Why Sir Keir Starmer could turn out to be a one-term prime minister

Judged purely on the number of seats Labour has won, then of course the general election was a victory for Sir Keir Starmer. Achieving a bigger swing than Tony Blair’s 10.2 per cent in 1997, the new Prime Minister has built a House of Commons majority worthy of a toolmaker’s son.

But how solid are its foundations?

Before Thursday night’s results, there had been much talk of a “supermajority”, with Labour destined to remain in power for at least a decade. While that may still happen if the party goes ahead with its plan to rig the system by introducing votes for 16 and 17-year-olds, Starmer is now facing a number of competing pressures that make a one-term government look equally likely.

Take the threat from Reform. Far from just knocking the Conservatives off their perch in previously “true blue” seats like Clacton and Great Yarmouth, Reform seemed to outperform expectations in the so-called red wall. Farage’s boast of being the unofficial opposition may overstate the influence of the party’s five seats in Parliament, but the fact Reform has come second in almost 100 constituencies means it has everything to play for come 2029.

Farage is already a far superior campaigner and communicator to Starmer. If he and party chairman Richard Tice spend the next five years “professionalising” Reform – while standing up for those disenfranchised by the notion of four million votes translating into so few seats – then they have a good chance of winning over even more voters, especially in left-behind towns.

Farage’s excellent social media reach could also attract a sizeable proportion of those newly enfranchised 16 and 17 year olds – if the surge in Gen Z support for Right wing parties across Europe is anything to go by.

Contrary to some of the more catastrophic pre-election MRP polling, the Tories haven’t been completely annihilated in the style of the Canadian Conservatives, either. If what’s left of the party can unite behind a new leader (preferable one who is unashamedly Thatcherite), there is no reason why they cannot win back votes in five year’s time, unencumbered by Covid, the war in Ukraine, a string of broken manifesto pledges, and more managerial problems than Watford FC.

The surge in support for the Greens could also pose a significant challenge to Starmer at the next election if his already watered down green plans are further thwarted by union paymasters fighting for oil and gas jobs. Similarly, his ongoing support for Israel’s right to defend itself is only going to continue to turn Muslim voters against Labour if the war in the Middle East carries on raging throughout his premiership.

The party had always expected to be threatened by pro-Palestinan independents at this election – but to lose once staunchly Labour seats like Leicester East and Leicester South, and to only scrape through in a host of others, doesn’t exactly bode well for Starmer’s future foreign policy decisions.

He is going to be required to walk a tightrope between the Labour types who think the war in Gaza amounts to a genocide, and those calling for him to distance himself from those boycott-Israel types. Arguing over ceasefires when you’re in opposition is one thing – but when you’re a government that counts itself as an ally of Israel, it is quite another.

Having fought the entire election campaign revealing very little about what he would actually do in government, Starmer undoubtedly has some tricks up his sleeve. We know who the party won’t tax – so-called “working people” (whoever they may be), but are yet to discover who or what it will tax to pay for its spending pledges beyond slapping VAT on private school fees and taxing non-doms and energy firms. A Labour Party which spends the next five years imposing stealth taxes on an electorate facing the highest tax burden in peacetime is unlikely to prove popular at the ballot box.

Similarly, any failure to control immigration – both legal and illegal – is only going to result in Reform, and very probably the Conservatives, winning more support next time round. Throw in closer alignment with the EU, and Brexiteers who have switched back to Labour may start having second thoughts.

The truth of the matter is that in order to really “change” Britain, Starmer must be radical.

Yet despite his 2020 leadership pitch betraying a distinctly Corbynista bent, his socialist tax and spend tendencies have been reined in by Rachel Reeves, mindful that Labour cannot claim to be the party of economic competence while appearing to be fiscally incontinent.

This, too, will pose a particular problem if Labour is not able to deliver the growth it has promised. The task of keeping inflation down is going to prove difficult if Labour caves into the NHS pay demands – while flirting with increaing the living wage to £15 a hour, a move that will inevitably result in the closure of already struggling small and medium sized businesses. Having revealed nothing about how the party will achieve higher levels of growth beyond reforming the planning system, it’s hard to see where the rise in GDP will come from other than continuing to rely on mass migration.

If these potential policy pitfalls weren’t tricky enough to navigate, Starmer will be doing it with a wide but shallow majority. As the pollster Professor Sir John Curtice pointed out, Labour’s vote share has barely changed since 2019 despite the party winning more than 200 more seats than the last election. While it remains one of the vagaries of the first past the post system that a party can win so many seats on the basis of around 34 per cent of the vote, it’s hardly a great start for Starmer that nearly two thirds of the electorate backed someone else.

Unlike in 1997, the public was never crying out for Starmer to be Prime Minister. He’s won because the Conservatives lost so badly. If Reform hadn’t stood any candidates, the Tories might have hung onto two thirds of the seats they squandered. “While [Labour] have won the right to govern the country, they are not necessarily backed by a very high proportion of the country, and they have still got an awful lot of people to win over during their term in office,” explained Professor Curtice.

In the words of that other, inspirational leader, Gareth Southgate, a win’s a win. But the truth as ugly as England’s bastardisation of the beautiful game right now is that more people voted for Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 (10,295,000) than they did for Labour on Thursday. Moreover, millions didn’t bother voting at all in what looks set to be the lowest turnout for an election in decades.

This victory doesn’t demonstrate some massive shift to the Left in the UK or indeed a swell of support for Starmerism. What it truly reflects is a populace that has lost faith in British politics and has opted for what it perceived to be the best of a bad bunch.