Keir Starmer Is Hitting the Right Patriotic Notes

Since becoming U.K. Labour Party leader in April, Keir Starmer has wasted no time in overhauling his party. The change of tone and strategy are hitting the mark.

Labour was trailing Boris Johnson’s Conservatives by a jaw-dropping 26 points when Starmer took over, a deficit due in part — though only in part —  to the pandemic-related boost for the government during the early stages of the crisis. In polling conducted in late August, the gap ranged from 7 points to a tie.

Starmer’s personal ratings have also been impressive. His polling matches or betters Johnson’s on many key measures and, unlike his recent predecessors as opposition leader, he’s seen as a potential prime minister in waiting. Significantly, in something akin to a coattails effect, moderates have retaken control of Labour’s key power structure (its National Executive Committee) from the hard left under former leader Jeremy Corbyn.

That makes it much easier for Starmer to return the party to its more centrist pre-Corbyn state. It has also brought about a sea change in Labour’s style of politics, including greater harmony within the party and a far more constructive stance towards less-than-sympathetic voices outside it (including even penning an op-ed in the pro-Conservative Daily Mail).

And yet, even more significant are some of Starmer’s strategic choices. One has been to hammer away at the Tories on the matter of competence. Oppositions oppose, but in every weekly parliamentary appearance and during interviews, Starmer has used his command of data and policy detail to question whether this government has a grip on policy.

The issue of competence is important to voters and a potential weakness for Johnson, who is more of a campaigner than a details person, and whose government has been criticized for missteps and U-turns over the Coronavirus response and its mishandling of this year’s school exam results. Moreover, it appeals to both the left-leaning Labour party faithful and the country by sticking to a point where there’s widespread agreement (that governments should govern well).

Starmer has also been astute on important issues beyond the competence of government, where statements by politicians are essentially an expression of their values.

To see why this matters, it’s important to understand the U.K.’s cultural divide and how it has corresponded to the realignment of British politics since Labour’s last victory in 2005 — well before anyone was talking about Brexit or Corbyn.

The U.K. doesn’t have the sort of culture war seen in the U.S., with extreme partisan polarization and the prominence of policy issues such as abortion and gun control. It does, however, have a political, cultural and corporate establishment that is vastly more socially liberal and politically correct than the public, and a party on the right that senses both political gains for itself in reasserting more traditional conservative values, and political danger for the left in being associated with “wokeness.” Put simply, many of Labour’s lost voters come from the socially conservative side of that divide.

The BBC’s decision to drop the lyrics of two much-loved patriotic songs from a popular summer concert, the Last Night of the Proms, was unpopular not just with conservative commentators but with the wider public, who opposed it by more than three to one. So it was notable that Starmer's response was to defend the pomp and pageantry as “a staple of British summer." Corbyn regularly took positions that were decidedly unpatriotic.

This Labour shift aligns Starmer with the public and marks a clear departure from the recent past. It also fits with his refusal to take hardline stances on other culture war issues such as the removal of colonial-era statues, and reform of the Gender Recognition Act.

At the very least this is avoiding the bait set for him by the Tories or right-leaning parts of the press. More important, it’s a great example of what has been described as moving right on the cultural axis (or at least, back toward the center). These choices suggest the party is learning the lessons of a decade that saw it lose four consecutive elections, and lose districts it had held for generations.

Still, it would be wrong to take this line of thought too far. It is not a silver bullet for all of Labour's complex challenges, such as its weak electoral starting point, its continued struggles in Scotland and the lingering toxicity of the last five years. And there is obviously, at some point, a limit to how far Starmer is able or indeed willing to go down this route.

But it’s hard to overstate the contrast between the current leader and Corbyn and, by extension, between the Labour Party now and the Labour Party that was defeated in December.