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Starmer’s squandering of a historic election victory is a tragedy nearing its finale | Rafael Behr
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Second sentence here is false and also cowardly. Getting trashed in the 2026 elections means losing lots of peole who do the groundwork of fighting elections.
Bloody hell, you dont win elections on transient bounces you just deliver something.
Anything.
These mps are the real problem.
It's really embarrassing for them that they don't realise this!
Cowardly remarks from a cowardly party.
Remember when Labour used to stand up to capital?
Remember when Labour actually stood for something?
It's time to move on to Greener pastures. To a party that actually stands for something and won't shy away from making the wealthy pay their fair share.
Also the next election doesn't need to be til 29, you can cycle through 2 or 3 more leaders in that time, just look at the Tories
Yeah. I mean, it doesn't make you look great, but if the hypothetical next leaders actually deliver something then it gives you a better chance.
Getting a new leader will probably not fix anything though. Starmer's incredibly unpopularity isn't because it's Starmer, it's because he's the Prime Minister and, worse than that, the Labour Prime Minister.
One reason for Starmer's unpopularity is his consistent promotion of shitty policies: attacking handicapped people, gutting trans peoples' rights, pandering to Reform bigots on immigration, ID cards, authoritarian bullying of pro-Palestinian activists and protesters. None of those is an inevitable consequence of his being the PM, except in the sense that Starmer is making these unforced errors while he's PM.
Are you referring to the supreme court case? It wasn't Starmer, and it didn't gut trans rights; it said that it was legal to designate a space for biological women. Maybe there's something I forgot about though. I don't think this is making him unpopular though, as Starmer's views on the issue are pretty mainstream.
Is very popular and cannot be an explanation for his unpopularity.
A sensible policy but yes, everyone knows it's unpopular so this was an unforced error
Palestine Action should never have been banned. But Yvette Cooper did that, and let me remind you of the past home secretaries, PMs and governments who gradually made the law on protest more and more repressive, who oversaw much worse anti-immigration pandering, who said more definitive things about trans issues, and so on and so on.
I'm not saying that Starmer would be some wonder-kid in other circumstances, I'm saying that his unpopularity is absurd and utterly disconnected from his actual performance.
Just to speak on this point. Regardless of what the intent of the supreme court ruling is said to be, it has resulted in many trans people being kicked out of sports teams, forced to out themselves at work and banned from toilets alongside increased harassment. So it has resulted in a very real loss of rights for trans people. And even though it is technical not Starmer's ruling, he had done nothing to push back against it or even criticise it.
That is not even mentioning Wes Streeting making the conservative's temp ban on puberty blockers permanent and therefore banning health care for all trans kids under 18. Also the introduction of new guidance discouraging schools from teaching about trans issues - effectively a new section 28 for trans people. The online safety act has also made it more difficult to access LGBT resources and communities. Its not an exaggeration to say that this labour government has been the worst for trans people in 30+ years.
I don't know how much this has affected Starmer's popularity, but anyone who is LGBT or an ally will be majorly put off, and thats not an insignificant fraction of the population.
The practical effect of the supreme court ruling has indeed been horrible in cases, but I would lay the blame mostly with the media, and perhaps with the Court for failing to provide sufficient clarity to the media. The actual ruling is so much narrower than the conversation immediately afterwards, with the BBC asking unqualified people if they thought it meant that women's bathrooms were now only for biological women, when there was simply no need to ask this question - the ruling is clear that it doesn't say this.
This reporting then feeds the situations you're talking about. Now, should Starmer have spoken out about this? I can see the argument for doing so, but not from the popularity point of view. The basis on which he could reasonably speak out would be narrow and legalistic, and risks treading on the authority of the Court. It wouldn't be the resounding pro-trans rally I imagine you might want, because that just plays into the hands of those trying to turn trans rights into a wedge issue.
I'll just point out that, tragically, this is another one of those things which is stupid but popular.
Yes it can. Reform voters see this move as disingenuous, so don't change their mind on Starmer, while Labour's base sees it as a betrayal so opinions sour.
I haven't seen those polls. It just doesn't seem plausible to me that all these Reform voters - most of whom haven't yet voted for Reform, what with their popularity being low at the last election are so beguiled by Farage that they don't believe any Labour proposal on reducing immigration. Those that are so beguiled... presumably believed Farage's praise of the proposals.
Remember what has driven the increase in Reform's popularity - it's high levels of overall migration, conspicuity of small boat crossings, and conspicuity of asylum hotels. These things have all got worse, and Reform's popularity rose on the back of it. We're not talking about dyed-in-the-wool cult followers here, but people who believe (wrongly in my view) that immigration is a massive deal.
To back this up with real data, this Ipsos poll has 2024 Labour voters saying 64% to 4% (yes, four percent) that immigration is too high versus too low. (23% "about right", rest "don't know"). That's 64% of people who voted Labour at the last election primed to like this announcement and clearly not so enamoured of Farage that they don't trust Labour to implement it. Yeah, some of them may have been holding their noses to vote Labour for other reasons, but nose-holders exist in all camps, so I think this is strong reason to believe that the policy is likely overall to be very popular.
and also because he abandoned most of the pledges he made during the leadership competition, has done almost nothing about key political issues (cost of living, crumbling public services) and seems to have spent most of his time as pm attacking disabled people, trans people and refugees.
No, that's why the Labour Left don't like him, which is a pretty small segment of the population. His unpopularity is unprecedented and reaches swathes of people who never heard what he pledged during the leadership election, don't care about "trans" and want fewer refugees.
You're right he's done little about the cost of living. But no-one would have; the only way to fix it is to "grow the economy" (as the mantra goes but which the government has little control over anyway) and wait for wages to catch up, which was always going to take years.
Services are crumbling because of 14 years of the Tories slashing investment into them due to a slavish adherence to austerity ideology at a time when balancing the books didn't bring us any benefits. Now when interest rates are high and borrowing expensive, we are fucked. Labour can't go back in time and un-fuck us, and they can't run an increased deficit without spiralling interest payments. What are they supposed to do? People talk about a wealth tax - in its most common form raising about 25 billion. An extra 25 billion would be great, but it would not fix the cost of living crisis, and it's the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reversing underinvestment and it is not possible to implement immediately (you'd need to set up a lot of apparatus to assess and collect the tax) so they'd still be woefully unpopular next year when everything is still shit and the wealth tax has never yet been collected.
That leaves them with broad-base taxes like income tax and VAT. Putting them up will genuinely help their finances and public services now but... is phenomenally unpopular.
I said ever since they came to power that they were screwed before they started. They've contributed to it with needless mistakes and U-turns they've pretended weren't, but none of that is more than a skin of mould over the turd of a situation we're in anyway. To round it off, the right-wing press won't print any of their successes (and there have been a few) and screams about everything that they can't fix.
I mean, he's now just about the most unpopular PM ever, so it's safe to say there's something worse than usual going on.
Yeah we have a combined COVID and Ukraine inflation bomb after 14 years of underinvestment...
I mean look at Starmer's missteps compared to the missteps of all the Tory PMs. Somehow Starmer is less popular than all of them. I think it's therefore safe to say that his unpopularity is not mostly due to things he's doing wrong, because in spite of it all, he's still doing better than any recent Tory leader.
I think you're raising half of a fair point here, which is that Labour PMs are judged differently from Tory PMs. But I also think some of those differences in judgment are fair: people were expecting public services to get visibly better and their pay to get visibly greater, because those are 'the kinds of things Labour does'. I don't think it's entirely unfair that we're judged stringently against those values because those are our values!
I don't think it's surprising that Labour is being judged this way, but what I started this off by saying was that I don't think they'll really improve with a new leader. Two things are clearly true:
But seeing them together and thinking, "we can have a more popular (and successful) government by changing the leader, and this is clearly true because of this combination" - which is the logic I saw - is wrong.
Maybe Starmer was the wrong pick for leader and we're seeing this now, and having a different one would have been better. But at this point it's too late unless there is clear evidence that Starmer himself is a massive problem, which their isn't. There's all these other explanations for his personal unpopularity that would apply to any other leader too. So replacing him might get rid of his propensity for mistakes, might get in someone a bit more left-wing than centrist, but it must be recognised that "a few fewer mistakes and a bit less centrist" is not a good reason to swap leader, given how bad that is in other ways. It's his unpopularity that is propping up this narrative.
It's not that getting rid of Starmer will definitely improve things, it's that it might and that he, clearly, at this point cannot!