Keir Starmer Resigns: Can Anyone Survive as Prime Minister in Today’s Britain?

Yves here. Your humble blogger is not remotely well-versed in UK politics to discuss Starmer’s long overdue departure and the new Labor leadership contest in any detail. However, this article has some points that I find interesting and hopefully will spark an informed discussion. For example, it makes an unwise comparison between the decline in Corbyn’s popularity ratings and that of Starmer, when Corbyn (like Sanders but obviously he was) was on the brink of a massive media campaign against him, centered on false accusations of anti-Semitism.

The article posted by Micael T may serve as a useful tip. From Anti-politics Starmer goes after the revival of the 90s. From the top:

Less than two years after his record election victory, Keir Starmer’s ill-conceived project has collapsed. His political legacy is the defeat of Corbynism, the imprisoning of pensioners and the lack of vision that makes Tony Blair seem like a great figure.

When Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday morning, few cried. Even his most devoted supporters can no longer muster the enthusiasm for the empty package of ideas that Starmer’s project launched from day one.

To understand how a person like Teflon, who has no previous experience as an elected politician, can become the prime minister, one must remember the context in which his career began. It was as a partner of left-wing Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn that Starmer first made a name for himself in politics – after a long stint as a prosecutor where, among other things, he brought in left-wing political activists.

That background in the Corbyn camp initially gave Starmer’s project a certain left-wing veneer, although he did everything in his power to destroy it. When he was appointed party leader after losing the 2019 election, it wasn’t long before Sir Keir showed where he really stood. Corbyn was expelled from his party and hundreds of thousands of members who had joined Labor under his leadership, making the party the largest in Western Europe, were silenced or expelled if they had not left of their own accord. In retrospect, it’s hard not to see this as Starmer’s main legacy: restoring Labor as a centrist party.

When Labor won the general election in the summer of 2024, it was more a result of the Tory party breaking up after nearly 15 years in power than any enthusiasm for a new Labor plan. It was certainly more left-leaning than it had been for a long time, a result of the general influence of the Corbyn era on the political left. But how little could be expected from Starmer’s government was clear even before he took office.

Less than a year after Liz Truss’s disastrous experiment with unfunded tax cuts in the area of ​​increased income in the autumn of 2023, Starmer’s advisers had learned their lesson: all expansion plans will be stopped – the voters will understand that they did not expect much, because this was a responsible government. In many ways, the Starmer era was a remaking of the politics of the 1990s. Accountability and austerity once again became guidelines, surface was prioritized over materiality, politics became a matter of communication rather than action, reform was a word overused in discussions rather than actually worked for.

The difference, however, is that none of the third-way socialists of the 90s even come close to Starmer’s complete lack of vision.

By Nicholas Dickinson, Lecturer in Politics, University of Exeter. Originally published on The Conversation

Keir Starmer resigned as leader of the Labor party, and later as UK prime minister. Eventually, despite his many assurances that he would continue to fight, after Andy Burnham’s resounding win in the Makerfield by-election, the pressure on Starmer became too much for him to handle. It makes him the sixth British Prime Minister in ten years to step down.

The immediate reason for his decision is the ultimate failure of support for him in the party and the cabinet, which was revealed in private conversations over the weekend. In setting out his plans, Starmer avoided the string of resignations that brought down Conservative PMs Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

The overall aim appears to be more orderly change – “with good grace” – than those under recent Conservative governments. However, his emotional speech reflecting on his time in office still highlights a leader who knows he has failed.

Starmer was not popular the day before he entered 10 Downing Street. On the eve of the 2024 general election, his overall satisfaction rating with Ipsos stood at minus 21. This was a historic low for the incoming prime minister. Although 31% of the public said they are satisfied with the way he is working, 52% are not satisfied, which means that this is the first time a leader gets a majority in parliament when he is not well received.

But in the British political landscape since the Brexit referendum, such figures seemed unusual. Starmer’s predecessor Rishi Sunak entered the 2024 campaign with an overall satisfaction rating of minus 56, according to YouGov.

At the time, I argued that Starmer was likely to see a surge in popularity as he achieved a Labor victory after 14 long years. In 1997, Tony Blair enjoyed a record-breaking honeymoon with satisfaction ratings rising to 60 in the months following his victory. Even David Cameron saw his approval rating rise to 21 shortly after forming a coalition in 2010. The prime minister’s office usually gives the ability to a new person.

Starmer’s popularity has really taken off. But only a kind of thermal neutrality. Immediately after the election, his popularity rose to 3 in Opinium’s first post-election poll, while YouGov recorded a similarly rapid recovery and nearly broke even. Unlike the sustained euphoria of the Blair years, Starmer’s “explosion” was a shallow recovery that barely lifted him above the waterline before the tide turned again.

At the same time, measured by his majority, he seemed to be in an unassailable position. Yet the same could have been (and indeed was) said of Boris Johnson. After the 2019 election, the talk was of the Conservatives achieving a “decade of governance”, saying that the restructuring of the “red wall” structure had created an almost permanent Tory majority that would keep Labor out of business until the 2030s. In this event, Johnson was out after three years and the talk is now about the demise of the Conservatives.

A Dangerous Pattern

Where did it go wrong for Starmer? Ironically, the answer can be found in the fate of his predecessor as Labor leader. Jeremy Corbyn’s record now looks like Starmer’s. Between 2017 and 2019, Corbyn’s personal ratings dropped from a competitive minus 11 during the 2017 campaign to a disastrous minus 44 at the time of his defeat in 2019. Meanwhile, the strategic ambiguity that once gripped his coalition collapsed under the pressure of Brexit.

Starmer’s rise and fall took almost exactly the same amount of time. And it happened for a similar set of reasons that both sides of the Labor party’s ideological divide were reluctant to accept. In both 2017-2019 and 2022-24, Labour’s fragile poll lead was driven less by opposition enthusiasm and more by the government’s decline. As the data from the 2024 “landslide without love” showed, Labor got about 64% of the seats on only 34% of the votes – the lowest share of any major government in history.

Just as Corbyn was pressured by the Populist-right Brexit party and the EU center party Liberal Democrats in 2019 for his middle-of-the-road position on Brexit, Starmer faced similar pincer movements in the mid-2020s. On the other hand, Reform UK destroyed the labor vote in the post-industrial areas; on the other hand, the Green Party and pro-Gaza independents have successfully targeted urban progressives. The Greens ended up winning four MPs in 2024 and independents made historic gains in strong Labor areas.

Labor’s election results in office reflected this – by-election losses for both Reform UK and the Greens, disastrous local election results in England, and the failure to oust the struggling and embattled Scottish National Party north of the border.

Fittingly, this latest resignation took place nearly a decade to the day of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Make no mistake, the divisions created and deepened by the Brexit moment are still at the heart of British politics – even if many people have forgotten the details of that conflict.

As Professor Tim Bale has recently argued, British politics is best seen as an example of a two-block divide. Voters are locked into identity-based camps and the Brexit position is a key variable. However this fact is overshadowed by the fact that these blocs are internally divided and from time to time face the problem head on.

While voters may occasionally rally against a common enemy, they remain divided on other policy issues, leaving leaders like Starmer (or Corbyn, for that matter) scrambling to cobble together a sandcastle coalition that crumbles when the tide comes.