Why does Keir Starmer seem set on following the example of the French Socialist party, and leading Labour into electoral oblivion? The sad truth is that it could all have been so different. Back in September 2019, at the height of the Brexit saga, it was obvious that Corbyn’s Labour was increasingly contemptuous of Britain’s white working-classes. But instead of reaching out to Red Wall voters, Starmer has doubled down on this misguided approach. The miserable state of the French left should serve as a warning to Labour that you betray your traditional voters at your peril.
In the last few years, France’s Socialist party has imploded, reduced to such penury that they had sold their Paris HQ. It is a humiliation they brought upon themselves. Smug, self-righteous and out-of-touch, this party of overwhelmingly middle-class metropolitans had for a decade turned away from their working-class supporters in search of more ‘wholesome’ voters. As one left-wing think tank advised the party in 2011:
‘The France of tomorrow is above all united by cultural and progressive values.
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