, age well. But they accurately reflected the hubris which defined the core cheerleaders of Starmerism - disproportionately white salaried professionals of a certain age based in southern England - and of the Labour leadership itself.

The Starmerite theory of power went something like this. Britain’s problems were largely explained by a lack of leadership qualities at the top. Sir Keir Starmer and his team were the antidote to this failing. Starmer was a man of moderation, defined by lawyerly competence, who - as the former Head of the Crown Prosecution Service - had experience in running a large public body.

Flanked by Chancellor-to-be Rachel Reeves - whose career began at the Bank of England - Starmerism would sweep away the Tory psychodrama and replace it with a credible programme for government and usher in a new age of stability, abruptly terminating the era of turmoil which has defined British political life for seven exhausting years. Politics would become boring again - or, in the words of Starmer in his last speech as Leader of the Opposition at Labour’s conference last year, “politics should tread lightly on people’s lives.”

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100 days in, and it has not, to put it mildly, gone to plan. Other than Liz Truss, who after all was defeated by a lettuce, no new prime minister has experienced such a dramatic plunge in ratings in the history of polling. Keir Starmer is now rated as less popular than Nigel Farage. One poll even suggested he was less popular than Rishi Sunak, who is - after all - the routed leader of a Tory party which presided over the most catastrophic government in British democratic history.

According to YouGov, Starmer has a net rating of minus 36; according to Ipsos Mori, his net ratings are almost the same as Jeremy Corbyn on the eve of Labour’s 2019 disaster.

Corbyn had been torn apart for half a decade by the British media and his own parliamentarians, and Labour tortured by the Brexit schism: Starmer has no such excuse. This is supposed to be the honeymoon period, when after a widely detested government was finally ejected from office having left Britain in a dire state, the new administration would be buttressed with widespread political goodwill. What went wrong?

(Image: Leon Neal)

The theory underpinning Starmerism was always a fantasy. That the Tory leadership was low grade is without question, but this was never the key factor driving the British malaise.

The real villain was, rather, an economic model established in the 1980s which, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and the ideologically driven austerity which followed, became self-evidently incapable of meeting the needs of the country or its citizens. The longest squeeze in wages since the defeat of Napoleon was the most telling indicator: Britain was left with typical household incomes a third lower than the comparable nations of Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Productivity growth since 2010 was more than three times lower than the average rate of the previous 13 years.

Britain’s rate of investment has long been consistently the lowest of the G7 nations, and amongst the worst of the OECD grouping of 37 rich economies.

Our public realm has been shredded by real terms cuts, even as the demands of an ageing population grow, leading to disintegrating public services and crumbling infrastructure. A younger generation became saddled with debt, exploited by landlords charging extortionate rents, and often condemned to precarious jobs with poor incomes.

That sense of decline has been felt in so many tangible ways. Privatised utilities we were told would deliver efficiency and competition became defined by rip-off costs and failure, from overcrowded and unpunctual trains to effluent infested waters. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy was beginning to shudder into reverse for poorer citizens.

British visitors to - on paper - less prosperous nations like Spain wondered why their town centres seemed to thrive, in contrast to our streets of dreary chain stores and boarded up shops. The people of Scotland and Wales both wondered - given their consistent rejection of the ideology which led to this malaise - they still suffered the gruesome impacts. Meanwhile, the triumph of Leave in the 2016 EU referendum - and all the resulting upheaval - cannot be understood without these broader economic and social insecurities.

But Starmer clearly believed he would simply be good at doing the job of Prime Minister, as if this was a substitute for having a coherent vision for a crisis-ridden Britain. Those who know him tell a consistent story: that he lacks clear politics of his own, unlike, say, Tony Blair. Instead, he outsourced the politics to a faction of the Labour party described by former Blair advisor turned Labour MP Jon Cruddas as “the most rightwing, illberal faction in the party”.

The only clear worldview this faction has is a burning hatred of the left. Their plan was straightforward: use Starmer as the frontman to deceive the party membership by offering a prospectus of transformative policies such as public ownership, higher taxes on the rich and public investment. Then, with the leadership secured, smash the left and abandon those commitments. The problem is - that is all they had. Corbynism emerged in the first place because the Labour Right was intellectually exhausted and had no answers to the mounting crises of modern Britain. In their years of political exile, that was never rectified.

(Image: Lucy North)

That was quite unlike New Labour, whose intellectual foundations were laid in journals such as Marxism Today, and whose founding figures - whatever my objections to their politics - were clearly substantial people. Their successors are one dimensional, soulless hacks, student politicians turned private lobbyists and management consultants.

There was never any enthusiasm for Starmerism: its victory was entirely driven by Tory self-destruction, from partygate to Liz Truss to stagnating living standards to an imploding English NHS. Pre-election polling found that on key polling measures - public trust it would keep promises, that it understood modern Britain, that it had a good team of leaders, or that it was fit to govern - Labour had substantially weaker ratings than in 2014 under Ed Miliband, just prior to an election defeat.

When the election was called in May, Labour could boast polling of up to 48%. While the polling was clearly off, Labour clearly haemorraghed public support in the weeks running up to election day, despite the Tories running a truly calamitous campaign, securing just 33.7% of the vote on the lowest adult turnout since universal franchise, a similar share as the 2019 electoral calamity and fewer actual votes.

Labour won a landslide in seats, but thanks to a transparently absurd electoral system and the role of Nigel Farage’s Reform in splitting the right-of-centre vote. YouGov polling found 55% of Labour voters cited getting the Tories out as their main reason for their political choice, with just 1% citing Starmer.

But Labour behaved as though it had secured an epic landslide. Alas, its lack of vision or answers to Britain’s plight was swiftly evident. As I warned on these pages during the election, Labour was going to announce there was a black hole of around £20bn when it secured power, and use that to justify austerity, a point also made by the SNP among others. And so it came to pass. Labour had hemmed itself into a corner with the refusal to commit to meaningful tax hikes on the well-off, and a Tory fiscal rule which arbitrarily suppresses desperately needed investment. Both Starmer and Reeves began a campaign of misery, with Starmer announcing “things will get worse before we get better”. But the public had already heard variations of that speech for 14 years under the Tories, from austerity to Brexit. They had rejected the Tories for that reason above all else.

That did not just antagonise voters. Starmer’s claims to competence were shredded by this self-defeating strategy, as relentless pessimism drove business confidence to plummet from minus 12 in August to minus 38 this month, while consumer confidence plummeted to minus 20.

Meanwhile, the “who” was expected to make sacrifices was deeply revealing. Labour refused to scrap a two-child benefit cap which is the biggest single generator of child poverty in modern Britain, and in a sign of the ruling faction’s authoritarian vindictiveness, suspended seven Labour MPs who voted against it. Labour advisors clearly then decided that scrapping the winter fuel payment for most pensioners would cement their ‘grown ups back in the room’ self-image. But it answered that it was always vulnerable people expected to pay for “tough decisions”, with over 800,000 impoverished pensioners eligible for pension credit who don’t receive it hammered, along with over a million struggling pensioners just above the threshold.

As actor Danny Dyer put it: “I don’t trust this man. He got the job handed to him on a plate. So what are you going to do to show us you’re different? And he’s gone straight in on pensioners. I find that fucking fascinating. This is meant to be a working-class party.”

Meanwhile, Chancellor Reeves began preparing government departments for real terms cuts, belying Starmer’s claims that austerity would not return. Undoubtedly, she will raise some taxes on the well-to-do, even as conservative Treasury officials attempt to bury them. But as the Institute for Fiscal Studies point out, Reeves would need to raise up to £25bn a year from higher taxes to avoid austerity - and that’s on top of cuts baked in after 14 years of Toryism, and the pressures of a growing, ageing population. 

(Image: PA)

But the demands for the already struggling to offer yet more sacrifice combined with ministerial avarice caused an explosion of public fury. Starmer himself has received well over £100,000 in freebies and hospitality from rich donors such as Lord Ali, more than every other Labour leader since 1997 put together. Ministers attempted to use their children as human shields, claiming pressure from their offspring forced them to accept free Taylor Swift tickets that ordinary parents - who also had Swiftie sons and daughters - would have to save to pay for.

Starmer could have taken control of the scandal by banning politicians from accepting such freebies: after all, they had salaries much higher than the average Brit, and polling showed voters overwhelmingly wanted such a prohibition, undoubtedly partly because of a wise suspicion such money corrupts democracy. Yet despite knowing the damage the scandal was inflicting, Starmer refused such a move. You can only conclude this is greed: that devoid of principles, senior Labour politicians see such perks as central to the appeal of what should be public service.

Despite bleeding support to independent and Greens over the genocide in Gaza, the government failed to learn lessons. There were some welcome moves, like restoring funding to the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA - which other nations had done months earlier - and ending a vexatious attempt to wreck the International Criminal Court’s case against Israeli leaders. But the government continued to arm Israel, scrapping just 8% of weapons and apologising profusely for doing so. When a young Labour member heckled Starmer during his conference speech over slaughtered Palestinian children, the leader callously joked his detractor had bought a ticket for the 2019 conference, summing up a leadership which scarcely sought to hide the lack of worth that it attached to Palestinian life.

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Devoid of a clear overall mission, the leadership swiftly degenerated into infighting, with the allies of Starmer’s right-wing campaign manager launching an acrimonious briefing war against Sue Gray, top civil servant turned chief of staff, who was then unceremoniously dumped. Rosie Duffield - a Labour MP who could not be dismissed as an irreconcilable leftist rebel - resigned with a vicious attack on the leadership, declaring “sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale”, that Labour’s imposition of hardship on children and pensioners was morally bankrupt, and declaring Starmer had a “lack of basic politics and political instinct.”

When transport secretary Louise Haigh - one of the very few ministers who can be described as effective - rightly denounced P&O as “rogue operators”, Starmer threw her under a bus, protecting a company which sacked hundreds of workers by Zoom.

Here is a classic Greek tragedy, of hubris meeting nemesis. Starmer’s clique clearly believed that having hammered the left with media approval, while the Tories imploded on their own account, that they would continue to play politics on easy mode. Inflated egos, an absence of vision and principle, a dearth of integrity and, yes, competence: all this brutally collided with reality.

Perhaps the leadership will be helped by a Budget which will be forced to offer some answers to mounting crisis: but the refusal to overturn a failed economic model means that won’t last. Labour is assisted by a shambolic Conservative party, but one poll put it just one point ahead of its only recently crushed opposition without even a change of leadership. You cannot rule out this government disintegrating completely in office.

The question is - what happens next? Will the left offer a clear, compelling alternative - or will it be Farageism that prospers, with calamitous consequences for us all? The next 100 days will surely offer some answers.