Starmer

After a solid 2020 Keir Starmer is now finding life hard. By the end of last year, it appeared he was dragging his party back from its disastrous 2019 election result. But YouGov now has Labour lagging the Conservatives by 13 points. The explanation for this might be simple and temporary: the government’s successful vaccination programme. But the positive reception to the recent Budget suggests voters are happy with the Tory approach to tackling the economic mess left by the pandemic. As Britons anticipate a post-Covid future, perhaps this is a significant turning point? Starmer’s reversal of fortunes has been accompanied by a darkening chorus of hostile commentators. It is

Sir Keir Starmer has launched Labour’s local elections campaign today, focusing on the need for a ‘proper pay rise’ for NHS staff. Of course, local government has nothing to do with the way NHS pay is set in England, but that’s by the by if you’re an opposition trying to turn every poll into a referendum on the government. Starmer’s call for Boris Johnson to give nurses and other health service workers a 2 per cent pay rise is in keeping with the approach he has taken over the past few months which is to look for a government problem and hitch a ride on that, rather than go on the

Keir Starmer had his most effective parliamentary outing in some time today. The Labour leader not only picked the right topic, nurses pay, but asked short, pithy questions which made it harder for Boris Johnson to change the subject.  Starmer landed a few blows with some cheap but effective comparisons of what nurses were getting compared to other bits of government spending. With elections coming in two months’ time, Labour will be happy to run with this issue. The only protection that the Tories have on it is to say that the independent pay review body will, ultimately, make a recommendation. Starmer’s performance could, though, have been even more effective.

Keir Starmer has caught a lot of flak this week for his response to the Budget. The complaints are that he wasn’t strong enough, his opposition to corporation tax rises was a mistake and that he had nothing to really say that managed to stick with the public. It has added to a sense of Starmer’s leadership of the Labour party being on a downward spiral. Yet Starmer has probably done as well in his opening year as Labour leader as anyone could have. He isn’t the problem – it’s his party. The reality is that Labour couldn’t win the next election with anyone in charge. The problem goes well beyond

Now that we’ve finally heard Boris Johnson’s ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown, a key question remains: when will we see a return to politics as normal? It might not be the most pressing concern for most people, but for Keir Starmer and his supporters, it matters. Only when this happens can Labour start making some serious assaults on the Tories stubborn poll-lead. As a Labour member of ten or so years I want Starmer to have a chance to shine. After all, it is not like my party has been blessed with great leaders in recent years. Much of my time on the doorstep during the 2010 and 2015 general elections involved shying away

Boris Johnson’s political recovery in the last couple of months has been nothing short of remarkable. Not that he was ever down and out, of course, but having got a Brexit deal that both Farage and Starmer backed, followed by the success of the vaccine rollout, the Prime Minister once again looks unassailable.  As for the Labour leader, things look much less rosy. But what hasn’t been said in the criticism of Starmer is that what has mostly caused the leader of the opposition’s dip is not his own incompetence but the Prime Minister’s recent good form. This has made me realise something about Boris: he bears a lot of comparison with one former prime

A leaked email from Keir Starmer’s director of policy that hit the headlines this week contained an interesting line: that Labour must become ‘unashamedly pro-business’ in order to ‘be the party of working people and their communities’. This has caused predictable outrage on the left of the party. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Tories have been quick to mock the whole idea. At this week’s PMQs, Boris reminded Starmer that at the last election Labour wanted to dismantle capitalism – now it wants to be the party of business? Really? But the Tories need to be careful about how hard they laugh at this one. While

Should the Labour party be worried about the Greens? Some Labour activists think so. The Greens have just become the third most popular in British politics, if the latest IpsosMORI poll is anything to go on. The party won eight per cent support in the survey, putting them ahead of the Lib Dems. It’s enough to give even the staunchest Starmerite cause for concern. But the reality is that Labour needn’t sound the alarm. In fact, the very last thing Labour should be worried about at the moment is losing potential voters to the Greens. Why? Because we’ve been here before. In early 2015, support for the Greens went as high as 11 per cent

Only a few months ago, Keir Starmer was hailed as a prime minister in waiting who was giving Boris Johnson serious jitters. Now the shine appears to be coming off Labour’s leader.  Starmer’s ‘forensic’ approach can only get him so far. And there are serious questions about whether he has what it takes to get the Labour party back to winning ways. The postponement of last year’s elections hasn’t helped, as it meant Starmer missed a chance to show what his party could achieve without Corbyn at the top; everything about how a Labour party with Starmer at the helm might fare with the electorate remains theoretical. For his critics, the worry is that

If Keir Starmer has a strategy, it’s this: to paint his party as more competent than the Tories while keeping his head down on almost everything else. The aim of this is to ensure Labour can crawl across the line come the next election, winning a majority with a bit of help from the SNP. There’s a big problem with this approach though: it’s the same one that failed to work for Ed Miliband. To beat it, Boris Johnson need do little more than recycle the Tories’ 2015 campaign, which depicted Miliband in Salmond’s pocket, substituting Sturgeon in his place. The other problem with the ‘do as little as possible’ strategy is that it will almost certainly result

The shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds’s speech last night has received little attention. But it would be a big mistake for the Tories to ignore what Dodds had to say on the new direction she hopes to steer the Labour party in. Don’t laugh, but in years to come, last night could be seen as a significant turning point for Keir Starmer’s party. For a start, the lecture was entirely free of sanctimony, which in and of itself marks a huge break with recent Labour history. Gone were blank attacks on ‘austerity’ or weepy complaints about the Tories being heartless; instead, Dodds put forward a case for why a social democratic approach to the economy

A feisty exchange took place at Prime Minister’s Questions today, on the subject of free school meals, after widely-shared images showed children being provided with substandard food packages. Keir Starmer went on the attack, and suggested that the meagre meals were in line with the government’s current guidance. But it was Boris Johnson who provoked the ire of the Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, after the PM suggested that Starmer’s stance on the matter was hypocritical. The remark led to the visibly angry Speaker giving Johnson a dressing down, with Hoyle calling on the PM to withdraw the remark. Watch here:

Inevitably, Keir Starmer’s main intervention today has been on Covid, with the Labour leader calling for more restrictions within the next 24 hours. But he made this demand as part of his first major policy speech as leader – and there was more in it than just Covid curbs. Starmer has decided he wants to spend the next few months talking about several topics the Labour party has veered away from over the past decade or so. Chief among them is the economy, with the leader and shadow chancellor keen to use the time they have now before the next election to start making it normal for Labour to bring

The verdict of the Twitter jury is in, articulated in a single, now viral tweet by broadcaster Matthew Stadlen:  ‘Keir Starmer would have been – and would be – a far better Prime Minister than Boris Johnson during this pandemic.’ It is a theme that Starmer has naturally been keen to develop, leading him to make excoriating criticisms of Boris Johnson in a press conference at the weekend. The Starmer thesis is that Johnson is so anxious to be liked that he ducks out of taking tough decisions until it is too late. The Labour leader cites examples that include the lateness of the original lockdown, an allegedly late-in-the-day decision

Plenty of Labour figures who voted Remain are now urging the government to complete a trade agreement with the European Union before the end of the transition period. ‘There isn’t a choice between a fantasy deal and no deal,’ says Liam Byrne. ‘It’s this deal versus no deal, and we will not have a manufacturing industry left unless there is a deal.’ Although there is still a battle within the shadow cabinet on what to do should a UK-EU trade agreement come to parliament, the consensus seems to be that Keir Starmer would whip the party to vote for Johnson’s deal. This marks a big shift in Labour’s Brexit strategy

Sir Keir Starmer will start setting out his vision for the Labour party in the new year, Coffee House understands. The Labour leader will ‘move onto another level’, according to party sources, talking about what life under a Starmer government might look like, and encouraging his frontbenchers to make policy announcements. Up to this point, Starmer has had a strangely slow start as leader because he has been largely in reactive mode, responding to the government’s own response to the pandemic. This has made it easier for him to avoid awkward confrontations in his party over policy, with the stand-off over anti-Semitism being the only real ruction. He has focused largely