The re-election of Donald Trump spells some extremely awkward questions for the Starmer government. The ultimate approach the Trump administration will take to relations with the UK is unclear. Elon Musk has for some reason got a real bee in his bonnet about how dreadful and unbearable life in the UK has become, the solution to which is obviously unrestrained deregulation, a Tesla and/or Cybertruck which is fully on fire, and blasting stuff into space for reasons which are totally obscure to everyone other than the most enlightened of parasitic billionaires. Nigel Farage, recently elected as MP for Clacton after years of trying, seems keen to act as an unofficial ambassador to the UK. Farage travelled to the US from 17th to 19th July following Trump’s first assassination attempt, funded to the tune of £35,000 by Christopher Harborne. According to records held by the Electoral Commission, between April 2019 and February 2022, Harborne, a British-born software investor and millionaire resident in Thailand, has donated £13.7m to Reform UK (previously known as the Brexit Party). In November 2022, Harborne donated £1m to Boris Johnson’s personal office, one of the largest individual donations in British political history. The forces of the political right will try and exploit a UK government which feels pressured to pander to the Trump administration.
While a Democratic loss was always a likely result, the loss of both the Electoral College and the popular vote sent shockwaves through a liberal establishment on both sides of the Atlantic, the failure of a campaign which stuck stolidly to a tired, centrist orthodoxy. In a recent ‘analysis’ published in The Guardian, Deborah Mattinson and Claire Ainsley represented what they proposed were some lessons to be learned from Harris’ defeat. Both hail from the world of the Starmerite left; Mattinson was Starmer’s director of strategy until July of this year, and Ainsley was his director of policy until December 2022. Both also work in the fields of political strategy and advising. Ainsley is currently director of the Left Renewal Project, run by the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington DC-based think thank, and and chairman of the Building Back Britain Commission, a policy organ commissioned by UK-based corporations, including Microsoft, Gatwick Airport, and British Land, a real estate company specialising in commercial real estate. Mattinson was until July a director and board trustee of ThinksInsights, a political consultancy.
In their article, published in anticipation of a longer report by the Progressive Policy Institute along the same lines, they extract a few lessons which the Labour Party can apparently learn from the Democrats’ defeat. The article relies on a direct comparison between the 2019 UK General Election and the 2024 Presidential Election:
The US election triggered a scary deja vu (sic) moment for those of us who had watched the 2019 UK general election from behind our sofas, hands over our eyes. The Democrats lost votes with almost everyone, almost everywhere, but, like Labour in the “red wall”, most dramatically with traditional heartland voters: working-class, low-paid, non-graduates. And, like Labour back in 2019, that lost connection with core voters had not happened overnight.
The claim that both contests are similar and present lessons for the left, in the article at least, lacks any substance and justification. For those of you who are curious how this comparison might be expanded, I would not suggest that you read the article, because it is not. Indeed, it ends with an encomium on the new Labour government, urging it to ‘continue to channel its powerful change message in government, reflecting the anti-establishment mood that now exists both sides of the Atlantic’ and ‘needs a strong overarching narrative and a plan to reform government and the economy so it can truly deliver back to the hero voters that delivered its electoral success in July’. This is a comparison which appeals to Labour right insiders who are convinced that the 2019 election represented incontrovertible proof that left wing politics do not work in Britain, and would probably be pretty catastrophic even if it did. It is not what ‘ordinary people’ want. However, this comparison is dumb and masks a number of striking similarities between the Labour and Democrat campaigns.
A report by Compass, a Labour-left aligned think thank, recently underlined the fragility of the electoral victory. In 2024, Labour only increased their 2019 vote share by 1.8%, with only 10% of Tory voters from 2019 switching to Labour in the most recent election. According to their analysis, 202 Labour victories were so-called ‘regressive tragedies’ (yeah, I don’t know where they got that from) whereby the overall vote for right-wing candidates was greater, with the progressive Labour candidate benefiting from a split in the right-wing vote, almost always split between the Conservatives and Reform. Reform came second in 98 seats in 2024, 89 of which were Labour wins. In other words, Labour got lucky. The Sunak government was historically unpopular and so they had no plausible challengers to lead the next government, but the electoral arithmetic means that Labour are in government but essentially lacking a convincing mandate. For all the talk of a coalition of ‘hero voters’ (not least from Labour right campaigning group, Labour Together), this is not something which materialised.
The Democrats made many, many, many, many, many ad nauseam mistakes and ran a poor campaign which failed to reflect some of the political realities of American society. However, the centre right politics which defined the Harris campaign is readily identified in many of the policy positions adopted by the Starmer’s Labour. The government have conceded to the far-right on the issue of immigration, that it is a net negative and the solution is greater law enforcement and restriction on the ability of desperate people from around the world the claim asylum in the UK. According to government figures, 13,500 people have been deported for working illegally in the UK and the Starmer government has pledged £8m for the rollout of body-worn cameras and biometric fingerprinting kits to immigration officers. The message is clear: increase enforcement, enforce aggressively, and frustrate asylum applications. Polling suggests that accepting to far-right logic of such policy decisions will convince no-one. Compass’ report suggests that the 10% of Conservative voters who did vote for Labour in 2024 are very unlikely to return to the party, with 33% of such voters reporting that they regretted their vote. Policies like this also erode support within Labour’s base; 17% of Labour voters report that they regretted their vote. According to polling conducted by More in Common, 27% of Labour voters considered voting for the Liberal Democrats and 23% for the Green Party. The challenge from Reform is acute and one which deserves attention and needs action, but as your writer has previously reported, Labour can and were successfully challenged from their left in the 2024 election.
The idea that Labour has regained its traditional heartlands is simply untrue. Conservative support in northern, former-industrial seats which largely given to Reform rather than returned to the Labour Party. The Tories swept many of the northern seats with very narrow majorities in 2019 in an election which was dominated by Brexit (on which Labour had never settled on a coherent policy), immigration (as a proxy of the former), and with the benefit of a media environment which was extremely hostile against Jeremy Corbyn. In 2024, the dial had shifted: the Tories were (and remain) historically unpopular and the media establishment was largely hedging its bets that Labour would win. Organs like The Guardian, at the best of times extremely sceptical of if not actively hostile towards Corbyn’s Labour, has been an enthusiastic cheerleader of Starmer’s government, even when it is difficult to put a positive spin on their disappointing record thus far. For whatever other mistakes Labour made in 2019, no one can argue that their policy offering did not offer clear differences from the incumbent government was one of them. Since Labour has failed to convincingly regain the support of voters in these constituencies, Compass estimate that an average swing of 5.2% away from Labour would result in a victory for the best-placed challenger (Reform in 45 seats and the Tories in 147 seats).
In many respects, Starmer has simply inherited and continued the political stagnation left him by Rishi Sunak, PM until July 2024. A policy vacuum for the first three months of their tenure was filled by infighting which culminated in Sue Gray’s sacking. The October budget has not proved to be the political reset it was hoped to be, and seems to have infuriated and disappointing everyone in equal measure. The government has now walked back their initial promises to ten ‘pledges’ (narrow policy goals which the government feel are deliverable and achievable), though this rings of yet another attempt to convince people that Labour is actually doing something. Many worry if even these are deliverable. For example, Starmer has committed to ensuring that 92% of patients should be seen within 18 weeks for hospital treatment by 2029; the current figure is around 58% according to NHS. According to reporting by Private Eye and The Times there are concerns within the NHS management that services will have to cut and staff reallocated in order to meet this target. In October 2024, 7.5m patients in England were waiting to start consultant-led treatment in hospitals, which equates to around 6.3m individuals (since often those with complex health conditions are waiting to be seen by multiple specialists). The pursuit of a target which rescues Starmer’s political reputation to the detriment of health outcomes within the NHS will surely prove to be self-defeating.
Labour in the UK and the Democrats in America are centrist parties that ran on policy platforms which sought to preserve and shore up a liberal democratic and capitalists consensus. Labour were not the incumbents, whilst unfortunately for them the Democrats were, though this is not the only major difference between the two. The Labour right would love it to be the case that Corbyn’s loss in 2019 and Harris’ loss in November are ultimately a product of the same political logic, but there is no evidence this is the case. It is simply one of a number of platitudes and myths Starmer’s inner circle and public supporters are comforting themselves with. We do not know how likely or easy a Conservative path to power will be in 2029 and there is no point speculating now. What we do know is that Labour’s path to power in 2024 was a fragile one and which will be difficult to preserve with the disadvantage of incumbency. Matinnson and Ainsley are wrong in their central contention, the Corbyn and Harris projects (to the extent that the latter existed in any meaningful sense) were fundamentally at odds with each other and failed to register with voters for entirely different reasons which have little bearing on one another. They are correct that Labour has lessons to learn from the Democrats, though they severely misdiagnose what they are. Whether they and other Starmer cheerleaders will feel the need to admit fault in the coming years and if the disappointing trajectory his government is on continues, we shall see. Based on previous experiences, your writer thinks its more likely that the Cybertruck will be made road legal in the UK. On the other hand, perhaps that example is tempting fate.
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