MC Feature: What is Starmerism?
Here are the three big ideas powering the Labour project.
Good afternoon. What do we know about the Starmer project so far? What does the man likely to become the next prime minister believe? What ideas would Labour fall back on in government?
We are sending you this week’s cover story on the meaning of Starmerism. George Eaton has identified three core ideas that power the Starmer project: the common good; progressive realism; and securonomics. We hope you enjoy it.
Read the full feature by becoming a Morning Call subscriber. Get 20 per cent off a yearly subscription by clicking this button:
Existing New Statesman subscribers can read the piece here.
What does Keir Starmer believe in? Four years after he became Labour leader, there is an increasing understanding of Starmer the man: his complicated childhood and early family life, his personal decency, his restless ambition, his ruthlessness. But “Starmerism” remains more elusive. Does the concept amount to anything at all?
During his 2020 Labour leadership campaign, when he positioned himself on the soft left of the party, Starmer outlined ten pledges based on “the moral case for socialism”, most of which have since been abandoned or revised (an act of pragmatism or betrayal, depending on political preference). His wider past can appear little more illuminating.
As Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, noted in his recent history of the party, A Century of Labour: “There are few contributions to help reveal an essential political identity and little in the way of an intellectual paper trail.”
Starmer entered parliament in 2015 aged 52; he was never a member of what George Osborne refers to as “the guild” of professional politicians and special advisers. He was a human rights lawyer and served as director of public prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. His time running the Crown Prosecution Service gave him a more practical focus than a pamphleteering backbencher. “He almost has an allergy to ideology, he wants to be the prime minister who rolls his sleeves up and gets stuff done,” Carys Roberts, the executive director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), told me.
Unlike Ed Miliband, who as Labour leader gave speeches on themes such as “responsible capitalism” and “predistribution”, Starmer avoids abstract language and concepts. He does not approach politics as if it were an Oxford PPE seminar. He has said that “Starmerism is as much about the ‘how’ as the ‘what’” – by which he means transforming how the state operates.
There is an instructive parallel here with the former Conservative MP turned podcaster Rory Stewart, who also worked outside of Westminster – as a diplomat and a governor in postwar Iraq – before entering parliament. In his recent memoir Politics on the Edge, Stewart writes that “it was at the operational level that so many of the worst problems in British government lay. Not in the ‘what’ but the ‘how’.”
It is often said, even by those who have worked closely with him, that Starmer has no politics. Some have identified Starmerism as a purely technocratic project, a perception reinforced by the Labour leader’s appointment of the Whitehall veteran Sue Gray as his chief of staff. Others characterise it as crude Blairism: pro-business, deferential to markets, irrevocably hostile to the left. The truth is that Starmerism is more intriguing and distinctive.
Through my conversations with shadow cabinet ministers, past and present Labour aides and think-tank leaders, three intellectual pillars emerge: one focused on ethics (the common good), one on economics (“securonomics”), and one on geopolitics (“progressive realism”).
But do they amount to a coherent vision?
1. The common good
“The two sources of what I believe to be right and good are family and work,” Keir Starmer said in his 2021 Labour conference speech. He spoke of how his toolmaker father gave him a “deep respect for the dignity of work”. Starmer does not usually reference philosophers in speeches, but his words recalled those of Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher, whom Starmer interviewed for a 2014 BBC Radio 4 programme, Can Time Run Out for Justice?.
In his 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, Sandel explores the idea of the “dignity of work”, arguing that it has the potential to “morally invigorate our public discourse, and move us beyond the polarised politics that four decades of market faith and meritocratic hubris have bequeathed”.
Some, such as Daniel Chandler, the author of the recent book Free and Equal, have argued that the philosophy of John Rawls should shape Starmerism. In Rawls’s 1971 work A Theory of Justice, the late US philosopher imagined a just society devised by individuals from behind a “veil of ignorance” – not knowing their own class, wealth, talents or any other personal characteristics. In these conditions, they would, he concluded, adopt what he called “the difference principle”: social and economic inequalities are only justified if they are of “the greatest benefit to the least advantaged”.
The idea has had a long intellectual afterlife, but it is far too abstract for Starmerism.
“Keir’s politics are lived politics, in my experience of him; they come from his experience, firstly, of his family – many intellectuals deny how important that is,” Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former director of policy, told me.
In contrast to Rawls, Sandel emphasised those “loyalties and convictions” that are “inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are – as members of this family or community or nation or people”.
There is a similarly communitarian quality to Starmerism, not least in its attitude towards class. While New Labour heralded a post-class era – “I want to make you all middle class,” declared Tony Blair in 1999 – Starmer speaks of working-class pride, and shame. He has lamented the failure of the previous Labour government to “eradicate the snobbery that looks down on vocational education” and to “drain the well of disrespect that this creates”.
When I recently interviewed Sandel, he praised Starmer as part of a wave of centre-left leaders who have broken with the post-class politics of the “third way”, the doctrine championed by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in the late 1990s.
“Olaf Scholz in Germany, Joe Biden in the United States and Keir Starmer in Britain are all emphasising the dignity of work,” said Sandel. “Not only this, they all seem to be aware of the fact that centre-left leaders in recent decades have lost credibility with working people to a striking degree.
“And this is connected to an attempt to address the resentment and sense of grievance of working people who feel elites look down on them… Scholz, Biden and Starmer seem keenly aware that what has alienated working-class voters, apart from inequality and wage stagnation, is the lack of respect, the lack of social recognition and esteem from well-educated, credentialled elites.”
Jon Cruddas, who has previously been critical of Starmer, writing that he “often seems detached from his own party”, also speaks of a decisive shift in Labour’s outlook under Starmer.
“They’ve decided to do something which is very radical, which is to re-establish Labour as the authentic party of working-class people,” Cruddas told me. “That sounds self-evident, but it’s not self-evident because over the last 30 years, both on the Labour left and right, there have been elements that say the working class is on the wrong side of history; it’s disappearing and technological upheaval means that it offers diminishing returns as a political project.
“Starmer seems to be quite confidently embracing the working class as the political agent that Labour needs.”
Starmerism is distinct from both the liberal individualism of the free-market right and the post-work utopianism of the radical left (which has advocated universal basic income as an alternative to the traditional goal of full employment). It derives political meaning from enduring institutions and values. “Keir understands what belonging means in terms of family, nation and community,” said Ainsley, the author of the New Working Class.
There are tentative echoes here of Blue Labour, the political faction that came to prominence in the aftermath of the party’s 2010 general election defeat. Starmer, its founder Maurice Glasman told me, was “at the gates of the kingdom but had yet to enter”.
Sandel praised Starmer’s communitarian ethos: “The centre left has made a mistake in recent decades by allowing the right to have a monopoly on the language of family, community and patriotism. These need not be conservative ideas. The centre left should present its own vision of what it means to honour them, to reconnect with its own traditions of solidarity, mutual obligation and care.”
When Starmer, a devoted football fan, speaks of the values encouraged by the game – teamwork, sportsmanship, community – you are reminded of the great Scottish Liverpool manager Bill Shankly’s declaration that “the socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life.” But how do these ethics translate into economics?
2. Securonomics
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Morning Call to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.