Keir starmer

Sir Keir Starmer will have spent far more time preparing his response to today’s Budget which comes after Prime Minister’s Questions, but he did also manage to highlight a problem that isn’t going away for the government in his questions to Boris Johnson. The Labour leader chose to focus his stint on Yemen, criticising the British government’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, and the decision to cut international aid money to the war-torn country. Johnson insisted that ‘when it comes to the people of Yemen, we continue to step up to the plate’. The most instructive question was on whether MPs will get a vote on the cuts to aid. Starmer

Sir Keir is having a wobble. That’s obvious. The Labour leader holds an equestrian title, so he naturally feels at home on his high horse. Today at PMQs he loftily commanded Boris not to raise taxes in the budget. That was hilarious. A Labour leader begging a Tory Prime Minister not to implement Labour policy. If Sir Keir had produced a viola from his trousers and played ‘Waltzing Matilda’ he couldn’t have looked more ridiculous. Boris was so stunned that he could barely speak. ‘Well, I don’t know about you Mr Speaker,’ he bumbled. Then he pointed out that in 2019 Sir Keir had ‘stood on a manifesto to put

The right is usually much better than the left at harnessing the awesome power of the folk memories that surround Britain’s heroic second world war struggle. The idea of British exceptionalism at its most evocative moment between 1939 and 1945 was crucial to Brexit and crucial to securing popular backing for the Falklands War a generation earlier too. So for Keir Starmer to base his economic pitch for power not on modern monetary theory or any other piece of leftish guru-jargon, but instead on drawing parallels with the reforming post-war Labour administration of Clement Attlee is smart politics. The Attlee government has a powerful mythology of its own that adds

It’s been a difficult few weeks for Sir Keir Starmer with left-leaning commentators and MPs lining up to criticise the Labour leader. Among recent complaints include the idea that Starmer plays it too safe, has not held the Tories to account despite the high Covid death toll and has failed to make much of an impression on the general public. The polls also point to problems – with Savanta ComRes finding Boris Johnson has had a 5 point rise on the question of best Prime Minister in its monthly political tracker. Today Starmer attempted to turn the page by setting out his approach on the economy. As Kate reports on Coffee House, this included the establishment of ‘British

Exactly what a Keir Starmer government would look like in terms of policy still remains a mystery to most people. During his leadership campaign Starmer ran on a platform consisting of ‘ten pledges’, which were essentially just reheated Corbynism. Without publicly disavowing them, Starmer seems to have been trying to move away from these pledges toward something that represents a solid break with his predecessor since winning the leadership contest. Yet we still don’t have a clear idea on what that would look like in real terms. Starmer has defined himself so far not on who he is, but rather, who he is not. To this end, Starmer’s people are

Since becoming Labour leader, Keir Starmer has single-mindedly been trying to persuade red wall voters that Labour is ‘patriotic’, just like them. He thereby hopes to clear away those cultural barriers that have arisen between Labour in the north and midlands where voting for the party used to be almost instinctive. As he said in his first leader’s speech back in September, Starmer wants red wall voters to ‘take another look’ at Labour now it is under his leadership: he wants to show them that it is no longer the party of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. But many in his party don’t like what Starmer is doing, because a significant

It is instructive that, faced with his first wobbles as leader of the opposition, the person Keir Starmer has reached for is Peter Mandelson. From the sounds of things, Mandelson is working with Starmer’s team on communications and strategy. I certainly don’t think this is a bad idea by Starmer, at least as far as recent Labour party appointees go, but I can’t help but feel that Mandelson’s return to the top says a lot about Labour’s problems, how they got into their current mess and where those issues might lead the party from here. Part of the problem is that the Labour party has been hollowed out talent-wise. Under

Being at the launch of the 1997 Labour manifesto and watching the shadow cabinet take to the stage is one of my abiding memories from more than 20 years spent as a lobby journalist. Even setting aside the star-turn Tony Blair, it was a veritable march of the big beasts — Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Jack Straw, David Blunkett, John Prescott, Mo Mowlam. All of these people were major players with large followings and massive public profiles. The less central figures also passed muster, including George Robertson (later a fine Nato secretary general), the ever-popular Donald Dewar, the clever and well-spoken Alistair Darling, suave Jack Cunningham, Margaret Beckett and Ann

Labour’s left appears to be licking their lips at the thought of Starmer’s ignominious end as leader, something which they now seem to hope will be coming sooner than they could have ever dreamed back in the summer. Should the party do poorly at the May local elections, the plan seems to be to agitate for a change at the top and unite around John McDonnell as Corbyn’s true successor. If the Labour party was taken over by the far left again, this would leave liberals in a difficult position. Since Keir Starmer took over, most liberals have folded into Labour, correctly seeing that they are the only vehicle for

Since Harold Wilson stood down as Prime Minister 45 years ago, there have been 11 general elections contested by seven different Labour leaders. Of those, only Tony Blair has managed to win, which he did three times in a row. The roll call of the defeated reads Callaghan, Foot, Kinnock (twice), Brown, Miliband and Corbyn (twice). As Alastair Campbell noted in a recent column for the New European, Labour’s record over the time span is lost, lost, lost, lost, Blair, Blair, Blair, lost, lost, lost, lost. Yet still we political commentators invite you to suspend your disbelief and suppose Labour is in the running. And still it is the Labour

It’s a different game at PMQs. With fewer than 40 members present, the debates feel more like a committee meeting than a full-throated parliamentary session. It’s bad for democracy if the highlight of the parliamentary week looks so static and uninspiring. When the weather cheers up they should move to a secure location outdoors, (like the gardens of Buckingham Palace), where more members could attend and the sessions would be livelier. Meanwhile, MPs are chafing under the restrictions. They’ve started to mess about like schoolkids in detention. They play games. They needle each other. They stretch the rules, and they dare the Speaker to shut them up or tick them

Boris Johnson had a very difficult backdrop to today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, having marked 100,000 deaths in the coronavirus pandemic last night. But, strangely, he didn’t have a particularly difficult session in the Commons. Sir Keir Starmer did, as you might expect, lead on the death toll, asking the Prime Minister repeatedly why he thought the UK had such a high death rate, and why he wouldn’t learn the lessons from the pandemic now so that the government didn’t repeat its mistakes. Johnson was able to deal with this reasonably easily, arguing that while he did think there would be a time to learn the lessons of what happened, that

A third stint in self-isolation and some extra time alone doesn’t seem to have given Keir Starmer time to reflect on his opposition strategy. Last night Labour called on the government to prioritise the reopening of schools when the time comes to lift lockdown restrictions.  Clearly a good idea — so good in fact that it’s already government policy. Boris Johnson has spent the best part of a year making clear that he will prioritise face-to-face education above almost all other social activity, telling the Commons three weeks ago that schools would be the first thing to reopen.  Starmer can hardly complain when the PM mockingly calls him ‘Captain Hindsight’ —

Keir Starmer’s keynote speech at the Fabian conference today was focused almost completely on foreign policy. The thrust of the Labour pitch was that Starmer is ‘pro-American but anti-Trump’. Given Corbyn’s tendency to see the United States at the Great Satan, this marks a huge shift in Labour’s foreign policy outlook. However, the speech was also classic Starmer and not in a good way: correcting the most obvious mistakes from the Corbyn era but going absolutely no further. I should take a moment to applaud Starmer for at least pivoting Labour back to a foreign policy position that is sensible and won’t stand in the way of the party trying

Where to begin? That was one of most absorbing PMQs of recent times. Three top moments: the Speaker rebuked the PM for improper language. The Labour leader was humiliated by one of his own backbenchers. And Ian Blackford asked a good question. That’s right. It finally happened. The SNP leader in the House of Commons — the great windbag of the Western Isles — made history by raising a sensible point. The Scottish shellfish industry, he said, has been shafted by Brexit. The problem? Red-tape. Last Monday a hapless trawlerman had to watch while his £40,000 haul turned rotten on the dockside as a posse of EU form-fiddlers fretted over