For a politician who has usually avoided high-flown rhetoric, Keir Starmer is suddenly sounding remarkably ambitious. As he addressed the House of Commons after last week’s king’s speech, he said his government’s aim was “nothing less than national renewal”. But there was an even bigger story he wanted to tell, aimed not just at hard-right Tories and the chancers of Reform UK, but their political soulmates across the world. At that point, Donald Trump had just survived an assassination attempt and Joe Biden was still clinging on to his declining hopes of another presidential term, and it seemed as if Starmer wanted to do his bit to fill the moral breach: his government’s agenda, the Labour leader said, represented “a rejection, in this complicated and volatile world, of those who can only offer the easy answer – the snake-oil charm of populism”.
Over the past seven days, two very different elements of the news have highlighted what this means and the daunting challenge Starmer faces. For the moment, a lot of domestic headlines are focused on his government’s opening array of policies and the fact that they highlight – within cramped financial limits – its energised and purposeful approach to power. Last week’s meeting of the European Political Community at Blenheim Palace saw ministers enthusiastically reconnecting with our old friends in the EU, and gave Starmer an opportunity to reaffirm Britain’s commitment to the European convention on human rights and international law.
But developments in the US threaten to drown all that out. With Biden having finally seen sense, it would be nice to think that Trump’s bandaged-and-exultant phase is now over. But the sense of America’s democratic institutions and social bonds – not to mention its support for Ukraine – feeling frail and imperilled will not be wholly neutralised by his exit from the presidential race, and a replacement candidate is hardly certain to stall Trump’s momentum. Meanwhile, the far right continues to disrupt politics across Europe. For the foreseeable future, looking out at the world from a British perspective is going to involve a discomfiting tension – between the small comforts of Labour’s cautious social democracy and a gathering sense of global disorder and breakdown.
So far, this dichotomy seems to be encouraging a flimsy British exceptionalism. At the state opening of parliament, for example, the mere sight of Starmer and Angela Rayner apparently sharing warm words with Rishi Sunak and Oliver Dowden was enough for some people to suggest that in a world gone mad, Britain remains an oasis of civility and calm. Starmer then told MPs not only that populism “does nothing to fix our foundations”, but that “the British people have rejected it, as they have throughout their history”. And at that point, he crossed over from principled opposition to the most dangerous force in our politics into something that sounded rather Panglossian.
In the midst of Starmer’s political honeymoon, it is an unfashionable point to make, but our national condition is still largely defined by a populist success Labour is still unable to contest: Brexit, arguably the greatest triumph for the new right anywhere in the democratic world. On 4 July, moreover, more than 4 million people voted for Reform UK, which put it well ahead of the revived Liberal Democrats as the UK’s de facto third party, only denied that status because of our absurd electoral system.
Thanks to Nigel Farage and his followers, and many Tories – including Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, who both surfaced at the Republican convention – British versions of Trumpism are alive, if not necessarily well. Meanwhile, the rightwing press is full of pundits awed by the prospect of Trump’s return, who sound like unsettling throwbacks to the more troubled periods of the 20th century. What they write often comes with caveats, but the basic message is clear. “A new kind of populist-conservative politics that aggressively pursues prosperity and order may well be the inevitable future of Right-wing politics in the declining West,” says one Telegraph columnist. These people are surely looking ahead to a mouthwatering scenario: the Starmer government colliding with its first difficulties just as Trump romps home, and the next Conservative leader decides to double down on the crabby, introverted mindset that has gripped the Tories since 2016.
Whatever its successes, the incarnation of rightwing populism that is currently dominant in the UK probably limits its political potential. Reform UK still tends to look like a force commanded by old and posh former Tories: if its shop window continues to be dominated by mustard-coloured trousers, pints and fags and nostalgia for imperial measures and the Dunkirk spirit, it will not advance nearly as quickly as Farage would like. But clearly, this does not mean that British populism will always take that form. Across the Channel, look at National Rally’s 28-year-old president, Jordan Bardella, whose catchphrase is “France is disappearing”: along with his 1.5 million TikTok followers, he may herald a grim political future in which the very real problems of millennials and generation Z-ers are successfully blamed on immigration and multiculturalism.
To some extent, the Labour leadership is obviously mindful of populism’s still-unfolding threats, and how the government should already be pushing back. It is telling that the term “working class” is suddenly back in the party’s vocabulary. Despite glaring policy gaps – on building new social housing, and the continuing local austerity that makes places feel completely abandoned – much of its initial programme is focused on issues that create the disconnection the new right cynically feeds on: witness plans to boost bus services, increase rights at work and protect people who live in rented housing.
And then there are the difficult, delicate subjects that Farage and his ilk will try to endlessly exploit over the next four or five years. Starmer’s emphasis on border security and his search for answers to the so-called small boats problem might cause dismay in some quarters, but they are issues to which his government needs coherent answers. They also flag up the clear risk of Labour trying to sound tough on immigration and asylum more generally, fearing a loss of support to the kind of people who want Trumpesque bans and crackdowns, and really believe in a thinly concealed nativism. Trying to close them down by leaning into their agenda threatens to give them even more political space: sooner or later their nasty and impossibilist arguments will surely have to be tackled head-on.
In that sense, all those votes for Reform UK – along with the fact that it came second to Labour in 89 constituencies – highlight perhaps the biggest quandary of all. If a party founded and led by privately educated opportunists can successfully present itself as the voice of ordinary people, when might we find a senior Labour politician with the confidence and wit to expose that for the scam that it is? So far, the post-election foreground has been dominated by an efficient-looking man in a suit, talking about calm and patience and trying his best to return politics to normal. That is a noble endeavour, of course. Whether it will succeed is another question.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
