A year ago this week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain swept into 10 Downing Street with a landslide majority of 172 seats. As his first anniversary approached, more than 120 of those Labour Party members of Parliament threatened to vote down their leader’s signature welfare legislation.
It has been that kind of year for Mr. Starmer. Though he made hasty concessions last week to keep the bill on track, the mutiny makes clear what a reversal of fortune the prime minister has suffered.
Stung by political missteps, sapped by a weak economy, and distracted by foreign crises that have put a heavy strain on public finances, Mr. Starmer’s government has yet to get off the ground. Labour now consistently trails Reform U.K., an insurgent, anti-immigrant party, in the polls. While he is under no immediate threat to his leadership, and the next election is not expected until 2029, Mr. Starmer’s personal approval rating has collapsed, even among Labour voters.
There is no shortage of people with ideas about how Mr. Starmer can turn things around, from sharper messaging to savvier management of his M.P.’s. But some are coalescing around a deceptively simple argument: his cautious, workmanlike centrist government needs to pivot to the left.
“They have to do something,” said Stanley B. Greenberg, a prominent American pollster and Democratic strategist who advised Bill Clinton, as well as Tony Blair and a host of other politicians in Britain and the United States. “I see them only stagnating or losing ground with their current vision.”
Mr. Greenberg, who is not advising this government, commissioned a poll of 2,048 adults in Britain earlier this month by YouGov Blue, a market-research firm that works with Democratic candidates in the United States. He said the results showed that Labour’s best chance to repair its position was to attract voters from the left-of-center Liberal Democrat and Green parties.
To do that, Mr. Greenberg said, that the government should embrace more left-wing economic policies like a wealth tax, deepen trade ties with the European Union, and redouble its investment in green-energy projects (the poll was cosponsored by Climate Policy and Strategy, an advocacy group).
Nearly 15 percent of Liberal Democrat voters and 10 percent of Greens said they would consider voting for Labour, the poll found. In contrast, only 1 percent of Reform voters and 3 percent of Conservative Party voters said they would.
“Labour faced steady defections because they did not seem to care about the issues important to liberal-left voters in these times,” Mr. Greenberg said. The polarized nature of British politics, which was accelerated by the election of President Trump in the United States, had given the government an opening to win back some of these disaffected voters, he said.
Mr. Starmer came into office determined to govern as a responsible fiscal steward. But the revolt over the welfare bill illustrates the difficult politics of that. He hoped to save 5 billion pounds — $6.8 billion — a year by 2030 by tightening rules for people to receive disability and sickness benefits. Lawmakers complained that the changes were unfair, coming on top of an unpopular decision to cut a universal subsidy that helps older people pay their heating bills in winter (the government backed down on that as well).
Mr. Starmer told lawmakers he wanted to see “reform implemented with Labour values and fairness.” But he antagonized many of them by initially dismissing the rebellion on the welfare bill as “noises off.”
“To have a third of your M.P.’s saying they’re going to vote against you in the first year of a government is a political failure on an extraordinary scale,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester.
Mr. Starmer’s woes, he said, can be traced in part to the attenuated nature of his victory. Although Labour won a huge majority, it did so with only 33.8 percent of the vote, fewer votes than in 2017, when it lost to the Conservatives. A “loveless landslide,” commentators called it, less a mandate for Labour than a rebuke of the Tories.
Voters were dyspeptic, giving Mr. Starmer no honeymoon and turning against him when the economy continued to stagnate after the election. The cut in the fuel subsidy, as well as a lingering scandal over freebies accepted by Mr. Starmer and some of his aides, added to the perception of a government out of touch.
The Labour Party now wins the support of only 23 percent of voters, according to a poll published last week by YouGov. Reform U.K. polls at 26 percent, the Conservatives at 18 percent, the Liberal Democrats at 15 percent and the Greens at 10 percent. The poll, which extrapolated the national data to individual parliamentary districts, projected that Reform would emerge from an election with the most seats, though not enough to form a government by itself.
The swift rise of Reform and its media-savvy right-wing populist leader, Nigel Farage, an ally of President Trump, has alarmed Mr. Starmer’s advisers. Pro-Tory newspapers routinely refer to Mr. Farage as a prime minister in waiting. To fend off a challenge from the right, the government has adopted tougher immigration policies. Mr. Starmer has also moved gingerly on one of his most significant promises during the campaign — to mend trade relations with the European Union after the rancor of the post-Brexit years.
That caution, analysts said, is driven by a fear of alienating voters in the “red wall,” Labour’s stronghold in the industrial Midlands and north, many of whom favored Brexit and returned to Labour in 2024 after abandoning it in the 2019 election. But Mr. Greenberg said that even in the “red wall,” support for closer ties with Europe had risen, out of a belief that it would help the economy.
Professor Ford said that while he understood the appeal of a more progressive agenda, there were risks in veering too far left. “We had a recent experience of a government that had a strong set of ideological principles, and it didn’t work out so well,” he said, referring to Liz Truss, a free-market, tax-cutting evangelist, whose government was ousted after 44 days of economic turmoil.
Still, analysts said, the risk of sticking with the status quo now outweighs that of a change in course. Already, Mr. Starmer has announced major new investments in housing and green energy projects. Most analysts expect the government will have no choice but to raise taxes in its next budget this fall.
“The penny is dropping on this,” said Steven Fielding, emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. “We haven’t had a politician who is able to conceptualize, let alone enact, a coherent Labour strategy.”
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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