Andy Beckett's Blog, page 4

Battered but bizarrely upbeat: why even utter defeat hasn’t shaken the Tory party’s confidence | Andy Beckett

The Conservatives believe that they uniquely represent British values – so what need is there to admit the UK is changing?

Why exactly are the Conservatives so upbeat, barely three months after their worst-ever election defeat? At their party conference, in their leadership contest and in the Tory press, the mood has been unexpectedly positive, even unrepentant, with relatively few recriminations and little deep reflection. During the conference, I lost count of how often people told me the party would be back in power within a few years.

There are some straightforward explanations: Labour’s troubles trying to run the country; Tory relief that they have been given a break from that difficult task; the displacement activity of the leadership contest; and the fact that the grind of opposition has not properly begun yet – all these are making being out of office easier than many Tories feared during the long run-up to the election.

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Starmer’s opening moves as PM have been as unpopular as Thatcher’s were. Can he recover like she did? | Andy Beckett

In 1979, another incoming prime minister struggled to satisfy the public hunger for change

“When we asked for your vote,” said the prime minister, “we didn’t promise you instant sunshine. We pointed out … that a nation can’t accelerate downhill for years and then … suddenly return to prosperity … We had to start … the long, slow climb back up the hill to recovery. I’m afraid some things will get worse before they get better.”

When Margaret Thatcher said these words in a party political broadcast in March 1980, her government, like Keir Starmer’s, was months old but already unpopular. The economy was struggling and the mood in Whitehall and Westminster was souring. The following year, her party’s poll rating fell to a then historic low of 23%. As Starmer is discovering, having also warned that “things will get worse before they get better”, prime ministers who promise to reverse national decline by a circuitous route risk deepening the sense of disillusionment.

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Warning to Keir Starmer – you are a Labour prime minister, not a ‘red wall’ one. Remember that | Andy Beckett

This narrow demographic helped the PM into No 10. But overemphasis on socially conservative voters will lead to failure

With every difficult day Keir Starmer’s government has to navigate, the ease of its election victory only two months ago feels more and more extraordinary. Despite winning only a mediocre 33.7% of the vote, Labour gained 211 seats, the most by any party since 1945, and reduced the Tories to a rump barely half that number. These achievements will be mythologised and analysed by Labour members and strategists for decades to come.

Probably the most startling success of all was in the “red wall”. According to the research firm Focaldata, whose analyst James Kanagasooriam first identified this supposedly pivotal electoral zone in 2019, Labour won 37 of its 38 seats. The party had lost a majority of these former strongholds to the Tories during the 2010s, a loss widely seen at the time as hugely damaging and possibly permanent, but on 4 July 2024 that trend was spectacularly reversed. Starmer’s decision to shape his leadership largely around winning back patriotic, often socially conservative red-wall voters who want tight controls on state spending and immigration – an approach you could call red-wall Labourism – seemed to have been completely vindicated.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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Is Keir Starmer’s plan to help workers the start of a new era – or no big deal? | Andy Beckett

Labour’s promises to ‘make work pay’ are short on detail, but delegates at the TUC conference were starting to believe

For 45 years, ever since Margaret Thatcher was first elected, Britons have had to get used to the idea that trade unions and workers’ rights are weakening. Changes in the economy and technology, in the mindset of employers and employees, and above all in government policy have left unions and workers in a weaker position here than in most wealthy democracies. The consequences of this relentless removal of power from the majority can be seen in this country’s precarious working culture and often low wages – a status quo around which rightwing politicians, thinktanks, journalists and business interests have erected great walls of justifying arguments and rhetoric.

So the notion that this seemingly permanent shift might be reversed, through Keir Starmer’s ambitiously named “new deal for working people”, can at first be quite hard to absorb. At the TUC congress in Brighton this week, the first prime minister to address the gathering for 15 years promised “the biggest levelling up of workers’ rights in a generation”, to enthusiastic applause. Yet there were also large empty spaces in the main hall, and in the foyers where unions had exhibition stalls, which made the labour movement’s diminished state impossible to ignore.

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Is effective centre-left government possible? Starmer has yet to prove that – but prove it he must

The PM faces conflicting ideological demands. After the budget and Labour conference, we will see how adept he is at managing them

All governments disappoint us in the end. Some policies fail, divisions open up, ideological dead-ends are reached and national problems are left unsolved. The big question is at what point widespread disillusion sets in: after a few months, a few years, or longer. The answer has decisive consequences for a government’s sense of itself and for its electoral fate.

You might think this government, only seven weeks old, the first entirely new Labour administration for a quarter of a century, with a huge majority and ministers working hard while much of the country is on holiday, will be safe from voter disdain for quite a while. Yet that assumption may be optimistic. Not just because of Labour’s thin total vote at the election, or the immense national problems it has inherited, but for other, less examined reasons. Ruling from the centre-left is particularly difficult, as Labour governments have regularly demonstrated. And changes in the media and in how voters think have made that task even harder.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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Were UK protests against far right anti-thugs or anti-racist? The answer will tell us much about our nation | Andy Beckett

There is little doubt anti-racist activists led the pushback, but it is also important to know why so many others took a stand

In some ways, the counterprotests across the UK against the far right have been a straightforward, much-needed good news story. A great array of people, right across the country, mobilising almost spontaneously to protect refugees, Muslims and other minorities from the worst wave of racist attacks for decades. The counterprotests are a sign that this country has become less tolerant of racism and more politically engaged, in a fundamental rather than party-political sense.

At the counterprotest I went to in north-east London, people of different ages, races, sexualities and religions filled the road and pavements. The crowd was tense at first, but then grew chattier, almost festive, as it became clear that the racists weren’t going to turn up.

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Tough on elites, tough on the causes of elites: that’s how Starmer can defeat the allure of populism | Andy Beckett

As the west zigzags between bland centrists and polarising populists, it will take a fiercer response from Labour to halt a creep to the right

There are times when centrism seems shrewd politics. Progressive enough for some lefties, permissive enough for liberals, cautious enough for conservatives and unobtrusive enough for the many voters who want politicians to “tread more lightly on your lives”, as Keir Starmer put it in his first prime ministerial speech. After years of turmoil and extremism, a centrist government – whether of the centre left or centre right – can come as a relief.

Centrism can seem inclusive: “We need to move forward together,” Starmer declared outside No 10. Centrism can seem “unburdened by doctrine”, as he pledged his government would be, instead offering “stability and moderation”. And centrism can promise reforms that are modest in scale but cumulatively uplifting: “The work of change,” he said, “begins immediately.”

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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Starmer won by shifting to the right. But the Labour left doesn’t need to spend these years in the wilderness | Andy Beckett

The party increased its vote in seats with leftwing MPs. In this strange new world of British politics, there are reasons for hope

When Labour wins a general election by centrist means, some on the left of the party always have mixed feelings. They welcome the crushing of the Conservatives. It’s sometimes forgotten by centrists that the Labour left hates the Tories with a particular intensity. The left’s optimists also often hope, despite evidence to the contrary, that a Labour victory will open up new socialist possibilities – or at least provide some emotional catharsis. When Tony Blair won his 1997 landslide, Diane Abbott went to the Labour celebrations at the South Bank, she told her biographers Robin Bunce and Samara Linton. “And it was just the most amazing feeling … It felt like I had waited my whole life for this.”

Yet, mixed in with such elation can be a sinking feeling that the left’s enemies inside the party have been vindicated. What Keir Starmer always pointedly describes as his “changed Labour party” – others would call it a purged Labour party – has almost doubled its number of parliamentary seats, after ditching most of its leftwing policies and conducting an election campaign that prioritised winning over Tory voters with promised restrictions on public spending and with traditional patriotic themes. In the huge new parliamentary Labour party, the few dozen MPs considered leftwingers – the label can be hard to apply precisely – will be even more outnumbered than before. In the strange new world of British politics, likely to be dominated by both Starmer’s stern realism and the rightwing fantasies of Reform, does the Labour left, and the left more generally, still have a future?

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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The Tories are terrified of a Labour ‘supermajority’ – but there are reasons for Labour supporters to be wary too | Andy Beckett

A landslide victory for Keir Starmer could lead to hubris and division. For Conservatives, however, it’s an existential question

Can a political party win too much power? In many ways, it’s a strange fear to raise about Labour, yet the Conservatives have been doing it for weeks now. For only two periods in Labour’s 124-year history has it had huge parliamentary majorities: from 1945 to 1950 and 1997 to 2005. And even those two governments still faced hostile newspapers, sceptical civil servants, suspicious big business, millions of instinctively rightwing voters in the most prosperous regions and the pro-Tory bias of much of the establishment.

For the Conservatives to warn about the dangerous monopoly power of a Labour “supermajority”, having sought and enjoyed such power much more often themselves, is shameless even by their standards. For many Labour politicians, activists and supporters, meanwhile, the possibility that the party could enter an era of rare dominance next week is – though they dare not say it yet – very exciting. If the polls are right, the 2024 election and the Starmer supremacy that may follow could become legends that Labour lives off for decades.

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What does Starmer’s ‘changed’ Labour party look like on the ground? In Brighton, I found out | Andy Beckett

A controversial deselection has rocked the local party, and campaigners are divided over the leadership

In many ways, Keir Starmer’s makeover of the Labour party has been a deeply conventional project. Since the 1950s, a decade his buttoned-up style would have suited well, the majority of Labour leaders have moved the party rightwards. It’s what the mainstream media and big business usually advise these leaders to do, arguing that a less leftwing Labour is more politically and economically realistic – while not so readily acknowledging that such a party also offers less of a threat to their interests.

Labour’s rightward shifts don’t always work. Neil Kinnock, Jim Callaghan, Harold Wilson and Hugh Gaitskell all led the party to painful defeats. But on 4 July, Starmer’s orthodox approach looks likely to be vindicated, in electoral terms at least.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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