The last time the Labor Party wrested government from the Conservatives their victory was overwhelming. The ‘Tory’ John Major suffered a defeat comparable only to that suffered by his party almost a century earlier, in 1906. Tony Blair, leader of New Labour, who spray-perfumed the roses that decorated his public events, was the new Prime Minister : young, smiling and ambiguous.
On the evening of 1 May 1997, he and his co-religionists celebrated their victory by singing on a raised dais outside the Royal Festival Hall their campaign anthem, “Things Can Only Get Better”, to techno-pop dance music from the group D: Ream. Optimism had taken hold on the political left after almost two decades of the conservative era that Margaret Thatcher began in 1979.
The polls now prompt comparisons with what happened in 1997 and speculation about another landslide victory for Labor led by Sir Keir Starmer. According to Sir John Curtice, an expert in interpreting polls and election results, “the general public have decided that they cannot trust the Conservatives to run the country.”
Another episode from those years indicates that Starmer cannot be confident of victory. Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher in 1990 and achieved ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, despite hostility from eurosceptics. The party was bitterly divided over the ouster of Thatcher and there was an economic recession. But Major won the election in April 1992 with the highest number of votes in British electoral history.
Six months after an extraordinary victory, Major and his government were humiliated. They lost a costly tussle with the capital markets to support the pound on the ERM. Eurosceptics found the perfect excuse to persist in their attempt to oust Major and the party lost the public’s traditional confidence in its better management of the economy.
Will the new Conservative leader, Rishi Sunak, be able to emulate John Major and mobilize Conservative voters in the next two years? His abstention was key in Blair’s landslide victory, and he is now alarming the ‘Tories’ in the polls and in local elections. Will it be a national humiliation, in the short-lived tenure of Liz Truss, to weigh too heavily on the Tories in 2024, as it was for Major in 1997?
The key
He is accused by politicians and the media of being indirectly responsible for the hard Brexit that Boris Johnson materialized
Keir Starmer was born 60 years ago in London, but grew up in a town in the south of England. His father, Rodney, worked in a tool factory and his mother, Josephine, was a nurse, although much of her life was spent in caregiving. He suffered for half a century from Still’s disease, an inflammatory arthritis. Starmer has acknowledged that he had a distant relationship with his father, something he regrets.
He studied law at the University of Leeds and then at Oxford. As in the case of Sunak, the Labor leader is recognized for his ability to work. His former colleagues in one of the most famous London law firms remember him as a young man capable of great concentration in the study of cases. He specialized in lawsuits in which the Human Rights law was interpreted.
He was appointed state attorney and entered politics in 2015 as an MP for a central London district, in the same neighborhood where he lives with his wife, also a lawyer, and their two children. The family practices the Jewish religion, except for Keir Starmer. He has on occasion said that he would have preferred, when he was a teenager, that his parents had given him David as his name instead of Keir, in homage to the first leader of the Labor Party.
He is accused by politicians and the media of being indirectly responsible for Boris Johnson’s hard Brexit. In charge of monitoring the policy on the march of the European Union in the cabinet of the opposition led by Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer would have refused to agree to a more benign agreement between Theresa May and the EU, for insisting on the celebration of a second referendum when the exit agreement was known.
Rule out another referendum
The ‘Corbynists’ also blame him for causing the electoral defeat in December 2019, because his insistence on another consultation would have prevented the leftist leader from recovering Labor voters. Starmer has now ruled out a new referendum on the European question, and has purged the party and parliamentary group of Corbyn supporters. The former leader was expelled, accused of anti-Semitism.
Becoming leader of the opposition with five years until the next elections and with the government enjoying a comfortable majority is a thankless job. Starmer has delivered without fanfare, but is often accused of being a boring speaker. After renewing his team of advisers to focus on the elections, the sarcasm about rivals has improved and the speech is more aggressive.
He sponsors the training of Britons to reduce immigration, he is a convinced Atlanticist and at the last annual conference he managed to get party members to sing the national anthem. There is in him something of the ideological ambiguity of Blair, but he never proposed, as Starmer does, the creation of a state bank to finance an intensive green energy plan. He has another difficult task before him: to convince a population that feels that everything is getting worse that things can only get better.
Topics
Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, Liz Truss, Margaret Thatcher, Rishi Sunak, Theresa May, Tony Blair, European Union (EU), England, Leeds, London, Oxford, Brexit, 20-D General Elections
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