Mike Phipps explores worrying but compelling parallels between Labour’s current leadership and that of Neil Kinnock.

It is just over three years since Sir Keir Starmer was elected leader of the Labour Party. Starmer claims to have transformed the Party in that time and wants credit for Labour’s high poll ratings.

In truth, however, the implosion of the Johnson government and the even quicker collapse of the Truss project owed little to Labour making the political weather and had more to do with the Tories’ own internal failings. As the main Party of Opposition, Labour of course was bound to benefit. But how much value to that increase in the polls was added by Starmer himself?

Recent polls suggest Keir Starmer’s personal ratings are “underwhelming” despite the Labour Party’s overall improvement. Around 47% of the public think Starmer has done a bad job of setting out Labour’s vision, with 44% saying he has failed to build trust in the Party’s economic competence. Among Labour voters, his barring of Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy has not gone down well, with just 36% believing it was the right decision compared to 41% who believe it was the wrong one.

Additionally, as one analyst points out, “Starmer’s score is less than what Jeremy Corbyn’s was during this point of his leadership, and among Labour voters 48% are satisfied with his performance vs 45% dissatisfied. Not great when this is compared to Sunak, whose scores are 75% and 15% respectively among Tories.”

A recent editorial in the Guardian – a newspaper that has been highly supportive of Starmer’s attempts to bury the legacy of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn – recently made some telling points about Labour’s leader.

“He has had 12 slogans since becoming leader, each one more meaningless than the last,” opined the newspaper. It went on: “No one knows what Sir Keir or his party clearly stand for – apart from attacking its left flank.” Worse: “His policies are distinguished by their lack of ambition and are dwarfed by the problems they seek to solve.”

These criticisms are irrefutable. Keir Starmer’s original ‘ten pledges’ when running for the Party leadership in 2020 now lie in tatters. All references to continuity with the popular ideas of the 2017 Labour manifesto have been shredded. Despite the continuing popularity of radical policies at Party Conferences, Starmer’s leadership has been ultra-cautious about committing to public ownership, adequate funding of services, or anything else. Many policies appear to be a triangulation based on what the government is doing and what the left is proposing, shorn of any guiding principles.

Tory immigrations proposals, the most vicious in living memory, are criticised for their lack of viability rather than their inhumanity and abuse of rights. An expansion of the security state has been waved through Parliament on the grounds that it will be popular with supposedly socially conservative Red Wall voters. The same rationale lies behind recent personalised attacks ads suggesting Rishi Sunak doesn’t think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison, a line condemned even by former Labour Home Secretary Lord Blunkett.

Labour’s priorities seem strangely skewed under its current leadership. Even the Conservatives’ new legislation on voter identification – a blatant attempts at voter suppression, copied from the USA, which will hurt low-income and younger voters most – are unlikely to be fully repealed by a future Labour government. Shaun Roberts from the campaign group Unlock Democracy and the Democracy Defence Coalition suggested recently that the most Labour would do is extend the list of permissible voter identification documents, whereas the Lib Dems propose to repeal the legislation in its entirety.

“Labour looks set to gain 700 seats in May’s local elections,” says the Guardian. That in itself would be a big improvement on May 2022, when Labour gained a mere 108 councillors, just ahead of the Greens’ gains and fewer than half the Lib Dems’ gains. And most of Labour’s gains were in Wales, where under First Minister Mark Drakeford, the Party’s image is very different to Keir Starmer’s branding.

Multiple problems face Keir Starmer. Precisely because he has changed the Party so much in three years, including his own avowed positions, there is a credibility issue. Is he saying things just because he thinks they are popular? That won’t go down well with the electorate. If he doesn’t really believe what he’s advocating, why should they?

Secondly, if his main line of attack is that the Tories are incompetent, which may have worked with Johnson and definitely worked with Truss, it may not land many blows on the current government. Under Sunak, the grown-ups are back in charge, appearing to fix thorny problems like post-Brexit arrangements in Northern Ireland and even rolling out crowd-pleasing popular policies when it suits them.

Starmer will have to politically differentiate Labour with an alternative vision, rather than just offering a better-run administration. A play-off between an apparently competent team with governing experience and an apparently competent team which has been out of office for 14 years should be avoided at all costs.

Thirdly, Starmer has not been electorally tested and is likely to be knocked sideways by the sheer intensity of hostile coverage in some of the Tory tabloids. He’s dull, slippery, has changed his position on so much and been pretty brutal with his own Party’s rank and file, the Tory print media say. They will ask: if he treats his own colleagues so ruthlessly, how will he treat the country?

Can he be trusted, they will ask? In 2020 he called Jeremy Corbyn his friend. Now he says he’s not. Such inconsistency is not a good look and he will be punished for it.

Starmer’s unimpressive levels of support among Labour voters points to a bigger problem. Many of those voters may have been happy to see Corbyn stand down as leader but have been dismayed by the authoritarian and factional purging of the left that Starmer has presided over. They are also socially progressive and may drift towards the Lib Dems or Greens if Starmer maintains his dismissive approach to civil liberties and the climate emergency.

Parallels with Kinnock

Critics of Starmer see a continuity between him and Tony Blair, but this may not be accurate. Blair outlined a clear, if limited, vision. By the time he became leader, the right’s goal of containing and expelling the left had largely been accomplished. It was Neil Kinnock, Labour leader from 1983 to 1992, with his witch hunt against socialists, distancing the Party from trade unions and dumping of policy commitments, who bears a greater resemblance to Keir Starmer, as Labour Hub has previously argued.

Kinnock, like Starmer, claimed left-wing credentials he didn’t really hold, once calling for “100% nationalization of all the production and distribution industries,” but increasingly hostile to the left, for example refusing to support Tony Benn for Deputy leader in 1981, the closer he got to becoming leader of the Party.

As leader, he failed to support the historic 1984-5 miners’ strike, the defining industrial battle of the age. He lost the 1987 general election on his own terms – a lacklustre manifesto and a big emphasis on his own personality – although overturning a Tory majority of 144 was always going to be hard.

But the lesson Labour’s leadership drew from the 1987 general election defeat was the need to replace the values of social solidarity and collectivism with a Thatcherite commitment to individualism, consumerism and the market – even though within a few years the economic downturn would make these ideas look hollow. None of these changes helped Labour’s performance, however, because Neil Kinnock’s personal ratings were so low – just 18% in December 1988.

Another similarity between the Kinnock years and now is the involvement Peter Mandelson. In 1985 the Party appointed as Director of Campaigns and Communications this man, who apparently told his interview panel that it would be nice to abolish Party Conference. His obsession with focus groups, image and perceived extremism fostered a lack of accountability at the top and alienation among grassroots members. When his retirement from the post was announced at Labour’s 1990 Conference – Mandelson was leaving the bureaucracy to become a candidate in a safe Labour seat – there were scattered boos from delegates and not a single clap.

Part of the problem was Kinnock’s obsession – like that of the current leader – with witch-hunting the left of the Party, proscribing groups and suspending members. Kinnock spent more time on internal Party management than any previous leader and consequently he came across as a functionary rather than a future Prime Minister.

By the end of his term as Party leader in 1992, investigations into local parties and disciplinary action against individuals had affected members in over 80 constituencies in all regions of the country. Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee in their superb 1992 book Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Inside Kinnock’s Labour Party wrote: “Violations of natural justice were legion. The presumption of innocence was hopelessly subverted. Guilt by association became commonplace.” (p. 299).

As a result, the witch-hunters “succeeded only in spreading fear, frustration and distrust within the party and nurtured the many seeds of doubt already planted in the public mind about Labour’s fitness to govern.” (p. 300). Sounds familiar?

As today with the implosion of Johnson and Truss, Labour’s fortunes under Kinnock were revived by the mass opposition to the Poll Tax and growing divisions in the Tory Party that finally forced out Thatcher in November 1990. But just as the current Labour leadership concentrated all its fire on the incompetence of Johnson and Truss and are in danger of being wrong-footed by the more assured Sunak, so Kinnock’s Labour Party failed to reap the full benefits of the replacement of Thatcher by John Major in 1990. It failed to capitalise on the legendary unpopularity of Thatcher’s iniquitous Poll Tax and largely lost interest in it once the Major government decided to scrap it. Instead Labour turned its fire on those who had helped bring down the tax through their non-payment of it.

In September 1991, polls showed that 85% of Tory supporters were satisfied with John Major, but only 57% of Labour supporters were happy with Neil Kinnock. As the 1992 general election approached, Labour was looking vulnerable on economic policy, with the leadership ruling out new taxes on the rich, but equally unclear about just whom it would tax. At the same time, its attempts to label the government as economically incompetent failed to resonate.

In the event, the 1992 general election result was sobering. The Conservatives were re-elected with a clear majority, albeit reduced, and with more votes than ever before. Labour, buoyed up by inaccurate polls that favoured them, appeared over-confident and cocky. The Party lost skilled workers and other core voters – the young, pensioners, the poor. Overall, it gained only a 2% swing from the Tories.

The 1992 result was accurately characterised by Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee: “Here was the principal party of opposition in a country bogged down in economic crisis, in a society riven by social inequalities, unable even to secure its core vote… financially bankrupt and stripped of one third of its membership… infected with a culture of careerism that combined, in unhealthy measure, forelock-touching and back-stabbing.” (p1).

By then Neil Kinnock “was seen as a man who would do anything or say anything, repudiate any conviction or embrace any prejudice for the sake of a handful of votes.” (p120). Remember: these are exactly the same things now being said about Keir Starmer. It’s the downside of the boast ‘Look how much I’ve changed the Party.’ What people also see is how fast he’s junked his supposed principles.

Could the next election be another 1992? The scale of Labour’s task,” suggests one recent analysis, “is arguably even bigger than the one Kinnock faced in 1992. Without a major revival in Scotland, experts calculate that the party will need a swing of up to 13 per cent in England to govern with a majority. It means that if Labour edge towards Hung Parliament territory, the ‘question of trust’ on Starmer’s deals with the SNP and the Lib Dems will become the dominant political narrative.”

There are certainly striking similarities between now and then. Labour in 1992 were about to go into a general election which they were really expected to win. After thirteen years of Conservative government, the ruling party was in turmoil, deeply divided with neither mandate nor coherent policy agenda.

Yet Labour, proud of its move to the centre, neglectful of the morale of its demotivated grassroots, light on policy detail and costings, and expecting an easy ride from the millionaire press because it had abandoned its so-called extremism was completely blindsided by the Tories’ ruthless tenacity and voters’ lack of enthusiasm.

There are lessons here – and it’s not too late to learn them.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dushenka/473385725. Creator: Olya & Richard. Licence: Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)