Starmer is already preparing for yet more U-turns when elected

  • Post last modified:June 30, 2024
  • Reading time:12 mins read


Keir Starmer is famous for two things:

  1. Being the guy people sort of recognise as the man who runs the Labour Party.
  2. U-turns.

Given the second, everything Starmer says or does should invite the question: ‘how is he setting himself up to U-turn on this later?’

Starmer has made a lot of promises in this general election, and that means he’s going to be doing a lot of U-turning over the next few years. Our guess is he’ll find two-to-three big omni-excuses for these U-turns, and on Saturday 29 June he unveiled what we predict will be among the biggest:

The seeds of this U-turn?

Specifically, the vague and ill-defined term that is “clear mandate”.

The least clear man in politics

Throughout this election campaign, poll after poll has predicted a Labour super majority:

Recent polling suggests Labour could do worse than some of these earlier predictions, but there’s still “no real uncertainty about who’s going to win”:

Recent reporting, meanwhile, has noted that Labour itself is less certain of these figures:

A private memo from Labour’s campaign chief, Pat McFadden, sent to candidates on Friday says “up to a quarter of voters are yet to make up their minds”.

That is way more than most of the polls suggest when they report on undecided voters, estimated to be around five million people.

But Labour takes into consideration not just the “undecideds” but also, the “uncertains”, which could make up another three million.

These are people who, if asked, tell pollsters that they have chosen which party to back, but when asked how sure they are about their choice, they swither.

By the time you factor in turnout, the estimate at Labour HQ is that there are around seven million or so voters who have not yet made their minds up. The final decisions of that huge number of people will clearly have a massive impact on the eventual outcome.

That’s why, in the next couple of days, as the campaign enters its final phase, Labour HQ will start shifting its message.

If you’ve spoken to a range of people over this election cycle, you can probably understand where this worry is coming from. People are done with the Tories, but no one is enthused about Labour. There seems to be far fewer support placards on people’s houses than you usually see. And, as the Canary’s Steve Topple previously predicted, it feels like this will be the lowest voter turnout we’ve had in years.

Given the above, the Labour faithful will argue that Starmer isn’t getting his excuses in early; he’s instead trying to ensure people get out and vote.

To explain why we think otherwise, let’s look at what the man actually said.

Let him be clear

‘Starmer is just inspiring people to get out and vote’, they’ll tell you.

If that’s the case, why does his piece in the Guardian contain passages like this:

I am sure there are some people who would prefer a less sober message. But the Tories have kicked the hope out of people so thoroughly, to expect a chorus of optimism would be like scattering seeds on stony ground.

Feel inspired to get out and vote?

What he’s superficially arguing in this depressing passage is that ‘people aren’t responding enthusiastically to us because of the Tories‘, when both he and everyone else knows that people aren’t responding enthusiastically to him because he is a Tory.

This is the sort of double-talk he deals in. And it’s why we need to pay close attention to the following, which he says after listing all the things he claims to want to achieve in government:

Yet to do that we would need a clear mandate. With problems this big, Britain needs strong government. Part of the story of Tory chaos is the attempt, under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, to govern without that mandate. It doesn’t work. If you want change, you have to vote for it.

What precisely is a “clear mandate”?

The argument seems to be that Sunak and Truss didn’t have clear mandates because they never won an election, but this would suggest the David Cameron and Boris Johnson governments weren’t chaotic. Lest we forget, Cameron’s majority was swiftly followed by Brexit and then resignation; Johnson’s majority was followed by more chaos than you could shake a Covid swab at (and then resignation).

Starmer’s problem is that while a parliamentary majority does indeed facilitate change, that’s only useful if you intend to legitimately change things.

For all Labour’s talk of improving the country, we have the manifesto now, and we know it’s a continuation of Tory austerity. This means that when nothing changes – which it won’t – people will ask Starmer why nothing is happening when he has the numbers to do anything.

In other words, the greater the majority, the less believable his excuses will be.

And so he will need a new narrative.

Starmer chameleon

It looks almost certain that Labour will get a majority, but it’s not certain they’ll get a “clear mandate”, because it’s unclear what a clear mandate even is. If Labour underperforms and smaller parties do better than expected, the ‘lack of a clear mandate’ line gives Starmer an opportunity to U-turn on his half-decent proposals and to excuse the failures of the rest.

We’re confident making this prediction about Starmer because we’ve seen it before – specifically with Starmer himself.

Starmer became the Labour leader on the back of ’10 Pledges’. As soon as he was leader, he dropped these pledges one by one until none remained:

In Starmer’s latest piece, we can see the excuse he gives for abandoning and U-turning on these early (and popular) pledges:

And we will break with recent years by always putting country before party.

This last point cannot be overstated. It is why, over the course of the past four-and-a-half years, we have had to be so uncompromising in changing the Labour party.

Lying to get into power and then backtracking was an act of putting “country before party”. For reference, here are the pledges he made back then – pledges which would have benefitted the entire country, and not just the minority of wealthy donors and mainstream journalists Starmer is trying to win over:

Keir Starmer's 10 PledgesKeir Starmer's 10 Pledges

Expect Starmer to point at Reform’s rise as the reason why he tacks further towards the far-right, with the explanation being that he’s ‘listening to the country’. Just don’t expect him to use any success enjoyed by Greens as a reason to invest in the environment, because that’s not who he is. We’ve seen who he is, over and over again.

It’s time to start believing the clarity of his actions over the murkiness of his words.

Featured image via the Canary





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