Labour Party leaders over long decades were previously well steeped in the day-to-day political workings of Parliament and the Parliamentary Labour Party, with their time-consuming but often necessary democratic and consultative procedures. The picture is more complicated with the present leadership. The detailed evidence amassed by Times and Sunday Times journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund in their recent book Get in: The inside story of Labour under Starmer portrays a prime minister and his predominant advisor less embedded in the heart of the UK’s political system. A cautious but ambitious Keir Starmer is depicted rising in a Westminster culture he personally experienced as discomforting and managerially inefficient. Former Labour minister Alan Milburn observes “He doesn’t come from politics. He travels relatively light”. His ascent is accredited to the tireless organising efforts of Morgan McSweeney, a skilful but factional backroom campaigner determined to break the party’s Corbynite left and engineer a politically passive election strategy geared to mollifying socially conservative UK voters’ “values” and the British and US establishments. He is now the prime minister’s chief of staff.
Swept to power in 2024 by the country’s strong repudiation of Tory failures in office, this unusual leadership in fact garnered an undeniably low Labour vote, including in the much-coveted former “Red Wall” constituencies. Their joint unfamiliarity with proactive government has since unluckily coincided with Donald Trump’s volatile US protectionism threatening international political and economic dislocation and sharply testing their responses. To date, the resultant challenges of months of poor opinion poll ratings and rebellions by numerous Labour MPs have been met by reluctant policy retreats, recent cabinet reshuffling and questionable efforts to tighten disciplinary and rulebook control over a genuinely anxious parliamentary party and wider party membership. This is unlikely to offset the pressures of a public discontent rooted in genuine economic pain and a related national pessimism reflecting deeply-felt powerlessness. Top-down restrictions usually fail to acknowledge that politicians and local communities alike develop and flourish through more democratic discussion and engagement, not less.
This government defensiveness reflects another distinct feature of the current leadership. It emerged from a collaborative effort targeted on defeating Corbynism more than preparing an alternative programme for a future government. As the general election neared, this central deficiency became clearer and former civil servant Sue Gray was brought in to remedy it. Instead, internal rivalry between McSweeney’s team and Gray, who worked to improve the leadership’s relations with MPs, Labour mayors and the broader party, forestalled concrete progress in sufficiently preparing for government, a difficulty described in some detail in the Get In book. The persistent factional conflict seems to have generated a robust but decidedly negative ‘groupthink’ still influencing the leadership’s outlook today. Despite the government’s efforts to urge public patience until their policies bear fruit in the long term, enough time and events have now passed to consider the hard question of whether the party is facing not just a serious medium-term downturn in popularity but electoral defeat and ongoing decline. We need to track the government’s de facto trajectory in the stark context of today’s weighty external pressures.
Insular economic patriotism
The continuing absence of a positive government narrative clarifying its basic direction, regretted across different wings of the party, reinforces the case for provisional categorisation of this unfolding project. The official emphasis on the broadly uncontroversial aim of eventual “growth” and generalised references to “missions” and “fairness” do not assist this task. However, while an overall national strategy is certainly required, the leadership’s specific stances on economic management and key social issues point at this stage to an insular, primarily economic patriotism which duly struggles to balance Brexit Britain’s trade and investment relationships with all of today’s more powerful and competing global players – the USA, EU, China and other major economies including India and the Gulf States. Instead of consistently building strong and permanent international alliances designed for the future, this patriotism shades into nationalism proper when it irrationally classifies recent immigration to the UK as a problem comparable to the painful domestic economic pressures the government has to alleviate. The government’s approach does tend to avoid the post-Brexit Conservative administrations’ nostalgia for the lost era of British imperial power, and their naïve confidence in a UK somehow reborn as an independent Singapore, but poses similar practical challenges. The Tories’ nationalistic project proved to be a dead end, despite their original optimism and popularity; today’s version of narrow patriotism is unlikely to succeed in the context of an uncertain and polarising world economy, with Starmer unwisely but noticeably leaning towards placating the unreliable US president directly responsible for these hazards.
While powerful UK financial institutions initially expressed warmth towards the Labour leadership, the City of London remains essentially global-facing, pursuing profit maximisation by investing assets wherever in the world offers the highest returns. A notable Sheffield University study found that over a period of twenty years, the UK’s “excessively” powerful finance sector cost the national economy £4.5 trillion in lost growth potential due to its overseas priorities, proportionately higher than the impact of the equivalent US sector.[1] The present government’s initiatives to promote greater domestic investment have nonetheless been limited in nature: the non-legally binding Mansion House Accord, for example, endorsed by 17 major occupational pension providers, is meant to see 5% of their defined contribution default funds allocated to UK private market investments by 2030. In practice however, these companies remain subject to a fiduciary duty in law to manage their assets for the benefit of investors, not government, as well as Financial Conduct Authority regulations protecting the rights of their customers. This target may therefore prove unattainable. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has now fallen back on historically doubtful policies to further deregulate the City and to indulge the finance sector, a route already criticised (albeit in careful language) by the Governor of the Bank of England – who remains conscious that current regulations were specifically designed to prevent another major financial crisis.
Anti-immigrant poison
A particularly ominous feature of the government’s more nationalistic rhetoric has been its impact in magnifying the racist and anti-immigrant prejudices still to be found in parts of the UK. This threatens social cohesion in a period of increasingly widespread disenchantment with the national political establishment. McSweeney was previously active in Labour’s efforts to resist the growth of the British National Party in the London Borough of Barking in the early 2000s. He ascribed success in this campaign to the hard work involved in directly contacting individual local voters and being seen to address immediate local-level issues. However, while this may be an effective “delivery” tactic in local elections, it is not a solution to the national-level challenges confronting a Westminster government saddled with a weakened economy.
Labour today openly describes Reform UK as its principal national political rival, but has not developed an effective strategy to counter its central populist demand for more draconian immigration controls. On immigration, Starmer has publicly regretted both his reference to an “island of strangers” and the language used in the subsequent government policy paper which held that high levels of immigration had done “incalculable damage to the UK”. Nonetheless, his continuing emphasis on “stopping the boats” in the English Channel and seeking agreements to return asylum seekers to other countries predictably serves to amplify and legitimise Reform UK’s corrosive anti-migrant message.
A survey of over 50,000 news articles and 300 parliamentary debates has underlined that the language used about race and immigration by media and politicians over recent years has assisted “the increase in reactionary politics and backlash against anti-racism which has emboldened the far right in this country”.[2] No government attempt worthy of the name has been made to prepare and foster a calmer and informed national debate on these issues, despite opinion polls showing significant public acceptance of people migrating to the UK for work or study reflecting the country’s longstanding mainstream culture of relative tolerance towards ethnic and other minorities.[3] Even British Future’s director, Sunder Katwala, who rather optimistically hoped for an “inclusive British patriotism” has concluded that “after five years as a party leader, Starmer has yet to offer a substantial public argument about diversity or integration.
The conversation about his government’s future is dominated by political tactics – slicing and dicing which voter segments to engage in four years’ time”[4]. In reality, the UK economy positively needs immigration, especially in such sectors as social care where labour shortages loom. Migrants, since they tend to be of working age on arrival make a measurable net contribution to the country’s public finances, help to raise the UK’s aggregate output and address the very serious social challenges posed by our ageing population.[5] They also serve to enrich the country’s diverse culture and reinforce our shared humanity. These advantages deserve highlighting, as continuing climate deterioration and the growing economic difficulties of underdeveloped countries facing rising indebtedness are actively driving higher migration flows to most wealthier Western nations that will not subside.
A failing strategy
A project based on insular patriotism is hazardous for Brexit Britain in this period of external dangers from Trump’s protectionist ambitions and shifting tactics, and ultimately unsustainable. The government’s efforts to simultaneously improve relations with all of the economic superpowers, now increasingly rivalling each other to advance their separate interests, will predictably encounter fresh tensions. The narrow patriotic focus also makes it harder for the UK to take advantage of the one significant opportunity still achievable to both strengthen the country’s overseas trade and its standing in the eyes of international financial markets, through working towards rejoining the EU’s single market and customs union. It is calculated that the UK’s current Brexit agreement with the EU will reduce the country’s medium-term productivity by 4% compared to Britain staying in the EU and that UK exports and imports will be 15% lower in the medium-term on the same comparison.[6]
While government delivery of visible economic progress in future remains clearly problematic, it is also insufficient. Years of widespread difficulty in coping with rising prices in the shops and overstretched vital public services have undermined public confidence in the political system and encouraged electoral abstention, naïve populism and unfounded conspiracy theories. A combination of continuing British economic patriotism with anti-immigrant motifs will not rally the population behind a feasible, unifying and hopeful national strategy in a period of global disruption. A significant segment of hitherto reliable Labour voters is already contemplating voting for the Greens or Jeremy Corbyn’s new party; many who tactically voted Labour in 2024 may well join the drift towards no longer voting at all.
A Strategy of Hope
The continuing central groupthink, constrained initiatives to improve basic public services, and intolerant restrictions on Labour MPs and party members’ dissension all stand in the way of advancing the alternative strategy now required to counter populist divisiveness and define a realistic UK role and productive international alliances in a fast-changing world. Labour is presently risking defeat at the next general election, before most of its longer-term plans aspire to demonstrate tangible benefits. It is also – tragically – risking facing the apparently permanent decline already suffered by several historically important European social democratic parties. Today’s insular patriotism and concessions to right-wing populism offer no escape from this dilemma. Nevertheless, Labour’s mainstream, tolerant and outward-looking membership at all levels of the party possess the capacity in the period ahead to ensure that, working alongside potential allies, an effective riposte to reactionary populist politics is mounted at last and the current project replaced by a progressive, more egalitarian and pro-European social and economic agenda giving hope and direction to the UK.
The impact of events may yet assist this process of change. Trump’s evident desire to improve US economic collaboration with Russia in order to open up new opportunities for American corporations to extract oil and mineral wealth across much of the Arctic region increasingly exposes his relegation of basic European economic and security concerns. The UK and the EU are duly obliged, however reluctantly in light of their traditional reliance on US military assets for their defence, to explore enhanced European integration and cooperation in yet wider fields to protect their future interests. In addition, public opinion may soon persuade the UK government to at least place stronger public emphasis on the progressive aspects of its formal ambitions, such as by highlighting its ten year NHS reform plan which proposes to shift of resources from the acute sector to community-based preventative services. A stronger emphasis on traditional social democratic themes may also prove attractive to cabinet members and others considering their chances of potentially replacing Starmer should the May 2026 local elections confirm Labour’s electoral descent.
However, the real value of any modified presentations of government policy should, of course, be measured by the detailed policies actually adopted to implement them and not merely by the headlines they generate. The new health policy, for instance, has been floated before, and the Trump camp, US technology and pharmaceutical interests, and UK private health care companies remain keen to influence the future shape of the NHS. Specific tax increases in the government’s autumn budget may be presented as a new approach to wealth taxation, but the detailed proposals might prove relatively mild in nature. If Reform UK populism is to be genuinely confronted and defeated, a detailed government programme to positively unify this diverse country’s tolerant majority, and to create new international alliances, will become an urgent necessity.
It was a minister in the country’s first ever Labour government who insisted that the base of nurse Edith Cavell’s famous statue near London’s Trafalgar Square carries her last words before execution by the German army: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hate or bitterness for anyone”.
John Chowcat is the retired general secretary of the education union ASPECT. He was previously assistant general secretary of the union MSF.
[1] A. Baker, G. Epstein and J Montecino The UK’s Finance Curse? Costs and Processes, Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, University of Sheffield, 2018
[2] M. Julios-Costa and C. Montil-McCann A Hostile Environment: Language, Race, Surveillance and the Media Runnymede Trust 2025
[3] New Poll finds Public Support for Migration to Work or Study Focaldata Research Report for British Future 11.5.2025
[4] S. Katwala “To lead on immigration Starmer must speak with his own conviction” The Eastern Eye 19.5.25
[5] Economic and Fiscal Outlook Office for Budget Responsibility, March 2024
[6] Economic and Fiscal Outlook Office for Budget Responsibility, March 2025