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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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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.