The Starmer Problem for Democrats
By 
The reason why it’s frankly idiotic to say that we shouldn’t be having discussions about the future of the Democratic Party and instead just all get behind Democrats to oppose Trump (a position most strongly held by those who said Biden should stay in the race, which is something we can think about around here a bit) is that such a strategy might work in the 26 midterms. It might even work in 2028. But then when Democrats take power again and have absolutely no answers to anything because there was never a serious conversation about where the party should go and how to stop Trumpism going forward, it is highly likely voters will again abandon them in droves, not wanting some return to the status quo, but something very different.
You might say this is some sort of fantasy narrative. But it’s not. It’s exactly what has happened to Labour since Keir Starmer threw out the Tories. Since Labour stood for absolutely nothing but not being Liz Truss and other recent Tory disasters, they had no ideas, no politics of change, and now Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is storming ahead as the party of change for dissatisfied voters.
This month’s elections in England were significant without being surprising. They were dire for the Labour Party and cataclysmic for the Conservatives: neither has ever lost such a high proportion of the seats it was defending. The day belonged to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which took 30 per cent in projected national vote share. Labour narrowly lost the Runcorn by-election to Reform’s Sarah Pochin, a former Conservative. Reform took control of ten councils, where it will now administer budgets in the hundreds of millions. Farage took centre stage in the aftermath, declaring Reform the ‘main opposition party’: ‘We are the agents of change.’
It is tempting to reach for a comforting scepticism. Local elections punish the incumbent government. Wayward voters rally in general elections. Farage has made big gains before and seen them break against the rocks of first-past-the-post elections, or fracture under his titanic ego. There is a long and unpredictable three or four years before a general election.
Labour is governing badly. It has pointlessly squandered the popular goodwill that accompanied its return to office. Its leader is a besuited void. It is embarrassed by its few real achievements (a rise in the minimum wage, expanded workers’ rights, partial nationalisation of rail) and cowed by corporate tantrums. It says and does nothing about water monopolists stealing money from the public purse and fouling rivers. Homelessness and drug addiction are ever more obvious on the streets. The cost of living still bites hard. The government has imprisoned itself in a cage of fiscal rules and taxation promises wholly inadequate to the rapidly changing global picture, and its most eye-catching economic strategy is a further reduction of welfare. Ros Jones, narrowly re-elected as mayor of Doncaster, warned that Labour’s cut to pensioners’ winter fuel allowance had become emblematic of its approach; a few Labour backbenchers – most prominently Louise Haigh – have broken cover to join the criticism and warn against a further slide to the right. Downing Street quickly stamped on a rumour Labour might reconsider the cut.
Labour politicians are right to say they did not cause these problems, and that a country cannot be quickly turned around after years – decades – of neglect. Nor is it merely a communications problem, though injecting government communications with some urgency or contact with reality would be welcome. Starmer’s lack of political commitment leaves his government rudderless, its only real politics an amplified antipathy to the party’s own left. But it has made many bad decisions in its first year. Ministers inexplicably defended the taking of free gifts by MPs, widely and rightly understood as licensed corruption, while presiding over benefit cuts. Starmer failed to give any clear national leadership when racist riots erupted after the Southport stabbings. The party has shattered its moral credibility by its assiduous support for Israel as it starves and murders in Gaza. Change, as promised by Labour’s manifesto, seems in very short supply.
If your country appears to be presided over by a caste of broadly interchangeable, hectoring and insincere politicians, none of whom ever delivers on their promises, why not vote for someone to upend the table? Behind this anti-establishment mood, which has rankled in British politics for many years now, lies the nastier promise of Faragism. It is not only that his voters are angry or disenfranchised, though some of them are. It’s that he offers a kind of political desublimation, a pleasurable release of all the prejudicial impulses kept under wraps, the right – as one jubilant Reform voter put it on his Facebook page – ‘to say what I REALLY think’.
Maybe we should do the work up front to have serious conversations about the Democratic Party and what it should stand for and how to build power and what to do when we take power again. Because just being anti-Trump is simply not enough and we know this from the UK. Let’s not have the next Democratic president be Keir Starmer. Let’s have the hard conversations now. The only way to save the country is to defeat Republicans in 2026, 2028, 2030, 2032, etc., until they come back from the brink. We need to develop a politics and a party that can do that.