Marzia Maccaferri is a historian of ideas and politics who teaches at Queen Mary University of London, a contributor to Appunti.
Keir Starmer’s mandate has been full of problems from the start. What went wrong? Labour knew it would win in 2024 and had plenty of time to prepare.
The failure of Keir Starmer’s leadership — because we can certainly say today that it is a failure — I believe is due to a mix of things.
First of all, Starmer was unlucky, this must be considered. He inherited a particularly serious and damaged situation: Brexit, economic crisis, war in Ukraine, problems that he shared, apart from Brexit, with the rest of the European countries.
Then Trump came along. And it should not be forgotten that, just weeks after his inauguration, that is in the summer of 2024, there was the first march of Tommy Robinson. We saw one a few days ago and the first attack on the Starmer government came just weeks, indeed, after his inauguration.
But if we have to follow what Machiavelli said, 50 percent is due to luck, and that, okay, he did not have. But the other 50 percent is due, according to Machiavelli, to good leadership, to a good prince, to human virtue that must contain the damage of bad luck. And there Starmer really missed the mark.
Inexperience, centralization in his leadership style — everything must go through a centralizer — certainly incompetence in political decisions, a very poor communicative style, placid and bureaucratic, which worked against the Conservatives, therefore Boris Johnson and all the others, but proved ineffective when the leadership is in government.
Moreover, from a purely political point of view, his government pursues mainly reactive rather than proactive policies.
At the same time, I believe there is also a deep problem within the party, naturally worn down by years, if not decades, of internal struggles.
And this, beyond the fact that it is never a pretty sight, from a purely conceptual and political point of view has not produced ideas, essentially, but only factions — from my point of view, hooligans — from one position to another. And so it has essentially blocked any innovative capacity of the party once in government.
The almost bipolar party system has also gone into crisis despite the same electoral law. British politics has now become Italianized. How did this happen?
When there is a crisis of governability, or of any other nature, the English press normally always picks up this comparison: the United Kingdom is becoming Italianized.
Even the Financial Times recently published an article with this title. From a certain point of view yes, it is a process of Italianization, in the sense that multipartism now seems consolidated.
If on one hand, in the last general elections, precisely those that crowned Starmer, one could think there was a realignment in the traditional bipartism, with these last local elections instead we return to what all analysts agree is a process started years, decades ago.
The English political-party system is made up of four parties at the national level: three historic ones, to which Reform has been added; two nationalist parties, which obtained relative majorities in the last local elections; and an emerging party, the Greens.
The problem, in this framework, naturally is the majoritarian electoral law. I won’t dwell on that, but there is a strong discrepancy and so first past the post risks being even more unrepresentative, exactly as it risks not producing majorities capable of governing.
What happened? I believe it was a fatal encounter between the residue of Thatcherism — therefore deindustrialization, abandonment of the politics of ideas, limiting politics to managing the bank account, without imagining anything else but that all politics is resolved in the economy — and then obviously Brexit.
Brexit inserted itself transversally in both traditional parties, splitting both, doing what in the history of English and British politics the Corn Law and the Irish question did: in fact, they created a fracture in the bipartite system and opened space for new parties, which were the Liberal Party and then the Labour Party at the beginning of the twentieth century.
So are we facing this situation? We will see. From a certain point of view yes: Reform has taken, at least according to the numbers, the place of the Conservative Party. What will the Green Party do? We shall see.
Is the Green Party the left-wing response to Nigel Farage and his Reform? Are we heading towards a new “bipopulism”?
Certainly the growth of the Greens was the novelty of these last local elections. And it is clear that the Greens have gathered the discontent on the left, especially in urban centers like London and especially among young people, among the new generations. This is an important thing to keep in mind.
However, they are not yet a national party, which instead is now clear from the data of these elections. So the Greens remain at the beginning of their maturation, they will have to be judged politically in a while. Even from this point of view it is too early.
But I feel I can say that the signals are not the best, they are not at all encouraging. Beyond the controversy over the fact that the Green leader, Zack Polanski, did not pay council taxes — which is a triviality — from a political point of view I think it is much stranger that he did not go to vote.
Zack Polanski asked voters to go vote for his party, but he did not go himself. I believe this is unique in the history certainly of this country, perhaps also of modern, contemporary, mass, Western and European politics.
Is the United Kingdom then a laboratory of new bipopulism? It’s a nice expression, I like it, maybe it can be reflected on in the future. But I think it is still a bit too early. And Labour is a structured party: beyond the new pompous leader who is coming, the mayor of Manchester, there is time and space to recover.
From this point of view, it should not be forgotten either that these are local elections. General elections can go differently; historically, in this country, they have always gone differently.
I would like to conclude with a different perspective. Let’s say that in the last local elections nationalist parties won: there are three, Scotland, Wales — albeit with relative majorities — and Reform, an ultra-nationalist if not reactionary party.
In short, more than bipopulism it might seem — I’ll end with this joke — a return to nineteenth-century politics.
(Excerpt from Appunti)
