As of writing, the general election is still in the distance. As such, I resort to speculation, but let’s play with the statistical probability for a moment. It seems concordant with the current state of affairs in the British political system that we shall relinquish one leader, Sunak, who isn’t particularly keen on picking sides, by all accounts a relatively weak willed leader, with another of almost identical nature. If Keir Starmer is to succeed Sunak in the election, Starmer’s mediocrity will prove a detriment to the leftist political sphere and ideological progression. As Sunak (not so eloquently) put to Starmer on Wednesday’s PMQs, he must ‘unstick himself from the fence’.
The factual support for this opinion is multifaceted, and therefore my approach to analysing said opinion must be too. Let’s start with the ‘U-turns’ he’s offered liberal voters recently, including on matters such as tuition fees, the two child beneficiary cap, nationalisation of public services, the list goes on, but in summary any policy deemed too far left for the centre-right voting groups he’s targeting for an electoral landslide next year. It’s a moral ravaging for anyone disaffected by the current Tory directives. According to Starmer, the vast majority of Tory policies won’t be rolled back, and from the look of the Labour manifesto, edited for the list of U-turns, new policies won’t be much more progressive either.
It’s important to note that a large group of leftists regard these matters as posturing in the run up to the election, simple vote fielding measures and it’s their submission that not a lot more stock is to be put into Starmer’s current rhetoric than that.
The problem with this position is twofold, the first element being that it assumes once office is taken, his policies will become more progressive and liberal in nature. This stance is particularly interesting to me, because electoral mandates are a matter that the left enjoys tormenting the Tory party with, in its current state. If Starmer’s cabinet is elected based upon his current position, they have a democratic mandate to fulfil that position and nothing else. It is not the government’s right nor role to subvert the population’s governance to an agenda that they did not give informed consent for. The defence of this ideology is simple: No matter what political side of the isle you’re on, consider how you’d feel if an opposition government was elected under what are essentially false pretences, then quickly bringing the country further and further to their political ideals, and away from yours. This demonstrates the flaws in the thinking of this position. We, as the general public, must not elect a new government under that condition, if we wish to set a precedent of transparent, legitimate democracy from the ashes thirteen years of conservative rule leaves behind, leading us to the second concern, that this idea pre-establishes an internal illegitimacy. Perhaps the wider problem with politics is the lack of belief we hold in our politicians, but if we are to entirely abandon what we truly believe in order to gain a better chance at election, we perpetuate the problem, rather than propagate the solution. In order for any political progress to be made, especially liberal agendas requiring bigger degrees of societal acceptance, must recover some semblance with the general public as being honest. Not being fully truthful with set objectives, as the sentiment above would suggest Labour are doing by pretending to be further right than they truly are in order to win votes, isn’t the first step towards this goal.
Secondly, if we were to take Starmer’s current agenda at face value, and assume that he will not attempt to move further left throughout his theoretical tenure as PM, the core policies he’s adopted are not at all in line with traditionally accepted leftist ideals. The progression from the Corbyn era of Labour, which would’ve stood on the picket lines with the services strikers, shown contempt for the conservative’s push to cut off ‘low value’ degrees, and become absolutely furious over Tory outsourcing and privatisation of the NHS, to instead what we see as the occasional weak handed virtue signalling in opposition, but eventual support of all of the above by Starmer and his sidekick Angela Rayner (who, by the way, he did a U-turn on ousting) demonstrates that one thing’s for certain; it doesn’t do the political left any good at all to have a government bearing a leftist name but enacting centre right ideals. It simply exposes the entire wing to undue criticism based upon this theoretical government’s mistakes as well as painting the left in a more moderate light, both of which making it more outlandish for any future (actually) left wing government to expect majority support for election.
It’s easy to draw a conclusion that the Corbyn era of Labour was more reactionary than governmental, and therefore the observations made above are reflective of that, rather than a proper structure to lead the country. Such a conclusion would declare my analysis invalid in the proposed context. However, while I do agree that drawing a hard line on every issue isn’t the ‘proper’ statesman’s way, and perhaps some agreement and mutual policy with the other side is necessary, in order for political discourse to survive as a useful element of society there must be a balance of fresh ideas and genuine diversity in ideology through more than the occasional jab at PMQs. If Pierre Mendes-France is to be believed, ‘To govern is to choose’, and the abject lack of any decisive action that does not appease a target voting base is no choice at all, and certainly does not paint Labour as a party fit to govern under the guise of leftism.
