Unpopular measures: UK chancellor Rachel Reeves, well being secretary Wes Streeting and prime minister Keir Starmer launch Labour’s 10-year well being plan, Sir Ludwig Guttman Health and Wellbeing Centre, London, 3 July 2025
Jack Hill · WPA pool · Getty
For prime minister Keir Starmer and his staff of advisors, Tony Blair’s management of the British Labour Party has at all times offered the mannequin they sought to emulate. At first look, Starmer’s election victory final July seemed to be a political achievement to set alongside these of Blair himself. With 411 seats, Starmer had the most important parliamentary majority for any get together because the early years of Blairism.
However, on nearer inspection, Starmer’s governmental mission rested on a lot weaker foundations. His get together obtained lower than 34% of the vote in final 12 months’s election. Labour’s vote share in 1997 was almost 10% increased. Since the 2019 election Labour had improved its vote share by lower than 2% but its seat share doubled, because of the peculiarities of the British electoral system. In absolute phrases, Starmer received fewer votes for Labour than his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn had managed in 2019. He benefited from the collapse in assist for the Conservative Party, which was additionally squeezed by competitors from the centrist Liberal Democrats and a brand new rightwing get together, Reform UK (the previous Brexit Party).
Since then, it has all been downhill for Starmer. By the top of 2024, the Financial Times was asking why the Labour chief ‘fumbled his first months in energy’ after taking workplace with such a commanding majority: ‘No prime minister in current occasions has seen such a calamitous fall in public assist in such a brief area of time’ (24 December 2024).
During Blair’s first time period as prime minister, it was greater than three years earlier than Labour fell behind the Conservative Party within the opinion polls, and that was a short lived blip. Yet it had already occurred to Starmer a number of occasions earlier than Christmas of final 12 months. Since the start of 2025, Labour has recurrently trailed behind its opponents within the polls; the Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage, overtook each Labour and the Conservatives to turn out to be the preferred get together in Britain through the summer season of 2025. (…)
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