British politics can only be understood right now if one realises that Keir Starmer is presiding over a “landslide minority” government: two thirds of the seats on one third of the vote.
On the parliamentary maths, things are about as rosy as can be for Labour. It has more than 400 MPs and the Tories just 121. The Lib Dems – in effect Labour’s reserve fuel tank – have a bumper crop of 72 MPs from last July. No other party grouping gets into double figures.
None of the main planks of Labour’s programme enjoys much public support
This is the sort of dominance which traditionally betokens an administration fully in charge of the zeitgeist and able to implement radical change with justified confidence. Think Thatcher post-1983 or Blair post-1997.
That is certainly how Labour has behaved in its first six months. Imperious decisions from the Chancellor Rachel Reeves about the winter fuel allowance and a bumper tax-raising budget have been accompanied by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson implementing unabashed woke leftism in the education sector, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband going full Greta Thunberg on energy policy and Foreign Secretary David Lammy masterminding an apologies-and-reparations regime at the Foreign Office.
Thousands of convicted felons have been released from jail early, and Prisons Minister Lord Timpson is seeking to tilt the criminal justice system towards non-custodial sentences. After scrapping the Rwanda deterrent plan, Labour has presided over a further increase in small-boat crossings. Some train drivers are now so well off after a bumper no-strings pay award that they will no longer volunteer for weekend shifts.
And yet none of the main planks of Labour’s programme enjoys much public support. Labour’s feeble winning vote share of July – 34 per cent in a low turnout election – has morphed into an average poll rating of just 26 per cent. The trendline is still tracking downwards.
So while the Commons arithmetic says Starmer is Tony Blair without the charisma, popular reservoirs of support are already so depleted as to make him more akin to Jim Callaghan, minus the sunny disposition.
Starmer, however, clearly continues to gauge his stock of political capital almost entirely via the freakish MP headcount. Hence he has felt secure enough to block a grooming gang inquiry and to unveil a motley crew of new Labour peers, along with a damehood for that discredited establishment numpty Patricia Hewitt and a knighthood for Sadiq Khan.
The hubristic mindset which led to the “freebie-gate” scandal of late summer persists. This mood of complacency in the British establishment is present well beyond the confines of the government. The Christmas message of King Charles, for instance, was based on the brainless and discredited mantra of diversity being our strength.
This is the context for politics in 2025. It is the wind in the sails of Nigel Farage and Reform. The insurgent party’s policy platform is notably half-baked but as a receptacle for protest votes it is formidable: the perfect cudgel with which to bash the British political class.
Parliamentary sovereignty tells us that Starmer can do pretty much what he wants. The popular sovereignty which underpins it says quite the opposite. Starmer’s instinct is to ignore the public mood. It guided his disastrous decision as shadow secretary of state for Brexit to try and cancel the result of the 2016 EU referendum. He has not learnt his lesson.
The year ahead will surely be the last in which the commanding parliamentary maths can render the Prime Minister impervious to the extreme unpopularity of his policies. As each month takes us further from the last election and closer to the next, so the gravitational pull towards having to accommodate the public mood will strengthen. Imposing Whitehall housing targets on semi-rural constituencies represented by Labour MPs with tiny majorities? Good luck with that. More tax increases after the ones already announced kill growth and stall revenues? Ditto. An immigration regime lacking any meaningful deterrent against border gatecrashing? Unsustainable.
Starmer won big on a loser’s score last year. The longer he continues to misinterpret this as a mandate for inflicting more boilerplate progressive leftism, the more disastrous will be his unravelling.
Comments