What Democrats can learn from the UK’s resurgent Labour Party

When Britain’s Labour Party gathers for its annual conference in Liverpool next month, its main task may be tamping down overconfidence about next year’s national election. Almost everyone expects Labour to oust the ruling Conservatives after 13 turbulent years in power. If so, it would cap a remarkable reversal in Labour’s fortunes engineered by party leader Keir Starmer, who would become Prime Minister. 

Starmer, who was featured in a May conference co-sponsored by Progressive Britain and my organization, the Progressive Policy Institute, grasps something that eludes many U.S. Democrats: It will take more than a new economic offer to bring working class voters back to Labour. Restoring hope for working people, he argues, also requires building prosperity on a strong social foundation of “stability, order and security.” 

Starmer took over following the shattering 2019 election when the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to its worst drubbing since 1935. 

Since then, Starmer, a London lawyer, has calmly and methodically exorcised his party’s ideological demons and nudged it back to the pragmatic center. The latest YouGov poll shows Labour with a commanding 22 point lead over Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Tories.  

As Starmer is the first to admit, Labour has gotten a big assist from the Tories. A long bout of austerity, the drawn-out and divisive fight over Brexit, Boris Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal and fall during the COVID shutdown and the ensuing succession fiasco with Liz Truss have all fed growing public fatigue with Conservative governments.  

If Labour does win, however, it won’t just be by default. Starmer has deftly steered his party away from the shoals of dogmatic socialism without opening an irreparable rift with left-wing activists and trade unions.   

Nonetheless, Starmer’s shadow cabinet reshuffle earlier this month, which elevated some prominent “New Labour” veterans and next-generation center-left politicians, leaves little doubt about Labour’s more pragmatic direction. “Even Tony Blair never had this many Blairites in his cabinet” one Labour member of Parliament quipped to the London Times.  

Starmer has stepped back from Corbyn’s throwback plan to renationalize key United Kingdom industries, pledging only to bring rail back into public ownership eventually. He’s also dropped talk of imposing a wealth tax and higher income tax rates on the top five percent of earners.  

That’s drawn criticism from unions like the powerful Trades Union Congress, which expects Labour to give top priority to tackling “rampant wealth inequality.” But it’s likely reassuring to working and middle-class U.K. voters worried that Labour might revert to massive welfare state expansions that would mean more onerous taxes on them.  

“We can’t win power by spending,” says Starmer. “Frankly, the left has to start caring a lot more about growth, about creating wealth, attracting inward investment and kickstarting a spirit of enterprise.”  

In a rejoinder to critics who equate policy “ambition” with heavy spending and income redistribution, Starmer instead stresses the need for “radical reform” of public services.  

What that means in practice isn’t yet clear, though perhaps more details will be forthcoming in Liverpool. But it helps Starmer draw a crucial distinction between his support for a more active state and the left’s demands for a bigger and more interventionist central government.  

Team Starmer also has tweaked their plan to spend over $34 billion a year to speed Britain’s clean energy transition. Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves now says the new borrowing and spending must be phased in and squared with Labour’s fiscal pledge to shrink public deficits as a share of national income after five years.  

To the chagrin of green activists, Starmer mostly eschews climate doom-crying and instead lays heavy emphasis on the economic benefits of the green transition. Taking a page from the center-left playbook of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and President Joe Biden, the Labour leader says that making the U.K. Europe’s clean energy leader will spur new job and business creation in left-behind regions.  

In this and other ways, Starmer is intent on helping Labour regain the allegiance of working-class voters in England’s industrial heartland in the midlands and north. Over the past decade, these non-college voters have defected to the Tories over worries about unfettered immigration, Brexit and eroding national sovereignty, and crime.  

He’s tough on crime and anti-social behavior, as well as controlling Britain’s borders. Last week, Starmer proposed a controversial plan to “smash” criminal gangs smuggling migrants into the U.K., hire new caseworkers to process asylum requests and negotiate a security agreement with the European Union to share data on Channel crossings.  

British political observers don’t seem sure what to make of Starmer. Once a member of Corbyn’s cabinet, he now consorts with the likes of Tony Blair. “The great conundrum at the heart of this government-in-waiting isn’t actually policy, it’s personality. It is, who is Keir Starmer?” asks the New Stateman’s veteran columnist, Andrew Marr.  

Unlike Blair, Starmer isn’t peddling sweeping visions of radical change. What he chiefly shares with Blair is a ruthless determination to win.  

But Starmer also has working-class roots and believes that center-left parties that cater only to college-educated professionals and cosmopolitan voters are in danger of losing their souls. His attempt to fashion a new political synthesis that draws together middle and working-class Britain is hugely important to the future of progressive politics. 

That’s why Democrats and other center-left parties should be paying attention to what unfolds in Liverpool next month.

Will Marshall is founder and CEO of the Progressive Policy Institute.