LONDON — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has avoided triumphalism in the days after his crushing electoral victory. Instead, he said the challenge of fixing this wounded country would be a daunting one — with any successes gradual and hard-won.
During his first speech outside No. 10 Downing St. on Friday, he commented on what he called “weariness in the heart of” Britain after 14 years of Conservative Party rule, which had drained “away the hope, the spirit and the belief in a better future.”
Britain’s ailments are many: stagnant economic growth and wages, high child poverty and homelessness, and crumbling health care and public services. The prisons are overflowing, some local governments have gone bankrupt, and the rivers and seas flow with sewage pumped out by privatized utility companies.
Starmer, 61, says his mix of progressivism and pragmatism is the answer to this sense of brokenness. But there are large gaps in his explanation for how that might be achieved.
“It’s going to be a difficult start,” said Anand Menon, director of UK in a Changing Europe, a London-based think tank. “They are going to have to say, ‘This won’t be easy, this will take time, don’t hold your breath.’”
The British people have made it clear that they “want things to change quite quickly,” Menon said, but “one of the interesting things about Labour’s election campaign is that we don’t know very much” about how it plans to do that.
That sober approach has been widely lauded by mainstream pundits, particularly after the turbulence, scandals and infighting of four Conservative prime ministers in five years. Instead, he has told the public to judge his government “on actions, not on words.”
His main “mission” is to boost the economy from its current paralysis to become the fastest-growing in the Group of Seven industrialized democracies, all the while sticking to the Conservatives’ restrictions on spending and avoiding major tax increases. But many economists say that to achieve that he will have to raise some form of taxes — perhaps one of the lesser-known types of taxes, sometimes called “stealth taxes,” for example, on capital gains on the sale of assets.
“There are two big events when we will learn quite a lot more about what Labour plans to do,” said Joe Owen, director of impact at the Institute for Government, a think tank based in London. “The first is the King’s Speech” next week — in which King Charles III reads out Labour’s planned list of legislation for the coming parliamentary session. And “the second thing is that, in the autumn, they will need to set spending plans for next year.”
That’s when “we will get more than promise and narrative but actual cash behind individual areas,” he said.
If the first few days are anything to go by, Starmer’s Labour is unafraid to roll out surprise policies never mentioned during the campaign.
Within hours, he had scrapped the old government’s controversial plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda. And he raised eyebrows among the right when he unexpectedly appointed James Timpson, a key-cutting magnate who employs ex-convicts, as his prisons minister. Timpson has said that only a third of inmates should be incarcerated.
The international picture is no less onerous for Britain, which finds itself an isolated, midsize power in a world increasingly contested by giants like the U.S., China and the European Union.
A key international relationship will be the one with Washington, and Starmer has vowed to work with whoever wins the American presidential election in November.
He and President Joe Biden appear to be comfortable bedfellows, both casting themselves as havens of liberal, centrist sanity after the chaotic tenures of their predecessors.
But as a rules-obsessed, self-described progressive socialist, Starmer could hardly cut a greater contrast with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Starmer’s foreign minister, David Lammy, described Trump in 2018 as a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” who presents a “profound threat to the international order.”
Lammy has apparently undone that potential diplomatic tension by jetting out to the U.S. and meeting with Trump officials, Menon said.
Nonetheless, “Trump would pose real challenges for Keir Starmer — one obvious example is Ukraine,” Menon added.
Starmer is a staunch supporter of Kyiv, while Trump’s mixed messages have led some to speculate about whether he might end the American aid on which Ukraine relies.
Like Biden, Starmer has lost support among progressives who believe he was slow to back a cease-fire in Gaza. How much the left of his party continues to pressure him on that issue or obeys party loyalty now in power remains to be seen.
On China, Starmer is likely to continue with the necessary ambiguity that drives most European powers, who balk at Beijing’s human rights record but whose economies rely on Chinese trade.
Ultimately, “whether Labour improves Britain’s standing in the world will depend on whether it can fix the U.K.’s problems at home,” according to a briefing by Chatham House, a London-based think tank. “It is a mark of the significance of this general election that a result predicted for months still brings with it a sense of uncertainty about what will follow.”
Britain is in an all the more precarious position having left the European Union. And dealing with the economic and diplomatic bloc as an outsider might be getting trickier.
The populist far right made gains in continentwide elections in June. And although Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration party failed to win a parliamentary majority in France over the weekend, she — like Trump ally Nigel Farage in Britain — will see it as a springboard for the next election.
These political insurgents have capitalized on the sense that mainstream politicians have lost touch with people. Starmer is all too aware that’s a perception he needs to change.
“This will be a government about delivery and about service,” he said Saturday. “Self-interest is yesterday’s politics.”
