If you were told that a Party was about to come to power which would cut overseas aid to fund defence, do away with the old folks’ winter fuel allowance, abolish NHS England, crack down on benefits claimants and even consider introducing digital ID cards to help the fight against illegal immigration and were then asked to guess which party it was, then Labour would have been the last by a country mile. Yet that is what has happened in less than a year on Starmer’s watch.
Tony Blair's soft spot for Thatcherism is no match for Keir Starmer's love of Faragerism - Ann Widdecombe
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All governments occasionally part company with cherished principles in the face of emergencies but Starmer seems to have made a regular practice of it and without any particular unforeseeable crisis. Why?
I suspect he has worked out that the future is turning right in both America and Europe and therefore here too. The huge success of Reform has probably convinced him. We are contesting over 99% of seats in the current Council Elections, which is more than any other Party is managing to do. We are regularly top or joint top in opinion polls. We have the fastest-growing membership of all the Parties in the UK, having left the Tories behind months ago. Our conferences and meetings are well attended from the big national rallies to the small village halls.
Starmer will know that he won the last election on the basis of a resounding negative: the public had more than their fill of the Tories, who managed to squander an 80-seat majority to the point where they gave Starmer a landslide. He knows also that his policies of raising taxes, giving in to the Unions and cosying up to Europe are not going down well.
He is not a man of much imagination, but he knows that Britain wants something different: an end to woke, a bonfire of the quangos, true equality before the law, control of our borders, strong defences, an NHS which works, different police priorities, a larger say for parents in what their children are being taught, free speech, the right to dissent from state orthodoxy. And that is only the start.
So he looks at what the right is doing and cherry picks the bits he thinks he can mimic. In particular, he is terrified of Reform with its huge appeal to common sense and proportionality, its willingness to be proud of Britain and its determination to put the UK first.
Starmer’s problem is that his party may well come to have other ideas. They do not much like the direction of travel, but a lot of them are too new to have the confidence to rebel, and most threatened revolts prove to be just that: threats rather than actions.
It is still early days but if Starmer continues to lag in the polls or his followers begin trekking towards Reform then the compliance he is expecting from the overcrowded benches behind him may wane.
One of the greatest successes a political party can have is when its appeal obliges its opponents to adopt its agenda.
The last dramatic demonstration of that was when Blair adopted Thatcherism. We may now be about to see Labour adopting Faragism.
