If there was one place where there remained a mood of optimism, after the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and with the good news fading from the news, it was focused on a tiny dot on the map of world, in the northwest of England. Precisely in Liverpool, where the British Labor Party held its last annual conference before the general elections of 2024, which should, logically, finally propel to power a party confined in opposition for thirteen years. All polls agree that Labor is 15 to 20 points ahead of the Tories. Since the election of David Cameron in 2010, five successive Conservative Prime Ministers have exhausted and damaged the country with austerity policies and their false promises of a better life outside the European Union.
The worn-out and unpopular Tories are the best advertisement for Labour, whose leader, Keir Starmer, shines neither for his natural charisma nor for the clarity of his program. His promise of “a decade of national renewal” and his pragmatic centrism do not strike people’s minds. But the former lawyer, through his great mastery of technical files, knew how to knock out Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the debates in Parliament during Covid. He also knew how to be ruthless in eradicating the anti-Semitism which had arisen within Labor then led by Jeremy Corbyn. At Starmer’s initiative, the Labor Party’s national executive committee banned Corbyn from being reinstated in his constituency. The likely future Prime Minister plays football on Sundays on a common ground in north London and is working to pull towards the center an electorate torn between Corbyn’s radical left and Tony Blair’s social-liberal “New Labour” movement. .
Despite his 70 years, Tony Blair remains the only one to embody the modernity of Labor
At the start of his speech in Liverpool, Keir Starmer was sprayed with glitter by an activist shouting “Real democracy is led by the citizens!” The Labor leader dusted himself off wisely, accustomed to being booed by the left of the movement. He is decided to ignore the minority of supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and his press release on the Hamas attack which avoided, like that of his French counterpart Jean-Luc Mélenchon, expressing the slightest condemnation of the terrorist organization Islamist.
There was a ghost in Liverpool. Despite his 70 years, he is the only one to embody the modernity of Labour. He remains the most charismatic and competent Prime Minister the United Kingdom has ever had. The only one to have, like the Conservative Margaret Thatcher, won the general elections three times in a row and ruled the country for ten years. Tony Blair is this ghost, disgraced and ostracized since leaving Downing Street because of his disastrous decision to send the British army to Iraq in 2003 and his personal enrichment. Here he is suddenly rehabilitated in complete discretion by a Labor at the gates of power which has no other model than him. Associated with a unique decade of growth and redistribution and a historic peace agreement in Northern Ireland, the most European of Britons was able to achieve a “third way” adapting the social democratic left to the market economy in globalization , strengthening the economy in order to invest massively in public health and education services ravaged by the brutality of the Thatcher years.
Speakers have avoided mentioning his electric name, but Starmer is subtly working to bring him back into favor. In May, he stopped by to greet him at his 70th birthday in a London restaurant. In July, the two men appeared together on stage at a conference organized by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the former Prime Minister’s foundation. In September, he honored the Blairites in his “ghost cabinet” camped in the center. By reinstating the figure of Blair, the Labor leader has broken a taboo. There remains the second, which he tries not to formulate as it still tears society apart: Brexit. If he puts the right words on this aberrant act of national self-mutilation that more than 60% of British people admit to regret, Keir Starmer will be the winner not only of the election, but also of the national populist disease which has infected up to United Kingdom, yet the oldest and strongest European democracy. Only then will he be a statesman.