The Character of Britain
Oliver Eagleton on Labour under Starmer.
The character of Britain’s Labour government is reflected in the killing fields of Gaza. Before his ascent to Downing Street in July 2024, Sir Keir Starmer insisted that Israel had the right to impose a siege on the Strip – cutting off power and water. Since then, he has supplied the butchers in the Israeli cabinet with the tools they need to exterminate the trapped Palestinian population. Over the course of just three months, Labour approved more arms sales than the Conservatives permitted over the previous four years. Starmer fought tooth and nail against legal challenges to ensure that the UK can help manufacture the fighter jets Israel is using to rain hellfire down on civilian areas and ‘safe zones’. Under his watch, more than 8,000 British munitions have been sent to the occupying army; hundreds of British spy planes have collected intelligence on its behalf; senior British military figures have held secret meetings with their Israeli counterparts; and British diplomats have provided cover for their atrocities. When we look at the fallout – skeletal children screaming from the pain of hunger, entire families trapped under the rubble of razed buildings, a death toll projected to reach 200,000 by the war’s end – we cannot accuse Starmer of ‘inaction’ or ‘complicity’. For he is not a bystander, but a perpetrator.
Any assessment of the current Labour Party must start with this fact, because it captures the essence of its politics: an adamantine commitment to upholding the interests of the powerful which sanctions even the most intense forms of violence, including the crime of genocide. While the effects of this outlook are most visible in Palestine, they stretch beyond those boundaries. Starmer pounded Yemen with bombs and backed the US assault on Iran, suggesting that the UK could become directly involved in the conflict later down the line. He embarked on a massive military buildup, with warfare spending set to reach an astonishing 5 per cent of GDP over the next decade and arms companies given access to the highest levels of government. Rather than trying to resolve the war in Ukraine, Starmer proposed a major provocation: sending UK troops to the front line as part of a ‘coalition of the willing’. Rather than calming tensions with China, his government inflamed them by announcing that it is ‘ready to fight’ in the Pacific. While this spiral of jingoism may seem senseless, behind it is a consistent rationale: to reassert Britain’s role as a militarised enclave of American empire, a nation that will spare no expense, neither in public money nor human lives, to serve Washington’s objectives.
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The violence of Starmerism, though, was not directed only at its external opponents. Internal enemies were similarly in the crosshairs. The government classified Palestine Action, an organisation that disrupts arms factories assisting the Israeli war, as a ‘terrorist’ entity: consequently, its supporters can be jailed for up to fourteen years. The decree is without precedent in British history. Never before has the state taken such extreme measures to eradicate a protest movement. The number of arrests to date has surpassed 1,600, with many more to follow. Elderly peace activists holding signs that read ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’ are now treated as equivalent to followers of Isis or al-Qaida and manhandled into riot vans by dozens of armoured police. People involved in organising protests against the ban have been rounded up in dawn raids and charged with terrorism offences. The crackdown has been condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Chief, who described it as ‘disproportionate and unnecessary’. It has also been slammed by the UK’s two largest human rights organisations, Amnesty International calling it an ‘egregious abuse’ and Liberty warning of its ‘chilling effect’.
This fit with Starmer’s wider ambition to build a state that can smother any effective form of dissent. He kept in place legislation that allows police to disband any protest they consider a ‘nuisance’, introduced a bill that imposes further arbitrary restrictions on demonstrations, and made it easier to deport non-citizen activists in Trumpian fashion. Branding them ‘contemptible’, the PM demanded that climate campaigners be given stiffer sentences. During his time in office, environmentalists have reportedly received the harshest jail terms ever handed down to peaceful protesters in Britain: one of them getting five years for discussing a protest in an online call, another six months for participating in a ‘slow march’ down a London street. Laws intended to suppress organised crime rings have been creatively interpreted to apply to protest groups and lock up their members. They are backed by a major enhancement of the surveillance state, with Labour working doggedly to gain access to people’s private mobile data and bringing in a ‘bank spying bill’ to snoop on Britons’ personal accounts. A project called the National Violent Disorder Programme is meanwhile targeting perceived threats to social order by rolling out facial recognition technology across the country.
Labour’s brutality abroad and repression at home are both heavily racialised, with new police powers and ‘antisocial behaviour’ laws often deployed against communities of colour. In the 2024 election campaign, Starmer and his shadow minister Jonathan Ashworth complained that not enough people from ‘countries like Bangladesh’ were being deported. Once they took the reins of government, Labour duly launched a ferocious assault on migrants: ramping up immigration raids and summarily ejecting people from the country, while broadcasting the lurid footage on social media. A new Border Security Command with a ‘counterterrorism’ remit has extended the militarisation of Britain’s frontier – which, combined with subsidies for French authorities to wage war on the migrant population there, is supposed to prevent undesirables from reaching our shores. Starmer has been in talks with several countries about plans to process asylum applications overseas, in a rerun of the Tories’ infamous Rwanda policy. The PM became well versed in inciting racial hatred: channelling Enoch Powell to claim that Britain has become an ‘island of strangers’; accusing migrants of inflicting ‘incalculable’ damage on society, overstretching public services and breaching ‘national security’. His administration appeared to spend much of its time brainstorming innovative ways of making the lives of asylum seekers even more intolerable. Its latest scheme: to create an elaborate financial infrastructure that will ban them from buying certain ‘non-essential’ items, such as tickets for leisure activities and toys for their children. Soon enough, such luxuries may be out of reach for many other working-class Britons, as Labour steps up its perma-austerity approach to the economy.
While splashing out on more bombs and stronger borders, the government also slashed vital services. One of its first acts after the election was to remove winter fuel allowances for most of the elderly, which would have forced as many as 100,000 pensioners into energy poverty were it not for a last-minute U-turn. Labour also announced that it would retain the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, despite the policy pushing eighty children into poverty each day. Next on the chopping block was welfare, with Starmer making it his personal mission to remove support payments to sick and disabled people so as to corral them into the labour market, whether or not they are fit to work. Though public opposition forced ministers to delay or backtrack on some of these reforms, it has not changed the overall direction of travel. A set of ‘ironclad’ fiscal rules are routinely invoked by the grim-faced chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to keep spending at miserly levels and head off any demand for public investment. With the health department in a state of roiling crisis, it was decided that its budget will increase by only 2.8 per cent annually, well below the postwar historical norm of 3.7 per cent. With local councils unable to meet their basic social obligations, the government opted to target deprived boroughs for further cuts, sometimes exceeding 10 per cent of their budgets. As the state struggled to fulfil its essential functions, Starmer and Reeves demanded even more retrenchment, with day-to-day administrative spending to fall by 16 per cent on average. Naturally, it is private interests that stand to benefit, swooping in to fill the gaps under the auspices of ‘public–private partnership’.
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The pattern, then, is fairly consistent. Genocide in the Middle East to protect the US–Israeli order from Palestinian resistance. Authoritarianism to defend ‘British culture’ from the corrupting influence of protesters and migrants. Austerity to safeguard the privileges of investors against groups like pensioners and benefits claimants. Starmerism was nothing more than the fortification of these power structures against perceived threats from outside. This was not quite the politics of New Labour, defined by faith in free markets and the cult of modernisation. It was a politics of our present: an age of anxiety, in which the establishment strives to root out agents of disruption in the interest of stability. The Labour Party today has no future orientation, no conception of ‘progress’. It is a purely conservative force, seeking to preserve the decrepit institutions of the state and capital, and harking back to a time when they commanded greater confidence.
This restorationist tendency is, of course, why Labour’s outlook shades so easily into that of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – why the two parties share such similar rhetoric, and similar diagnoses of the country’s ills. Having eradicated any trace of social democracy from Labour’s ranks, Starmer presided over an empty husk of reaction. His policies were increasingly right-populist while his communication style remained stubbornly bland-centrist. No wonder that Farage – a more capable and combative media performer, who falsely presents himself as a force of opposition – is leading him by ten points in the polls.
Nor is it a mystery why this hard-right tendency has become so dominant in contemporary Britain. It is on the rise globally, because of the crack-up of neoliberalism and the long fallout of the Great Recession. But the most immediate local explanation can be summed up in two words: Jeremy Corbyn. His leadership of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020 was a traumatic shock for the country’s elite, as it took aim at each of the power structures mentioned above. Starmer’s principal role in British politics was to eclipse the horizon of Corbynism and deflate the aspirations it had raised. Once the Corbyn project was felled in 2019, ceding its populist energy to Boris Johnson, Starmer captured the party and set about remaking it through a comprehensive clear-out of the left. He passed new rules to make it impossible for outsider candidates to contest the leadership, stitched up the composition of local branches, and threatened MPs with suspension unless they fell in line. His principal target, however, was solidarity with Palestine, designated an ‘antisemitic’ thought crime that could lead to the termination of one’s membership. The ensuing purge of anti-Zionists disproportionately targeted Jewish members, who were reported to be almost thirteen times more likely to be expelled than non-Jewish ones. It finally culminated in the ousting of Corbyn himself: a symbolic statement that his movement had been banished from Labour, never to return.
Having coasted into Number 10 thanks to low turnout and a collapse in the Tory vote, Starmer attempted to scale up this approach to the country as a whole. The goal remained the same: to lower expectations, constrain the political imagination and narrow the scope of public discourse, so as to reconsolidate the bastions of ruling authority. But Sir Keir is a better party bureaucrat than he is a national politician, and he – unsurprisingly – failed to secure even passive consent for this dismal programme. Labour’s popularity has now fallen below 20 per cent. Its leader’s approval rating is minus 46. It is challenged from the right by Farage, who, because he need not concern himself with the realities of government, can take the same ideological coordinates – racism, Atlanticism, deference to big business – and radicalise them, advocating policies that are practically unimplementable but rhetorically effective. By pushing the government’s own agenda to its extreme conclusions, such as mass deportations and major tax cuts for the wealthy, Reform can contrast its strength to Labour’s weakness. The latter thus finds itself forever outflanked, unable to keep pace with the tide of reaction that it has unleashed. Yet the more interesting and authentic challenge comes from the left, whose forces have not been eradicated despite Starmer’s best efforts, but have instead reestablished themselves outside the Labour Party.
Oliver Eagleton is the author of The Starmer Project and editor of Your Party, from which this post has been lightly adapted.
