The Labour Party are predicted to win executive power with certainty of about 95%. Poll after poll has the Labour Party at around 20 points and expected to win over 440 seats. Kir Starmer is most likely going to be our next Prime Minister and the shadow cabinet will turn into the government. That is the prediction. Yet, this is all really because the only other realistic alternative is so unpalletable. We will have a dig down into the extend that the Labour Party is the next party of government.
Governments do not tend to last for longer than 4 General Election cycles. 3 is the average, but with the way Prime Ministers can call General Elections at almost any time the actual time in office should be looked at more. Administrations tend to last at a push around 13 years if they are very good or the alternative is seen as sheer lunacy. The Tories have been in power for 14 years. They have reached the natural endgame for the time being. In order to govern for any longer you would need to completely reinvent yourself which is really difficult to do when you are in government. The roots of the status quo grow deep into the soil and it becomes simply impossible to become something new. The Tories have tried this with multiple Prime Ministers but they have ended up quite consistent in the one-nation-Tory wheelhouse, aside from Liz Truss. People are jaded with the Tories being in power. Broken promises, a stagnant economy and a lack of conservatism have made the Tories a socially liberal muddle of individuals playing for time.
So, what is the Labour Party then? In opposition it has reinvented itself twice. It became a more hard-left organisation under Jeremy Corbyn and then was dragged back to the centre by Kir Starmer. One should, however, not underestimate the damage Jeremy Corbyn did to the party. People were shocked, worried and appalled by the sheer ease by which the party became more hard-left, more intolerant, more militant and very anti-Semitic and it took independent investigations from organizations including the police to expose the dark turn the party had gone down. Kir Starmer has done an incredible job to root out the Corbyn legacy and to dispel the worrying reputation the party had. He does, however, have snarling hard-left MPs sitting behind him in the backbenches waiting for a chance to get their way, and well might they if the Labour Party win by a small majority, but more on this later. The Labour Party is now much more Blairite, with their ex-leader Gordon Brown setting some interesting plans into the party’s policy that show the Middle Way Socialists are back in the game. Starmer, who let us not forget was in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet as a senior shadow minister, is tasked with holding together a broad leftist-coalition of the hard left, centrists and social democrats as well as reaching out to fiscal conservatives as well to try to achieve a parliamentary majority. This is an unenviable task for sure.
Kir Starmer has been fighting a very quiet campaign. Where once he was desperate for airtime in order to show a new face of the party, as well as trying to put it back into the minds of people, he has now decided to go somewhat under the radar. Where once he was photographed taking the knee with Deputy Leader Angela Rayner in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement (overtly Marxist and under serious investigation for embezzlement), he is now doing and saying very little of note. He has, instead, let the Tories knock themselves out of office. “Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake” said the great Sun Tzu in his books “The Art of War” and you can forgive him for doing this. In order to keep his broad coalition together has to essentially say very little. If he declares himself a patriot, for example, he alienates the hard-left. If he declares himself a major supporter of tax-and-spend economics he alienates fiscal conservatives. He needs to walk a tight-rope of this coalition and to a large extent he is doing just that. He is a good communicator but not a great one. His speeches tend to confirm policy, to provide reaction to events and issues and to outline changes of thought. His speeches do not inspire, they do not change minds and they do not reassure. He is just not that good at it. This means that in the absence of speaking to change minds one should not speak to let minds assume him into power. Joe Biden did this very well in America though one should not make too many comparisons with a distinctly different American electoral system.
The Labour Party have yet to publish a manifesto. You may be reading this when one has been published but we have yet to see one right now. Usually manifestos are released as early as possible to let people read, digest and support bits, most or all of the text before them. Ambiguity is not a quality in elections and the Labour Party will need to remove this ambiguity. The problem is that this election was called quickly and has taken the Labour Party by surprise, and also it is almost certain that they are drafting a manifesto. The problem they have is that they need to satisfy the demands of what has been outlined already in this article; they need to keep the coalition together. Starmer can throw red meat to the different red factions but when it comes to a manifesto and policy there is no hiding. It is certain that there is a great amount of argument from many factions of the Labour Party over what it is they will campaign for. There will be deals, Faustian bargains, shrewd manoeuvres and all sorts of political intrigue that will litter the manifesto. For a party that is sure to win the election this will be the toughest part. When publishing a manifesto to try to win an election there will be a huge amount of expediency in order to try to win votes. The Labour Party simply has to publish a manifesto so that it does not lose the election it is due to win. Therefore there can be policies that will be unpopular but not unpopular enough to lose them the giant lead they have in the polls. The manifesto, with a 95% probability of becoming a political mandate, will therefore be heavily fought over by all of the wings of the party. We might have to wait a bit longer to see it! In fairness, no other party has published one either; but the Labour one will be the most interesting.
Make no mistake, Labour is not popular, but under the electoral system we have (shared only with Belarus), you don’t have to be popular; you just have to be more popular than the other party. The Party will most likely not achieve even 50% of the vote, though this is normal in our electoral system too. What will most likely happen is that the non-voters will vastly outnumber Labour voters. What will be interesting is the factor that people who don’t like the Tories are not exactly going to vote Labour instead; they will either not vote or spoil their ballot, or perhaps a third party will offer a genuine protest vote alternative. This will be a far more local element, though if a third party captures the national sentiment then maybe all bets are off; and that is why Labour’s lead is not so salient. They are currently ahead by default, and the ‘none of the above’ choice far outpaces the Labour support in the country. There is some residual fear in the country of a party that only 2 and a half years ago was campaigning for socialist policies not seen since the days of Micheal Foot in the early 1980s. The party still has some interesting individuals within it that have been very happy to engage in sectarian issues and unpopular woke politics (woke being synonymous with cultural Marxism). Though Jeremy Corbyn has been thrown out of the party and the fate of Diane Abbott’s future within the party not yet certain there may be some movement still left to go, but there is still a fear.
One final thing should be worth noting here. For those who fear the Labour Party and a decent sized faction’s hard left agenda be it on lowering the voting age, gender issues or relaxed attitude to immigration within the party, a big Labour majority might actually be something to hope for. There are a good number of incumbent Labour MPs that are on the hard left of the party, but if there are a flood of new Labour Party MPs chosen by the centrists then it would make the hard-left of the party much weaker. A weak Labour majority makes the hard-left faction strong as it can demand policies from the executive in exchange for voting numbers in the House of Commons. A strong Labour majority makes the hard-left power and voting numbers far less important. There are very interesting dynamics going on here for the Labour Party and so it is important to distinguish between reality and playing politics. The party will need to do both.
In this election Kir Starmer will need to show that he is a capable Prime Minister, capable of managing the United Kingdom. As people focus far more on domestic problems as they mount up, and as the rest of the western world seeks answers from the right of the political divide following over 30 years of a failure of the established status quo to provide their own answers, the Labour Party will need to show a credible left-of-centre answer to the growing crises of the day. From the crisis of mass migration for the continent and the UK to the growing indebtedness of nations and people and the rise in radical Islamism the Labour Party will need to go against the trend by providing socially democratic solutions. The problem is that this has been the prevailing theme for the Tories too. For 14 years the Tories have been trying to out-Labour Labour, which caused the Labour Party to lurch to the hard-left. Now the Labour and Tory tanks are on the same lawn will people really want to stick to that lawn? Or is there another lawn? In a summer election lawns are very much the focus of voters and barbecue fans.
This article first appeared on the TDL Times. For more information, articles, and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.
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