The Scene
There are times when the Democratic Party looks enviously at the UK’s Labour Party; there are times when the envy runs the other way. And there are times when the left, in the English-speaking world, doesn’t really know what to do. That’s the moment Prime Minister Keir Starmer is living in — victorious in a landslide last summer, but already deeply unpopular, facing anger from the populist right and disappointment from the populist left.
“The party had been routed in 2019, under Jeremy Corbyn, and was confronted by a question which has troubled many social democratic parties across the world,” said Patrick Maguire, the co-author (with Gabriel Pogrund) of Get In, a new history of Labour’s comeback under Starmer and strategist Morgan McSweeney. “What are we for? Can we win again? By 2019, the party had finished a doomed experiment with socialism, but it was in no mood to revisit Tony Blair and Bill Clinton’s ‘third way’ politics.”
In Get In, the two reporters for the Sunday Times get deep inside Starmer’s Labour Party, from their text messages to their private moments of doubt. (Starmer considered resigning after Labour lost a safe seat in a 2021 by-election.) It’s a story with some lessons for Democrats — albeit none of them very easy or repeatable. We talked about the book as Starmer visited Washington this week, and this is an edited transcript of our conversation.
The View From PATRICK MAGUIRE AND GABRIEL POGRUND
David Weigel: One theme that comes up here, and that I’ve seen in the Democratic Party, is anger from the left at how the leadership doesn’t listen to them – that it didn’t nominate Bernie Sanders or run as populists. When Starmer took over, how prevalent was this idea that the left could have won had it not been undermined?
Patrick Maguire: By 2020 it was harder to maintain that argument, because it had been defeated so comprehensively in the 2019 election. It couldn’t just be explained away by structural disadvantages or external sabotage. The left has had its chance, and it had blown it, through its own incompetence and personal failings.
But it’s important to remember this — in 2020, the line on Keir Starmer was that he was essentially Jeremy Corbyn in a suit with a haircut. He was a Scandinavian social democrat. If anything, he pitched himself as the candidate of ideological continuity on big economic and foreign policy questions, while promising institutional change and professionalism. One of the big questions that’s hung over the Labour Party for the past five years is: Was he lying knowingly about that? There’s an argument that Keir Starmer didn’t mean quite a lot of it, and he was sort of mugged by reality.
What was the importance of The Canary, the left-wing news source that supported Corbyn?
Patrick: Labour Together was probably the closest thing we have in British politics to a Super PAC. It was reimagined under Morgan McSweeney with hundreds of thousands of pounds from donors supportive of the right of the Labour Party and resolutely opposed to Jeremy Corbyn. The Canary was hyper partisan. It was run on a shoestring. But it was incredibly popular. The Labour membership, by and large, distrusted the mainstream media — not without some justification. It was a feedback loop between members on the left that Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed, who’s now running the Center for Countering Digital Hate in the US, were determined to break.
And that was all about lobbying advertisers and saying: Have you seen there’s some sort of nasty conspiratorial content on The Canary? They are saying this Labour politician is in the pay of the Israeli embassy, or whatever. Stop funding fake news. Stop funding conspiracy theories. There was a very disciplined and deliberate and well-disguised campaign operatives on the right of the Labour Party to smash the only hyper-partisan and popular media infrastructure that left populism ever had in Britain.
How much changed after Boris Johnson resigned? One question that Democrats have here is: How much of their weakness is down to Donald Trump, and how much can they recover once his personality is off the scene. So how did that story play out with Johnson?
Gabriel Pogrund: The political genius of Boris Johnson was that — while he didn’t have policy prescriptions that he steadfastly adhered to over the course of his career — he shrewdly positioned himself as being left on the economy and right on questions of culture and law and order. He was saying he would champion our National Health Service and also deport lots of migrants to Rwanda. That is the sweet spot in British electoral politics. And once Johnson had exited the stage, that created a space for Labour to inhabit, where by the time of the election, it was Starmer who was positioning himself as the person who would revive our straightened public services and also beat the Tories at their own game by restoring order at Britain’s borders.
The problem for Starmer is that he is now being outflanked by Nigel Farage. The right in the UK remains fragmented, but there are a lot of people who think that in due course, British politics could have one of those once a century realignments where the Tories are cannibalized by this new party, which has been formed by Farage and exists in his image: Reform UK. And many of the instincts that propelled Johnson don’t exist within Keir Starmer. He has a contempt for politics and a distaste for politics, but a lot of people see him as being the personification of the establishment. He’s got a knighthood, he’s got the word sir before his name, and he remains very vulnerable to insurgent politics for that reason.
How does inflation change things? It was punishing for Democrats here.
Patrick: One of the great missed opportunities of British politics in this period is that for the entire era of zero interest rates, no party that was seriously threatening to win the election — with the brief exception of Corbyn’s Labour in 2017 — was talking about taking advantage of those rates to borrow and invest. When [now-Chancellor] Rachel Reeves comes to that epiphany in 2021, it is already an idea that is running out of time. Reeves says, I’m going to be the first green chancellor, and here’s our $28 billion per year borrowing target. Here’s our version of the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s not actually until 2024 that the Blairite right of the Labour Party, people for whom fiscal responsibility is the cornerstone of Labour ever winning, put that idea to bed.
That’s a really tricky thing for the Labour Party, because the sweet spot of British politics is actually big statism, interventionism, plus a sort of populist, soft authoritarian offer on crime and migration. Right now, Labour is leaning very hard into the law and order and migration stuff, but it doesn’t have an economic offer of commensurate radicalism.
Gabriel: They were inspired by Joe Biden and the IRA on an intellectual and political level, until, by dint of the global monetary situation, they weren’t.
If you’re an ambitious Democrat — you’re Josh Shapiro, you’re Wes Moore — what lesson should you take away from Labour’s experience?
Patrick: When Johnson was PM, it looked like the story was going to be one of Conservative Party hegemony for a long time. It seemed like politics had realigned and that certain groups of voters were, you know, lost forever to the left. And that was not necessarily true. If you are on the center left of politics in any democratic country, if you are willing to meet voters where they are – that means both your activist base and general election voters — it is about treating people’s views as legitimate. It’s not telling them that they’re wrong or telling them, we told you so.
That’s something the Labour Party under this leadership has been very careful not to do. Keir Starmer said: You know, if you’re a Brexit voter, if you want less migration, the Labour Party has to talk to you about that. We can’t just say you’re wrong, your wages are lower because of unscrupulous bosses.
Gabriel: There is one thing to be said for the British model, which is that it does allow one to perform and demonstrate their politics in opposition. Corbyn was so vulnerable to the accusation of being wacky and deranged. You need politicians who can take a baseball bat to the idea that they are culturally and intellectually on a different planet to their voters. There’s Starmer. By 2024 he can say, I’ve killed Corbyn, I’ve killed Corbynism. I don’t stand for that stuff. Whoever ends up representing Democrats in 2028, there’s a compelling argument that their interests would be served by having some evidence of antagonism with the hard left.