LONDON — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his ruling Conservative Party warn voters that if Labour wins the coming election, Britain will become a “one-party socialist state.”
Might sound scary. But where are the socialists?
Labour leader Keir Starmer effectively announced to the country on Thursday that the old Labour Party in Britain is gone.
Out: nationalizing the railways.
In: “wealth creation.”
“Wealth creation is our number one priority, growth is our core business,” pledged Starmer, who called his new movement “changed Labour.”
With relentless, years-long focus, working through complex, interlocking, often secretive committees, Starmer has effectively purged his party of the hard left, denying them not only places on the ballot in Britain’s July 4 elections, but also membership in the organization.
On Thursday, Starmer released his party’s manifesto — all parties in Britain call their platform a “manifesto” — and it was miles away from election pledges of just five years ago.
Out: free college tuition for all.
In: more dentist appointments.
Highlighting the top promises in the manifesto, Starmer stressed that Labour will put more police on the streets to crack down on petty crime and “anti-social behavior,” like public drinking and drug taking.
Starmer vowed not to raise income taxes, national insurance taxes or value-added taxes — for the regular folk.
He repeatedly used the term “working people,” not “the workers” that his predecessors referenced.
Starmer talked about a new industrial policy and national infrastructure and vowed to make homeownership less a dream and more a reality.
In the last general election in 2019, then-Labour leader Jermey Corbyn — whose deputy listed his favorite book as Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” — promised free college tuition and free at-home personal care for the elderly. Corbyn said his party would nationalize the railways, the utilities, the mail service, water companies and broadband internet.
Corbyn lost in a landslide to the Brexiteer Boris Johnson. Starmer concluded that Labour must return to the center — and especially must purge the party of “the stain of antisemitism” created when pro-Palestinian voices crossed the line into anti-Israel, anti-Jewish hate.
Corbyn wasn’t just muffled, he was pushed out of the party by Starmer and his centrist allies. Corbyn will now run for his old seat in Parliament as an independent.
Luke Tryl, director of More in Common, a British think tank, said: “He has detoxified the Labour brand, focused on national security, where there were concerns about Corbyn, and he’s seen to be fiscally responsible. He’s trying to convince soft Tories, ‘Look, it’s okay if you vote for the Labour Party, we won’t do anything to upend things.’”
Welcome to a “changed Labour Party,” as Starmer referred to it a dozen times in a speech in Manchester launching the manifesto.
A heckler briefly interrupted, accusing Starmer of pitching the “same old Tory policies” and letting young people down.
Starmer declared, “We gave up being a party of protest five years ago. We want to be a party of power,” as the protester was removed by security.
The last winning Labour leader was Tony Blair, who served as prime minister from 1997 to 2007. Since then, Blair has become an object of derision on the Labour’s hard left, which excoriated his supporters as “Blairites” and “revanchists.”
They especially hated Blair for swallowing President George W. Bush’s falsehoods that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction — nuclear and biological — that drew Britain into the long war in Iraq.
Blair was the leader of “New Labour,” a more centrist movement that felt similar to the moderate, triangulating Democrats under Blair’s ally and Bush’s predecessor as president, Bill Clinton.
A few weeks ago, Starmer surprised some voters when he declared himself still a socialist. (As a young man, Starmer served as the editor of a Trotskyite magazine called Socialist Alternatives.)
“I would describe myself as a socialist. I describe myself as a progressive. I’d describe myself as somebody who always puts the country first and party second,” Starmer said.
His deputy Rachel Reeves wasn’t so comfortable with that. Asked if she, too, was a socialist, she called herself a social Democrat instead.
Martin Baxter, chief executive of Electoral Calculus, a political consulting firm, said Starmer’s recent declaration may be seen as a slightly cynical way of shoring up his left-wing base, or he might believe that some of his policies have a socialist tinge.
“Socialist” is not a word that colleagues would use to describe Starmer these days.
“Does Keir Starmer know what a socialist is?” asked the Socialist Worker newspaper in a headline.
Some critics call Starmer “relentless” and “ruthless” when observing his attempt to reinvent the Labour Party.
Others use words like “boring” or “dull.” His own PR teams pushes the line that he is “no-drama Starmer.” (Which isn’t quite as catchy as “no-drama Obama” was.)
Starmer is not running a flashy campaign. No jazz hands here. And that’s deliberate. “If you’re 20 points up in the polls, no need to spook the voters,” said Tryl, from the More in Common think tank.
Both Sunak and Starmer faced interviews Wednesday night. Sky News’s Beth Rigby kicked off her grilling of Starmer this way: “You told the country Jeremy Corbyn would make a great prime minister. You then expelled him from Labour. You campaigned for a second E.U. referendum. Now you don’t talk about the E.U. And you dumped all the left-wing policies. … Your short political career is a catalogue actually of broken promises and changed positions.”
Starmer responded that he had responsibly put the party back on track after the 2019 election. “When you lose that badly, you don’t look to voters and say, ‘What on earth do you think you were doing?’ You look at your party and say, we have to change.”
Baxter noted that Starmer “looks sensible and he’s not off-putting” to many people, but his support isn’t deep. “It’s driven by an anti-Conservative feeling.”
So far, Labour’s large lead in voter intent surveys appears to be more of a case of the Conservatives on course to lose the election than Labour winning it.
Nonetheless, support for Labour is broad and consistent. Labour is polling ahead of Conservative in every age group under 70, and it has been 20 points up for some time. When Blair swept to power in 1997 with a landslide, Labour was only 13 percentage points ahead in the polls.
Starmer is trying a big-tent strategy, hoping to appeal to as many people as possible.