Steven Fielding

A warning from history for Keir Starmer

It is nearly a year since one of the Labour party’s worst ever election defeats; and just over six months since Keir Starmer became its leader. Starmer has acknowledged that his party has a mountain to climb if it is to win the next election, but that is his target. Most opinion surveys suggest he has started well: Labour has drawn level with the Conservatives. This rapid improvement might however be courtesy of the Prime Minister’s uncertain handling of the unprecedented Covid crisis. With a vaccine in the offing, voters might again look favourably on Boris Johnson as Britain returns to something-approaching normality.

Perhaps a better guide to how political parties can recover from a defeat such as Labour’s last December can be gained by looking at how our two main parties responded to earlier electoral reverses? That at any rate is the assumption behind ‘How To Come Back From The Brink’, which is broadcast on Radio 4 later today. Some of the defeats identified by producer Phil Tinline and myself were of the cataclysmic variety, such as in 1945, when Winston Churchill’s Conservatives were reduced to 197 seats; or in 1983, when Labour almost fell to third in the popular vote; and in 1997, when the Conservatives lost half of their MPs. But we also analysed those cumulative defeats, when a party’s problems crept up on it, as in 1959, Labour’s third loss in as many elections and October 1974 which saw the Conservatives lose their fourth contest in the five held since 1964.

The bad news for Starmer is that Labour’s defeat in 2019 was, in historical terms, unique, being both cumulative – it was its fourth reverse in a decade – and cataclysmic in its scale. It is unlikely Starmer will be able to emulate the rapid recovery engineered by the Tories after 1945, which saw them back in office in 1951.

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Written by
Steven Fielding
Steven Fielding is Emeritus Professor of Political History at the University of Nottingham. He is currently writing a history of the Labour party since 1976 for Polity Press.

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