“First real Labour leader working–class For several generations, Keir Starmer has been an ordinary man, in the best sense of the word.” This comment, signed by Tom Baldwin, his biographer, is essential to understanding the personality of the probable future British Prime Minister. According to partial results, his party has already secured more than 340 seats, more than the 326 seats needed to obtain an absolute majority in the House of Commons and to be able to form the future British government alone, during these legislative elections organized Thursday July 4 in the United Kingdom.
With Keir Starmer, the United Kingdom not only turns the page on fourteen years of conservatism, but also gets rid of a series of prime ministers educated in public schools like Eton, where tuition fees are £50,000 a year and whose students, like David Cameron and Boris Johnson, see politics as a game without consequences.
“Starmer has nothing but contempt for this decadent frivolity,” Baldwin asserts. “For him, integrity means something.” It would come, he continues, from football “which was a refuge during his difficult childhood” and from which the new head of government has retained the rigor of the rules and the team spirit. And his own, he has built it during these last four years spent in opposition, after having completely renewed the Labour Party and its culture.
Exit Corbyn
It must be said that when he arrived in April 2020, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, Labour was in ruins. Largely defeated in the general elections of 2010, 2015 and 2017, the historic party of the left, founded in 1900, had ended up frightening its traditional electorate in the north of England. In December 2019, it voted for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, consecrating its victory. The main reason for this historic shift is Jeremy Corbyn, the permanent insurgent, the Trotskyist who wants insurrection rather than power. At the head of the party between 2015 and 2020, he reigned terror against “the softies”, in other words the social democrats, and against the Jews in the party. Unprecedented since the Second World War.
As soon as he was elected, Keir Starmer ordered an independent investigation, the conclusions of which were unequivocal. A violent and anti-Semitic culture, perpetuated by the leader, had taken root in the party. The punishment came quickly: Corbyn and his cronies were expelled. Starmer, who was not attorney general for nothing, even changed the party’s statutes and significantly reduced the power of members and activists. He may seem “boring”, as the country’s conservatives and tabloids constantly repeat, but he nonetheless has an iron fist.
Pay parity as a hobby horse
In four years, Starmer has won back the hearts of Labour voters by showing seriousness and competence, particularly during weekly questions to the government. To support him, he chose two women in their forties. “Starmer and his Charlie’s Angels”, headline the tabloids. On his right, the economist Rachel Reeves; on his left, the redhead Angela Rayner, a single mother at 16, whose cheeky banter delivered with a Manchester accent stands out at the Palace of Westminster.
Rachel Reeves, who will probably be the country’s first female Chancellor of the Exchequer, in other words its Minister of Economy and Finance, has a plan. She has made equal pay her hobby horse. To achieve this, she says, we need to feminise the economy. And that starts with access to daycare in a country where only the poorest have access to it. Given the shortage of labour in the UK, due in part to the fall in immigration after Brexit, enabling women to work is one of the keys to Labour’s economic growth programme.
Similarly, Reeves intends to adapt the health service to women. Women are more likely to suffer from long-term illnesses than men. They are also more likely to care for elderly and sick parents, hence the need to allocate social benefits to them. For Rachel Reeves, economists – often men – have difficulty thinking about the economy beyond the managerial orthodoxy that relegates these issues, crucial for women, to later. To counter this mentality, or even this Pavlovian reflex, Reeves plans to appoint a woman to head each economic service of the State. She also promises that each public policy will first be evaluated according to its impact on women.
Close friends
The Starmer-Reeves tandem is crucial. He at 10 Downing Street, she at 11. Their good relationship is crucial to ensure the stability of the government and attract foreign investors, whose billions should allow it not to raise taxes. “It will be good for the country to have at its head a Prime Minister and a Chancellor who are not only close friends, but above all share a common project,” Starmer declared on June 28, before adding: “with what is happening in France, and soon no doubt in the United States, foreign investors are looking for the stability that we are finally offering in the United Kingdom.”
Keir Starmer is expected to entrust Angela Rayner, who during these years of opposition had the role of number two in the “shadow cabinet” (in the United Kingdom, opposition MPs have the custom of forming an alternative cabinet), with the Ministry of Housing – a role that is all the more preeminent since one of the first measures of the Labour Party in power will be to launch an “all-out construction blitz”, with the obligation for local authorities to create a fixed number of social housing units per month. Labour also intends to review the Local Urban Planning of each municipality in order to expand the buildable areas and, therefore, reduce a fraction of the famous English countryside, the “Green Belt”.
Labour says freeing up just 1% of this land could help build 738,000 new homes. A hot-button issue if ever there was one, young Britons cannot buy their first home without help from their families, hence their nickname, the Generation Rent (generation condemned to rent). This Thursday, during the general elections, this situation weighed heavily in the anti-Tory vote. Today, Starmer promises to create 1.5 million affordable homes in five years. The only one to have achieved this feat was Harold Wilson in the late 1960s. Angela Rayner will be the face of this commitment.
Pragmatic… and daring?
Suffice to say that Starmer is not lacking in ambition. On the other hand, we should not ask him to define “Starmerism”. “Ideology is not for him,” believes his biographer, Tom Baldwin. “If he got involved in politics relatively late, in his fifties, it was precisely to improve people’s lives in a concrete and practical way, not to sell them hot air.”
On the other hand, this pragmatist could become audacious. “The classic Labour man starts with a great vision, then reality forces him to compromise,” he continues. “Starmer operates in the opposite direction. He starts with reality and becomes radical if circumstances require it.” Starmer, a revolutionary in spite of himself? The future will tell. In the meantime, the one who was often underestimated in his life keeps his feet on the ground. An “ordinary man”, in short.
.