This weekend, something shifted in the public mood in Britain.
There were no street parties or jubilant scenes greeting the new Labour government, unlike the last time the Labour Party broke a long period of Conservative rule, an occasion marked with a dawn party at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 1997. But as the new Prime Minister Keir Starmer took to the steps of Downing Street to offer a new kind of leadership, and broke party traditions with a slew of expert appointments as incoming ministers, it’s like a weight has lifted.
People don’t expect miracles in this age of tight finances, but they have given change a chance. As a neighbor commented with a wry smile, “It’s a start.”
How did the United Kingdom go from electing a fourth consecutive Conservative government led by Boris Johnson with an 80-seat parliamentary majority in 2019 to electing a Labour government in a landslide less than five years later? And can this victory offer the Democratic Party hope that there is a way to defeat the political right and win big?
The Labour Party that Keir Starmer was elected to lead in April 2020, when I joined his team as executive director of policy, was broken by its fourth defeat and a grueling period under left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Undaunted by the scale of the task, Starmer set about changing Labour to move it from the political extremes to the center ground of British politics and become electable once again. He set his mission as returning Labour to the service of working people — code for speaking for the millions of working-class people and communities who had felt left by the party it was created to represent. In so doing, he aimed to win a parliamentary majority so he could change Britain in their interests.
Starmer made ridding his party of the antisemitism that had shamed Labour a top priority. His zero-tolerance approach brought him into conflict with the previous leader Jeremy Corbyn, with Corbyn having the parliamentary whip withdrawn for downplaying antisemitism in his public response to the equalities watchdog.
Starmer took action when behavior fell below the standard set for members of parliament and party members. The policy platform shifted to reflect the issues that mattered most to the public rather than the party and to provide fiscally responsible policies on the cost of living and the National Health Service. It wasn’t all plain sailing, not least because Labour was far behind the Tories when much of the change was taking place, but it was necessary if the party was ever to win the trust of voters again.
Undoubtedly the Tories played a leading role in their own demise. There was a significant anti-Conservative sentiment that saw many senior cabinet ministers lose their parliamentary seats, and anti-Tory tactical voting that resulted in a spread of votes to other parties.
The Conservatives kept showing the public they were more concerned with their own interests than those of the voters, from the “Partygate” scandal to the Truss/Kwarteng mini-budget that sent the markets and mortgages flying, to former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak dashing back from the D-day memorial to do a news interview for the Tory election campaign. But there is no doubt that Labour are the architects of their own success as well as the beneficiaries of Conservative decline.
For Democrats, Labour’s victory offers hope that even with the incumbency factor, the center-left can win and win big. The reality is that in both the UK and the U.S., there are millions of working-class voters who feel our parties have moved away from them. The Democrats are not just losing white working-class Americans to the Republicans, but Black and Hispanic working Americans as well.
Starmer’s success shows it is possible to win significant numbers in the places needed to secure a majority, but the party has to view politics and policy from their perspective. Of course, both parties need a larger electoral coalition to win, but you can’t reach that coalition without putting the interests of working-class voters at the heart.
The Progressive Policy Institute’s Campaign for Working Americans, led by Tim Ryan, is one example of such an effort. (Full disclosure: I am the director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s Center-Left Renewal project.)
Moving the Labour Party to the center ground was a critical part of Starmer’s strategy, with fiscally responsible policies to promote investment and economic prosperity. But it is a centrist politics that is defining a new agenda for our country, not the mid-point between two extremes.
This new centrism, of active industrial policy fueled by private sector innovation, offers hope for the future of our parties, but only if it brings about lasting change for the working people who need it.
Starmer has made controlling and managing immigration a political priority, an approach that has not enjoyed universal acclaim but one that is necessary to show the center-left has a better answer on immigration than the populist right. He has got to work straight away with new Home Secretary Yvette Cooper launching the Border Security Command to tackle illegal boat crossings across the English Channel.
Labour views its victory for what it was: a rejection of the Tories, an endorsement of Starmer’s changed Labour Party and a chance to change Britain for the better.
The transatlantic dialogue between Democrats and Labour has been reignited with a new generation of politicians, strategists and policy experts. That dialogue has helped fuel this victory, which can also be part of the path forward for Democrats.
Claire Ainsley is director of the Center-Left Renewal project at the Progressive Policy Institute. She served as executive director of policy to UK Labour leader Keir Starmer from 2020 to 2022 and is the author of “The New Working Class: How to Win Hearts, Minds and Votes.”