Mindless Middleness Was Keir Starmer’s Undoing
The UK prime minister was forced out because he failed to offer his own vision and played on the right’s turf
In the summer of 2024, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won 411 seats, a Commons majority of 172, the largest in a generation. It swept the Conservatives out of power after 14 years and reduced Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK to a handful of seats. Two years later, Reform leads the polls, Labour has been routed in Scotland and Wales, and Starmer himself has resigned.
This was no accident. The “landslide” was hollow from the start: Labour won nearly two-thirds of the seats on barely a third of the vote, a majority manufactured by Britain’s first-past-the-post system. Rather than govern on the strength of his supermajority in Parliament, Starmer governed as though he had something to fear, spending his majority appeasing not the Conservatives he had beaten but a Reform he chased rightward as it climbed.
Starmer had room to govern boldly. Instead, he governed in a crouch.
The Crouch
The defining theme was immigration, and Starmer did not rebut the right’s frame on it. He adopted a milder version of it.
He wrapped himself in the flag and unveiled a white paper that doubled the wait for settlement and shut the door on overseas care workers. He sold it in a speech warning that Britain risked becoming “an island of strangers,” a phrase close enough to Enoch Powell’s “strangers in their own country” that one of his own peers, the Kindertransport refugee Alf Dubs, rebuked him for it. On his watch, net migration nearly halved to its lowest level since 2021, and the asylum backlog fell to its lowest level since 2020.
The bet was that the right’s goods in gentler packaging would deny the right its market. It failed twice over. The voters he hoped to hold by sounding tougher did not stay; they went to the people who meant it. The voters he might have inspired got nothing to be inspired by.
He alienated the left without satisfying the right.
His instinct on free speech has run the same way. His government proscribed Palestine Action, a direct-action protest group, as a terrorist organization alongside al-Qaeda, making mere support a crime; police then arrested more than 3,000 people for holding signs, pensioners among them. The High Court called the ban a disproportionate breach of free expression in February; the government appealed, and in June the Court of Appeal reinstated it, so the proscription stands. His government has also backed prosecutions for offensive online posts and leaned hard on the Online Safety Act. This is not a quarrel about one country’s legal tradition; it is the older liberal principle that a free society answers bad speech with better speech—and turns to the law only when speech crosses into incitement or threat, not when it is merely offensive or false. A government confident in its own liberalism makes that case by reflex. Starmer’s, unsure what it believes, has reached for control instead.
The cost of all this caution showed when the violence came, and the provocation was real. A knife attack in north Belfast left a man blinded in one eye, and the suspect was a Sudanese asylum-seeker who had been granted leave to remain. Within hours a graphic video was everywhere, spread by the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson and by Elon Musk, with a hitlist of migrant addresses—flagged to police months earlier—circulating alongside it. Masked men set those homes alight, the same machinery that had turned the 2024 Southport murders into a national riot, running again. The victim's own family begged that his suffering not be used this way; the mob was not interested in the victim.
A foreign billionaire was pouring petrol on British streets through a platform he owned, and Starmer could not even bring himself to have his own government stop using that same website.
The bitterest irony is that the grievance the rioters exploited against a lax official response to the groomer scandal was one Starmer had done more than almost anyone to address. The years of official failure to forcefully deal with the culprits were a genuine disgrace. But that failure was not, as Musk and Reform insist, the fruit of multiculturalism or “wokeness” because the men involved were Asian. It was, largely, institutional self-protection and a contempt for working-class girls who were treated as disposable.
As director of public prosecutions, Starmer was among those who changed how the system handled these cases. He overhauled the guidance that had let prosecutions collapse, reopened closed files, and left office with the Crown Prosecution Service winning more such convictions than ever before. Few in the country were better placed to name the lie and rebut it.
He declined. Trapped in a posture of his own making, he could not risk looking soft, and so he ceded the argument to Musk and Reform, reassuring no one and rebutting nothing.
Beneath both failures sat a third: a government that gives ground on values can sometimes survive by delivering on bread. Starmer’s did not deliver. The economy was stagnant when he arrived and stagnant two years on: flat growth, flat wages, no achievement a voter could point to and feel.
Starmer gave the left a reason to leave, the right a milder version of what it already preferred from the original, and the country nothing material to hold onto. A government can survive being disliked. It cannot survive being pointless.
The Reckoning
The bill is now arriving. Starmer is among the most unpopular prime ministers in the history of British polling. Reform leads national surveys at around 27% to Labour’s 19%, with Labour level with a Conservative Party that had been pronounced dead.
In May the collapse moved from polling into results. In Wales, Labour lost the Senedd, the Welsh parliament it had governed since the parliament’s creation in 1999, finishing third behind Plaid Cymru and Reform UK, which surged into second place; Welsh Labour’s leader, Eluned Morgan, became the first sitting head of government in British history to lose her own seat. In Scotland, Reform entered Holyrood, the Scottish parliament, for the first time and tied Labour for second place, Labour’s worst Scottish result on record. To Labour’s left, the Greens are now the most popular party among the country’s youngest voters.
Then came Makerfield, an area in northwest England. A Labour MP resigned his northern seat to clear the way for Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester and Labour Party membership’s favorite, to run and return to the House of Commons so that he could challenge Starmer for the leadership. On June 18, Burnham won in a landslide with nearly 55% of the vote and some 9,000 votes ahead of Reform’s candidate. He beat every campaign poll. Even that win measured the party’s weakness as much as his strength: in a seat Labour held comfortably two years ago, it ran on his brand, not on anything the government had done.
Starmer spent days insisting he would fight any challenge. Yesterday, he gave it up, announcing that he would step down as soon as the party chose his successor, almost certainly Burnham.
Standing for Something
It is tempting to read all this as the country lurching right, and conclude that Labour erred by moving too slowly to the right. The polls say otherwise. Reform leads, but with little more than a quarter of the vote. Reform and the Conservatives together run level with Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens combined, around 45% each; add the nationalist parties (which are generally on the left) and the left pulls ahead. Starmer’s collapse, in other words, is not that British public opinion has swung to the hard right. It is that the left has fractured, and a first-past-the-post system brutally punishes such division by handing plurality wins to the other side. And the left fractured because Starmer gave it no reason to hold together.
This is the heart of the failure, and it is not really about migration or free speech. A governing coalition has to stand for something, or it cannot hold the base that sustains it. The mistake was not that Starmer moved to the center; a center-left party can triangulate and win, but only from a core its own side can rally around. What he offered instead was a listless technocracy and a watered-down imitation of Reform, and triangulation done that way does the opposite of what it promises. Conceding the other side’s premises told his own voters the other side had been right all along, giving it no reason to turn out. Offering a diluted version of the challenger’s program confirmed the challenger’s framing and sent persuadable voters to the real thing. Starmer was rewarded with exactly the level of loyalty such an offer earns, which is to say: none.
Whoever follows Starmer, probably Burnham, inherits a wrecked state of affairs and under four years to repair it. The repair does not take genius. It takes a decision to stand for something, and to say so. That means making the affirmative case rather than the defensive one. On migration, that a confident country can control its borders and still gain from newcomers, part of a larger story about the country Britain wants to be, not a surrender to the idea that the newcomer is the problem. On speech, defending open argument and answering lies by rebutting them, not a haphazard approach, alienating everyone while appealing to nobody. And delivering something a voter can feel: a functioning health service, houses people can afford, an economy that grows.
It may also mean changing the rules of the game, and here Burnham has pointed the way. He has long backed replacing first-past-the-post with proportional representation, an idea whose time he says has come, and wants a national commission and a manifesto pledge to do it. The case is partly one of principle, that seats should reflect votes. But it is also a direct answer to the fear now driving Labour into its crouch.
The nightmare haunting the party is a Reform majority. The only thing that could turn its plurality into untrammeled power is first-past-the-post, the same arithmetic that turned Labour’s own third of the vote into a landslide of seats, and could as easily hand the state to a party that only a quarter of the country supports. That threat is largely an artifact of the system, not of the country’s preferences, and recognizing it ought to change the strategy.
You do not defeat a 27% party by trying to outflank it. You defeat it by refusing to split the larger bloc that does not want it, and, in the longer run, by reforming the system that lets a plurality masquerade as a mandate.
A Self-inflicted Defeat
The warning in Starmer’s failure is plain, but it is worth stating carefully, because the wrong version of it is everywhere. The wrong version flattens every populist into the same figure. Reform is not the Conservative Party of old, and Farage, its leader, is a decidedly illiberal right-wing populist. He is a nativist who treats immigration as the master explanation for everything that has gone wrong, contemptuous of the liberal norms that protect minorities and dissenters, and happy to ride the grievance and misinformation that fed the summer’s violence. None of that should be softened.
But it is a different thing from Trumpism, and the difference is not a technicality. Farage contests elections and accepts their results. Reform has not tried to overturn a vote it lost, to cling to power it was not given, or to break the constitutional order to keep itself in office. Whatever one fears it might do with power, it has not set itself against democracy as such, in the way a movement that storms a legislature to reverse an election has.
To treat the two as interchangeable is to indulge exactly the catastrophizing that lets a hollow center-left recast its own emptiness as the lesser evil. That posture is its own kind of evasion, and voters smell it.
The danger is subtler, and more useful to grasp. It is not that illiberal right-populism is unstoppable. It is that a governing party which offers nothing of its own, and tries to survive by selling a thinner version of its opponent’s program, will lose anyway, and deserves to. The temptation is not Britain’s alone: any liberal coalition that decides its job is to manage decline without giving offense will meet the same fate.
A politics built on stopping someone has a hole where its purpose should be. The majority that could sustain a liberal center is still there, waiting to be given a reason to gather. What has gone missing is the conviction to offer it one. Keir Starmer kept the far right out of office for two years and lost the argument anyway. Whoever comes next has until 2029 to remember what the argument was for.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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