Five months after his Labour Party won a thumping election victory, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain finds himself a lonely figure: Like-minded centrist leaders in France and Germany are in retreat, while in the United States, Donald J. Trump and his populist message have vanquished the Democratic Party.
On Thursday, Mr. Starmer served notice that he would stick to the plan for rebuilding Britain that won him the election, though he did put more emphasis on kitchen-table concerns, promising to boost voters’ disposable income, construct 1.5 million new houses, and put more police on the streets.
Mr. Starmer’s six goals — delivered in a speech that was yet another effort to reset his troubled government — amounted to a stubborn bet: That he can resist the populist wave rolling across Western democracies by delivering on the issues voters care about.
“Everyone can see there’s a growing impatience with traditional politics,” Mr. Starmer said. But he added, “Populism isn’t the answer to Britain’s challenges. Easy answers won’t make our country strong.”
For Mr. Starmer, a methodical lawyer-turned-politician, the speech was a clear admission that his government has continued to struggle — a string of missteps and minor scandals sapping its poll ratings and giving an opening to populist critics like Nigel Farage, a close ally of Mr. Trump.
Mr. Starmer’s six “milestones” are an attempt to recapture the initiative by improving the daily lives of Britons: in addition to the pledges on disposable income, housing and police, he vowed to cut patient waiting times at the National Health Service, improve childhood education and put Britain on a course to a clean-energy economy, albeit with slightly softened ambitions.
Whether that will be enough to arrest the government’s plummeting popularity is an open question, especially with the public in such a querulous mood. Even Mr. Starmer seemed skeptical, noting, “the path of change is long, it is hard, and there are few thanks in the short term.”
He steered away from an earlier promise to make Britain the fastest-growing economy among the Group of 7 countries — the kind of abstract goal, critics said, that does not speak to voters. More controversially, he omitted a pledge to cut down immigration — a rallying cry of the populist right — arguing that controlling borders was, implicitly, a core duty of any government.
Analysts said Mr. Starmer was drawing a lesson from the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris last month in the United States: delivering economic growth does not by itself satisfy disgruntled voters.
“Unless voters experience the benefit of that themselves when they’re sitting around the kitchen table and adding up what they’ve got left at the end of the month, then you’re not going to get the political benefit,” said Claire Ainsley, a former policy director for Mr. Starmer who now works in Britain for the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington-based research institute.
Jonathan Ashworth, an ally of Mr. Starmer and a former Labour lawmaker, said the prime minister had little choice but to retool his message, given the unforgiving realities of today’s political climate.
“Incumbent governments are on the run; they are toppling,” he said. “The world over, trust in politics is low, trust in the competence of the political system to deliver is low, which is why electorates are becoming ever more volatile.”
Although the Labour government secured a comfortable parliamentary majority and does not have to face the voters until 2029, aides to Mr. Starmer are already keenly focused on how Labour can avoid the fate that befell the Democrats: becoming a one-term administration.
That sharper political tone reflects the influence of Mr. Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who masterminded Labour’s general election victory and won out in a ferocious post-election power struggle in Downing Street, during which his predecessor, Sue Gray, was ousted.
Mr. McSweeney, who was raised in Ireland, cut his teeth battling the Labour Party’s left internally, and Britain’s far-right in municipal politics. Insiders say Thursday’s speech, which Mr. Starmer delivered in the Pinewood film studios outside London, reflected Mr. McSweeney’s preoccupation with electoral politics.
Still, Mr. McSweeney faces an uphill task with his boss. Mr. Starmer, never the most inspiring speaker, has struggled to wrap a punchy narrative around his practical, problem-solving brand of politics.
“People want stories,” said Mr. Ashworth, who now leads Labour Together, a left-wing think tank. “People want you to paint a picture of what you think is happening and where you are going, and they want to believe in something.”
Critics cite the government’s change in inheritance taxes for agricultural property as an example of poor communication. The rule change brought angry farmers into the streets of London. But some said the government should have stressed that the reform was aimed at wealthy people who, research shows, have bought farmland in recent years to shelter their assets from inheritance tax.
Mr. Starmer’s predicament is a stark turn from just four months ago, when Mr. McSweeney, Mr. Ashworth, and other Labour aides traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to speak to the Harris campaign about the blueprint they had used in their landslide victory the previous month.
Now, Mr. Starmer is isolated on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to Mr. Trump’s victory, there is President Emmanuel Macron of France, who is struggling with the ouster of his center-right prime minister, Michel Barnier. In Germany, the Social Democratic-led government appears destined to lose to the center-right Christian Democrats next February.
Mr. Starmer’s swift decline in the polls, analysts said, reflects the same volatility among voters as in those countries. And there are other warning signs: In multiple Labour-held constituencies, Mr. Farage’s anti-immigration party, Reform U.K., now polls as the second-most popular party.
“There have been a number of bumps in the road,” Ms. Ainsley said, “and it’s clear that the government is wanting to set out an agenda that is much more tangible for voters.”
But some analysts said Mr. Starmer needed to go farther, even embracing some of the more divisive language of Mr. Farage. His studiously moderate style was an anachronism, they said, better suited to a world before Brexit, the Make America Great Again movement of Mr. Trump, and even the financial crisis of 2008.
“People on the center-left like to think they’re the nice people,” said Steven Fielding, an emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. “When they go low, we go high,” he said, citing a phrase made famous by Michelle Obama in describing Mr. Trump and other Republicans. “Well, sometimes you need to go low.”
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