The Labour Party and Keir Starmer’s landslide election victory on July 4^th simply confirmed the inevitable. Starmer’s rebranded moderate Labour Party had been on course for a historic victory against a Conservative Party that had been living on borrowed time. There has been commentary aplenty on the short to midterm implications of this electoral victory. Many speculate that the Conservatives will now shift even further to the nationalist-right, in an attempt to win back the thousands of votes they lost to the ultra-right-wing spin-off party Reform, led by the ubiquitous demagogue Nigel Farage. As for the Labour Party, they have restored themselves as a credible and moderate governing party, moving on from the naïve socialist agenda of Jeremy Corbyn, Britain’s most prominent socialist.  

In this sense, comparisons have been made with the last Labour leader to displace the Conservatives in a general election, Tony Blair. Both are Oxford-educated former barristers. Both joined the parliamentary Labour Party under the leadership of an unelectable, far-left leader. Both came to power by shifting Labour right and quelling the influence of the socialist wing. Both courted business and the private sector, promising that the Labour Party is not an anti-capitalist organization. And in their first elections, both won sweeping majorities of over 400 Members of the 650-seat British Parliament. Both are regarded as ‘centrists’ who declare their politics to be ‘progressive’.

Yet beyond these obvious similarities lies a more complex reality. While both are rightly associated with ‘centrism’, their interpretations and expressions of centrism are remarkably different. While that of Blair and the broader ‘Third Way’ movement was palpably ideological, it appears that Starmer’s expression of centrism is self-consciously post-ideological. One need look no further than Starmer’s recent keynote speeches and the Labour Party pre-election manifesto to find a clear expression of his post-ideological, technocratic agenda for Britain. Starmer defines his strategy as one driven by five ‘missions’; to ‘kickstart’ economic growth; to make Britain a clean energy superpower; to ‘take back’ our streets; to break down barriers to opportunity; and finally to build a national health system ‘fit for the future’. While these policies undoubtedly address Britain’s key socio-economic problems, particularly in the aftermath of Brexit and the pandemic, there is still a sense that Starmer’s five missions fail to provide a clear ideological identity, a position on the political spectrum, and a clearly defined vision of politics from which his policies will derive from. 

The root of this technocratic approach to politics is part of Starmer’s personal story. Starmer arguably had the most successful pre-political career of any former Prime Minister in the post-war era. After graduating from the University of Leeds and the University of Oxford with law degrees, he was called to the bar in in 1987. Starmer joined Doughty Street Chambers, a world-leading human rights law chambers and became one of the country’s star barristers. He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2002 and in 2008 was appointed as Director of Public Prosecutions, making him head of the Crown Prosecution Service. In this high-profile role, Starmer oversaw the state’s most consequential trials in the country, such as the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2010; the unsolved 1993 Stephen Lawrence murder; and the protagonists in the 2011 London riots. Even before his political career, he was at the forefront of the most pressing public policy debates. Upon retirement from his post, Starmer was knighted and duly became ‘Sir Keir’, six years before Tony became ‘Sir Tony’. While Atlee, Thatcher and Blair were all barristers, none stuck with the job anywhere near as long as Starmer. Success in the law requires a certain mode of thinking, a detail-orientated, non-ideological approach to problem-solving as well as an unspectacular and somewhat anti-rhetorical approach to oratory. In 2015, when Starmer was elected a Member of Parliament at the age of 52, it was this very disposition he brought with successfully into the political arena. 

This has been Starmer’s approach to leadership in his four years as opposition leader in the United Kingdom. The first two years of his leadership were dominated by perhaps the most disastrous years of Conservative government in British history, the Tories ravaged by scandal after scandal. In light of this, Starmer’s approach was still cautious, focusing on anti-Conservative attack lines rather than any broader ambition to sketch a positive vision of Britain under more competent leadership. There was little sense of an ideological vision beyond the negative consensus. Admirably, Starmer pledged to take a tougher line on anti-Semitism within the Labour party and this was achieved by the expulsion of a handful of hard-left MPs, most notably former leader Jeremy Corbyn. But beyond this, there was little radical action in the political sphere. Even in the weeks running up to the election, voters found it very difficult to define what Starmer really stands for, beyond the necessary cliches and tropes about providing ‘security at home and abroad’, ‘economic growth’ and ‘sensible, stable government’ (which political party, on the left or the right, would beg to differ?). This should be the bare minimum of government, not the high water mark of their ambitions. 

This all stems from Starmer’s lack of conceptual clarity. One must wonder if he has any really substantive views on how the world works at all. He certainly lacks a theory of history and Britain’s place therein. Perhaps this stems from a lack of courage and reluctance to stir up division based on a set of personal convictions. His new ‘centrist’ Labour Party lacks an intellectual identity beyond the plethora of individual policies they have promised (not to mention the dozens they have backtracked on). While this may be a self-conscious attempt to move beyond the ideological factionalism that has been a staple of the Labour Party ever since its formation in the 1920s, it is naïve to assume that one can govern as a statesman without being propelled by a clear ideological vision. Incremental solutions to policy problems are of course essential, but they are not enough to bring Britain out of her post-Brexit malaise. An entirely new governing approach is needed for a modern Britain that has reduced its status to a second-rate power with a unique convening position. This is a task equivalent to the restructuring, both institutional and intellectual, under Clement Atlee in 1945, who ushered Britain into the post-war consensus-based social democracy, and Margaret Thatcher, who reformed our institutions (at times with great human cost) to embrace the inevitable neoliberal revolution sweeping across the Western hemisphere. 

The post-ideological technocratic incrementalism of Starmer is a world away from the political style of Blair’s Labour Party of the late 1990s to the early 2000s. While Blair may claim that he too is a problem solver, putting sound policy over lofty ideas, even his greatest critics would argue that his policies fit within a broader philosophy, a coherent worldview, and a vision of politics both at home and abroad. Blair’s reinvention of Labour was part of the broader ‘Third Way’ ideological movement that swept across Western Europe after the fall of the iron curtain. In 1999, Blair’s Chicago speech paved the way for an entirely new mode of interpreting military intervention in the post-Cold War world. Likewise, Blair was a passionate defender of the European project (Starmer, on the other hand, appears to be the only post-war Prime Minister without a coherent set of convictions on Britain’s relationship to Europe).

In the domestic sphere, Blair’s economic philosophy was clear as a proponent of the social market economy approach, where external investment and state intervention were regarded as two sides of the same coin. The government’s immigration policy was underpinned by the philosophy of multiculturalism. While in hindsight this vision of politics was short-sighted, placing far too great a faith in the power of integrated capital markets to transcend the baser realities of global politics, at least it represented a clear vision of the world and Britain’s place within it. Ideas matter in politics, beyond the mere procurement of technical solutions, as they provide the context within which future policy problems can be anticipated and solved. They also provide citizens with a sense of selfhood and identity that technocratic expertise, no matter how efficient, cannot account for. 

While both Blair and Starmer brand themselves as ‘centrists’, their expression of centrism is markedly different. Blair’s capital-C Centrism was the product of a set of clear political principles, a worldview that was a genuine expression of a middle way between democratic socialism on the left and laissez-faire economic liberalism on the right. It was a positive vision of politics, a clearly defined identity. Starmer’s centrism, which we can call small ‘c’ centrism, is synthetic in contrast. Starmer appears to be a reluctant centrist, one still unsure whether his shift away from the hard-left is a betrayal of his ‘working class’ values (it certainly betrays the tone and emphasis of his 2019 party leadership campaign, where he heavily appealed to the Corbyn voters). 

Starmer’s centrism is less intellectually authoritative than its Blairist counterpart. Instead of sketching out a positive ‘middle’ way between left and right, Starmer has merely aligned his own positions between the prevailing populistic left and right positions. If this continues and Starmer does not use his historic majority to outline a bolder vision for Britain, the 2024 election will be remembered as a missed opportunity. The Labour Party has always been a party of ideas. Something which set them apart from the more managerial establishmentarian Conservative Party. One need look no further than the rich correspondence between the patron of this magazine, Reinhold Niebuhr, with 1960s Labour grandees Denis Healey and Tony Benn, today nestled in the Library of Congress Archives. Indeed, it has been reported by Michael Ignatieff that Blair, upon taking office, appealed to an elderly Isaiah Berlin to discuss the nature of modern liberalism. Unfortunately, there is no written record of their encounter. 

One of the most important tasks for Western political leaders in 2024 is providing intellectual leadership. This is not to say we need a Europe led by philosopher kings. But it is to say that both our political language and practical policies must undergo a reinvention not seen since the end of WWII. While some problems may be solvable via technocratic expertise, the mass disillusionment with the post-Cold War neoliberal consensus requires new new ideas. The very paradigms we operate from have too often been based on assumptions that no longer correspond to reality. Centrist politics must reconcile ideas that are no longer irreconcilable – nationalism and supranationalism, foreign policy realism and foreign policy idealism, and maybe even the delineation between left and right itself (Emmanuel Macron famously described himself as neither left nor right). This requires a greater degree of intellectualism than is currently on offer in modern Western political discourse. Yet a new world requires new paradigms. This is as much an issue in British politics as in Europe broadly. A healthy dose of Centrism is the necessary antidote to the jingoistic right-wing English nationalism propagated by the Conservative Party for half a decade. Starmer now has the leverage to participate in fostering this intellectual shift, but the jury is still out on whether he has the ambition (and the willingness to be unpopular) to do so.