The Politics of Keir Starmer--and What Might Happen if a General Election Was Indeed Called Now

With the resignation of Liz Truss there is talk of call of a general election.

My thought is that it is mostly talk since the governing party has ample opportunity to avoid one for more than two years in anything like the present situation, and, given public feeling toward it (bluntly put, extreme disgust with the recent turmoil evident at the top of the Conservative Party), expected to make the most of that opportunity.

Still, the possibility would seem to have increased the interest in the politics of opposition leader Keir Starmer (who has, of course, called for such an election).

Last year I published a working paper analyzing Keir Starmer's political rhetoric as a way of considering that matter, focusing on his February 2020 leadership contest pledges and his "New Chapter for Britain" speech one year later. My conclusion in it was that Starmer's contest pledges could safely be considered a solidly social democratic platform--while his speech one year later showed him, to put it mildly, less than stalwart in that stance. Before the year was out he declared himself ready to break those pledges for the sake of "electability" and then this year formally abandoned them altogether, while, in case there was any doubt left that he was in fact a centrist neoliberal New Labour Blairite pretending not to be one (because 2022 is a long way from 1997), he confirmed it amply at just about every opportunity since, down to his keynote speech at the party conference in Liverpool last month (my reading of which you can find here).

The result is that if there were an election in the very near term we would see a neoliberal-pretending-to-not-be-a-neoliberal New Labour-led party running against a Conservative Party whose fundamental neoliberalism endures in spite of its misunderstood populist poses--with, in centrist eyes, the Blairite looking like possibly the more competent custodian of a neoliberal economic regime (the more easily as the bar is set so low these days for competence in this as in any other sphere of political life). Popular feeling and elite support alike would likely converge in the return of Labour to government, with said Labour government fulfilling those expectations of a more competent neoliberal regime squarely prioritizing the needs of investors over those of working people (smaller budget deficits paid for by service cuts, etc.), and being applauded it for it by those centrists who so adore phrases like "adults in the room," as the voters who had actually expected "change" grumble about having been "fooled again.

How does that saying go again? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . ."