Keir Starmer has been in office as Britain’s prime minister for a little longer than a year—and currently enjoys only a 22 percent approval rating among the public. Starmer has responded to those struggles with recent shake-ups of his cabinet and governing agenda. But, with the official visit to Britain by U.S. President Donald Trump underway, rumors still circulate that Starmer will eventually be forced to resign—and that a far-right prime minister will inevitably take his place. Does Starmer’s failure have to do with his lack of a clear ideology? And what sort of agenda would the far-right Reform party’s Nigel Farage pursue if he were to be prime minister?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: Do Starmer’s political failures have to do with his apparent ideology of managerialism and its fundamental mismatch with Britain’s problems?
Adam Tooze: Yeah, I mean, it has been awful to watch, especially given the British first-past-the-post system and the enormous revulsion across a large part of British society against the succession of increasingly corrupt and incompetent and, toward the end, just laughable Tory governments—Starmer had a huge groundswell of support. And looking at the demography of it, the British Labour Party still actually sort of looked like a classic social-democratic coalition. It had some working-class votes. It had a lot of young people voting for it because who else do you vote for in a first-past-the-post system when your options are the Tories, essentially, and when you have to, you know, in some senses get revenge for the disaster of Brexit? And the whole thing yields a gigantic majority in Parliament for one party.
But it’s gone spectacularly wrong. According to the latest opinion polling, Starmer is amongst the least popular politicians in the world within British society in terms of his net negatives. He’s about four times less popular than Trump, which gives you an idea of just how badly this has gone wrong. I mean, the procedure of this is its policy missteps and broken promises. You know, they’ve basically made really painful cuts to the welfare system. There’s a deep loss of respect and trust because they just seem to be bad at the details of modern politics, like not having corruption scandals, or just fully paying your taxes, which is an important issue if you’re running on a clean-hands campaign. There is an ongoing struggle for the hearts and minds of the Labour Party, and Starmer spearheaded an absolutely savage crackdown against the Labour left. And it hasn’t completely worked, and a large part, of course, of the Labour left has now broken away to form its own party. These were people that in many cases were expelled from the party and have now decided to form their own party. Forty-nine Labour MPs voted against the government over welfare cuts.
And as you say, there’s a sort of strategic vacuum. I mean, you say that he’s managerial and he doesn’t have ideology. As somebody who has the misfortune of carrying a British passport, I disagree. My friend David Edgerton put it well: He tells us he’s a conservative; we should take him at his word. Like he’s a flag-waving, small-c British conservative, with a sort of social-democratic touch and a kind of workerist personal affect, cut through by modern careerism and upward social mobility. Why pretend otherwise? The message that’s delivered is nationalist; it’s a kind of small-p populism. It’s a large part really conniving, as you see in large parts of Europe, with the anti-immigrant agenda. And it doesn’t translate. Unlike with New Labour, where both with [Tony] Blair and [Gordon] Brown, you could actually point to very substantial redistributive efforts and a serious effort, for instance, to deal with child poverty, we’re not seeing that in this government.
So what’s gone wrong at a deeper level? I think there are three basic issues here. The first is the underlying economic problems are really serious. So the British economy has been growing appallingly slowly since 2008. The New Labour government basically rode—that is the government in the ’90s and the 2000s—rode on the powerhouse of the city of London, which was broken irrevocably by the financial crisis of 2008. Then they gambled on connections to China, which didn’t work out in the 2010s because of global geopolitics. And then Brexit put the nail in the coffin, really, of placing the U.K. outside the EU, and therefore it’s no longer attractive as a major center for foreign manufacturing FDI—foreign direct investment, that is—that had been a big thing. And then you add on that the nervousness in bond markets that was triggered by the ghastly moment of the Truss government and the moron premium that the British taxpayer has subsequently paid for the incredibly sort of just feckless management of public finance at that moment and the uncooperative relation with the Bank of England.
That’s one set of problems. There you are: Labour government comes in, and it’s already basically in a kind of beleaguered situation facing deep structural issues. And it’s not easy to see how you maneuver your way out of that if you are going to persist with the claim that you’re not going to raise taxes, which they promised, and you also aren’t willing to take the risk of doing large-scale borrowing and investment. Problem number one.
Problem number two is the Brexit demons are still on the loose in the form of the Reform party, right? The degeneration of British democratic culture that was opened by the Brexit campaign and the lying, the post-truth, the pandering to the lowest common denominator of xenophobic nationalist conservatism, which is always a streak of British society as it is in most societies around the world. And the fact that this was raised to the level of national politics is still there, and it’s a huge dead weight on British democratic discourse, and the Labour Party is really responsive to it.
And then the third element is that the Starmerites see themselves as, you know, on a mission to purge the Labour Party of the demons of Corbynism. And the accusations of antisemitism and the really perverse attachment of the British government to the defense of Israel since Oct. 7 have compounded that in a society with a radicalized, democratically activated Muslim majority in many of the urban areas, which in a first-past-the-post system will result in parliamentarians being elected from those constituencies. It’s a recipe for fragmentation rather than unification, and it’s broken the integrity of the Labour Party. And who knows where that goes, the new left-wing party that Zarah Sultana and Corbyn have launched. There’s a long tradition in British politics of those third-, fourth-, fifth-party movements fizzling out. But those are the kind of constraints that Starmer is operating under. And so even if one sets aside just the pale mediocrity of the political class, the structural constraints are really serious.
CA: Polls suggest Nigel Farage’s Reform party would win an election held today in Britain. What exactly would his party’s agenda look like if it were put into practice? And what exactly would be at stake in a global sense in the possibility of Britain being run by a full-on populist party?
AT: So there are three really, you know, loudly articulated elements of the Reform agenda. And they’re, to anyone familiar with Trump politics, they’re the same old tune. The first is a massive, coercive attack on the complicated, to a very large extent, successful patchwork of multiethnic, multicultural Britain. So the plan is to build huge prison detention centers with tens of thousands of places, and over the course of a Parliament, which could be four to five years, to deport 600,000 people, which, you know, scaled up is the sort of target which the Trump people are going for. And this isn’t by accident; they’re obviously mirroring it themselves.
Then there is, again, an agenda of domestic public order. The idea that somehow Britain is a society convulsed by criminality, attributable obviously always in some sense to some other, which would be Black youth or migrants or deviants of some kind. One of my favorite studies of the Brexit vote, which are Farage’s people, is the close association between Brexit voting and the belief that the public flogging of sex offenders will be an appropriate kind of punishment to bring back. Like, this isn’t the kind of politics that’s limited to the United States or the right wing of the AfD [Alternative for Germany party]. It has its supporters in the U.K. So what they want, they want a 17 billion budget—that’s pounds—for the police and 30,000 new police officers.
And then, and this is the kind of hardcore of the economics program, they want a 12 percent cut to public spending and a similar cut to taxes. So this is the sort of hard-right neoliberal kind of [Javier] Milei radical, Thatcherite kind of element here, and Milei being the Argentinian equivalent of Farage. That’s a 5 percent shift of the fiscal budget. That’s the sort of number. The French are looking at a 2 percent to 3 percent shift in GDP, and that’s breaking French politics. The Germans are looking at that kind of number in terms of additional spending. And what Farage wants to do is cut back the state by that amount.
And then on top of that, you’ve got all of the usual noise. You’ve got anti-green talking points, so they don’t like windmills either, just like Trump. And they like crypto just like Trump, and they want to deregulate the city of London and concentrate regulatory power in the Bank of England. And, you know, since their electorate is overwhelmingly undereducated, about 5 percent of university graduates voted for them in the most recent election in the U.K., 25 percent of folks without college degrees. It’s a party, obviously, that would have pushed through a kind of empty “woke” educational agenda in Britain. They want to teach a proud history of the British Empire. It’s yawningly predictable and ghastly.
What would it actually do? Well, if they tried to do that fiscal program, good luck. Thatcher tried. She didn’t manage to do it because, in fact, there are huge constituencies tied to public spending, because it actually isn’t unproductive, and it’s not bad and the whole idea that it is, is crazy. Probably they would enact the tax cuts and probably not the spending cuts, and then you end up with large deficits, and we’d have to see how the treasury market responds. That would depend very much on the Bank of England and whether the bank was on side. Mark Carney, when he was running the Bank of England, absorbed the shock of the Brexit referendum and prevented a crisis. When [Liz] Truss came along, the Bank of England didn’t play ball and the treasury market went into spasm. So it would be kind of interesting to see how the Bank of England played that out. The migrant pushbacks would be brutal for Britain’s neighbors. They would have to figure out their politics with France. They’d be talking to Albania, but I don’t know whether they’d really play ball.
Defense-spending-wise, Farage is not looking to do more than the NATO basics right now. So he’s looking to increase spending on military to 2.5 percent of GDP in three years, 3 percent by six years. This is the standard NATO alignment. How does Britain matter in the world right now? It’s one of the European anchors of NATO. So it’s kind of conventional there. He’d probably play a kind of role similar to Italy’s far-right prime minister, [Giorgia] Meloni, in NATO. But the city of London, as a hub of financial activity, matters globally. And if you turned that into a sort of slightly roguish offshore financial center, you might attract serious money; Wall Street could be expected to go play.
Still, it’s hard to see that Farage as prime minister would be a game-changer. After all, with Brexit, this is really just the following through of the shock that British politics delivered to global bien-pensant opinion. That a democracy could deliver a self-harming vote of quite that proportion was a shock, but that it could then go on to vote for Farage seems a little less surprising on balance.
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