London The British opposition leader Keir Starmer wants to lead the Labor party out of the political sidelines and back into power. The 60-year-old told delegates at the Labor Party conference in Liverpool that his party was back “in the political center” and “the political wing of the British people”. With the same words Tony Blair had inspired his like-minded people for “New Labour” in 1996 and brought his party back to power a year later.
The conditions for a change of power in London could hardly be better: the Conservatives seem exhausted to many Britons after twelve years in government and numerous scandals.
The new prime minister, Liz Truss, and her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, have already lost the confidence of the financial markets after only three weeks and have a serious currency crisis to deal with.
Labor now leads the Tories by 17 percentage points in the latest Yougov poll. That was last when Blair was party and government leader.
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Starmer wants to build on this time. Referring to the Conservative government’s controversial budget plans, the opposition leader promised that he wanted to lead Great Britain out of the vicious circle of ever new crises and make Labor the party of “sound public finances”. All of his party’s political proposals would be counter-financed.
Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwarteng announced massive tax cuts on credit last week and was punished by the financial markets with a sell-off in sterling and British government bonds. “What we have seen from the government in the last few days is unprecedented,” Starmer said, adding that the Tories had lost control of the British economy. “And what for?”, says Starmer: “For tax cuts for the richest one percent of our society.”
Tories on the defensive
The Labor leader is certainly in tune with the zeitgeist in Great Britain. The country is mired in the worst economic crisis in 50 years, and many Britons are suffering from the sharp increase in the cost of living. Inflation is at ten percent and economic growth is stagnating.
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However, according to a calculation by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), it is the higher earners who will benefit most from the Tories’ planned tax cuts. Almost twice as many Britons are more likely to trust Starmer and Labor than Liz Truss’s government to deal with the crisis, the Yougov poll shows.
The political drought under former left-wing party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who gave Labor its worst election result since 1935 in 2019, seems to have been forgotten. The end of the Corbyn era was also expressed in symbols in Liverpool: at the beginning of the party conference, the Labor delegates fervently sang the national anthem “God save the King” and commemorated Queen Elizabeth II, who died in mid-September.
“We changed the party and rooted out anti-Semitism,” Starmer said, referring to his predecessor Corbyn, who was criticized for his anti-Semitic statements. The Labor leader also reiterated his party’s support for NATO, which Corbyn had questioned. “First the country, then the party,” promised Starmer.
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However, the opposition leader does not want to shake the Brexit. “We will make sure that Brexit works,” promised Starmer in Liverpool. The Tories would have made the country poorer after leaving the EU, leaving both supporters and opponents of Brexit in the lurch.
“One can vote Labor again with a clear conscience,” Peter Mandelson, the architect of Blair’s New Labour, told the Handelsblatt. Keir Starmer is the “Olaf Scholz of British politics” – honest, down-to-earth and trustworthy. On the fringes of the Labor Party conference, SPD election strategists revealed how they brought the German sister party back to power.
Green growth plan
Starmer used his performance in Liverpool to buff Labour’s green image and lure UK Green voters away. To this end, the Labor leader has had a “green growth plan” drawn up, with which the UK is to become an “energy-independent green superpower” by 2030 and generate all its electricity from renewable energies.
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The core is the massive expansion of wind and solar energy. A new state-owned company called “Great British Energy” is also to help with the implementation of the green growth plan.
Overall, the Labor leader is hoping for a million new jobs from green investments. With his growth initiative, Starmer also wants to counter allegations by the Tories that Labor is the anti-growth party.
According to Alastair Campbell, it is not yet certain whether the green image and the mistakes of the Conservative government will be enough to bring Labor back to power in the general elections, which are expected to take place in 2024. “The fact that your political opponent is in such a bad shape doesn’t mean you’ve already won,” says Tony Blair’s former spindoctor.
The Labor Party needs an alternative vision and must spread this more aggressively and visibly in the country than before, criticizes Campbell. This is also indirectly aimed at party leader Starmer, who has often seemed a bit brittle and stiff in his previous appearances. Even during his speech in Liverpool, the former public prosecutor mostly remained factual and cool.
The new UK government’s tax cuts have triggered a pound slump in markets.
(Photo: Reuters)
The fact that the Conservative crisis is not only a blessing for Labour, but could also become a curse, is shown by the question of whether a government under Starmer would reverse the Tory’s tax cuts. Such a reversal would play into the hands of the Conservatives, who could brand Labor as the party of tax hikes, as in the past.
Starmer and his shadow cabinet have therefore chosen a middle course: Labor would raise the top tax rate, which the Tories had just lowered, back to 45 percent and put the additional income from this of around two billion pounds a year into the ailing state health system NHS to fill the shortage of staff there with new hires to alleviate.
Labor also intends to reintroduce the increase in the corporate tax rate for companies from 19 to 26 percent, which was canceled by Finance Minister Kwarteng. The largest opposition party, on the other hand, would like to retain the reduced income tax rate from 20 to 19 percent and the reduction in contributions to National Insurance.
Unlike the Tories, Labor plans not to finance the state energy price cap for consumers on credit, but by expanding the windfall tax introduced by the Conservative government in May.
Tensions with the unions
Labor has put off plans for electoral reform and a possible move away from first-past-the-post system. On the other hand, relations with the British trade unions, which are not without tension, could still cause a spanner in the works of the Labor machine.
Traditionally, the ties between the Labor Party and the often more radical trade unions have been very close. The employee representatives still contribute more than half of all donations and loans to the party. However, Starmer is trying to keep Labor out of the current labor disputes and has ordered his shadow cabinet members not to take part in strike action.
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Here, too, Starmer is following in the footsteps of Tony Blair, who recently described Labor’s close ties to unions as a “birth defect” that needs to be fixed.
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