What is Keir Starmer Promising His Voters?

The Labour Party's June 13 release of its General Election Manifesto a mere three weeks before the day of the election leaves little time for the publishing of a really thorough, researched, grounded appraisal. Nevertheless, for what it is worth I offer my two efforts, "Contextualizing the Labour Party's 2024 General Election Manifesto: A Note," and "Keir Starmer's Ten Pledges and the Labour Party's 2024 General Election Manifesto."

The first item addresses what the Manifesto, read in light of Starmer's prior statements and recent British political and economic history, reveals about Starmer's broad economic and social vision, and his more specific stances on fundamental aspects of economic policy (fiscal and monetary policy, the private/public balance, etc.).

The second revisits Starmer's ten pledges from the 2020 leadership contest and, producing a set of twenty smaller identifiable, testable, promises made under their headings, reads the Manifesto with an eye to whether or not it carries forward those promises one by one.

The results strike me as unsurprising for anyone who has been paying even a little attention to British politics these past few years. Just as has been the case since the leadership contest Starmer, if at times endeavoring to sound like a radical and promise a few deviations from the orthodoxy of the last few decades in a way that would have been unthinkable for Tony Blair (as with his acknowledgments of inequality, or promises about Great British Railways and Great British Energy), he has on the whole striven to prove himself what journalists of conventional, mediocre and little mind call "electable"--someone who is in no way a "deal-breaker" for elites who have been in less and less of a mood to compromise for decades. That is to say that Starmer has endeavored to persuade everyone that he is a centrist in politics, a neoliberal in the economic and socioeconomic realm, a neoconservative in foreign policy, and the Manifesto testifies to that, so much so that it looks as if, amid the chaos that makes it look to some as if their normally preferred party may have dealt itself blows from which it will not recover anytime soon, said elite will accommodate themselves to the beginning of another stretch of conservative government by Labour of the kind that they abided for a third of the last century as the left again feels betrayed and frustrated--all of which, of course, is a feature and not a bug of such politics.