New Popular Front Needed

Mark Seddon assesses the Starmer government after eight months and finds a dangerous slide away from progressive politics

Mea culpa. I voted for Keir Starmer to be leader of the Labour Party. My defence is poor. In mitigation, I had been working in New York for the United Nations and was not as plugged in politically as I had once been. My confession is based upon a mixture of natural optimism, good faith and wanting to believe what I was hearing.

Scroll back a bit. Our New York Branch of the Labour Party, which from time to time used to meet at one of Harold Evans and Tina Brown’s Manhattan apartments, had nominated Jeremy Corbyn when he stood for election as leader. That nomination had come principally from the then chair, the long-standing Tribune columnist Ian Williams, and me.  Our collective thinking, in common with so many others at the time, was that Corbyn would represent a final break with Blairism, “New” Labour and the Third Way. Logically, we thought, Corbyn and the now surging membership would entrench this, and the seemingly reluctant new Labour leader could, in due course, ensure that he handed the baton to a younger Socialist. None of us of course reckoned with the ferocious, self-destructive, response that came from the embittered Labour Right – a response that was to culminate eventually in the purging of Corbyn and virtually anyone associated with him. It also substantially helped lose Labour the 2017 and 2019 elections.

The estimable Simon Fletcher, a long-time aide to Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn, who had also believed what he was hearing from Keir Starmer, had been appointed as his Strategic Campaigns Adviser.  He invited thirty or so of us from the Labour Left to come and meet Starmer at a pub in his London constituency, with a view to publicly endorsing him as he ran for the leadership. Starmer, it seemed to be me, was largely going through the motions. Sitting quietly at a corner table, only getting up to meet and greet when it was deemed politic for him to do so by one of his aides. No matter, for me and for many others, it seemed possible that Starmer could tread where Attlee and Wilson had once trod. Didn’t he used to say that Wilson was the Labour Prime Minister he admired most? He said that he supported the essentially social democratic programme of Corbyn and McDonnell. I thought that unlike them, he could present an image of stolid small “c” Labour conservatism to a hostile media, while pushing through the desperately needed policies aimed at tackling inequality, re-building the welfare state, creating decent unionised jobs and rolling back the years of privatisation and ending Britain’s involvement in America’s wars.

These commitments mattered most in those parts of the country that had born the brunt of Thatcherism and never recovered. Places like Port Talbot in south Wales which had always sent a Labour MP to Westminster. This great steel town had also produced a phalanx of famous actors including Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. Michael Sheen, who famously played Tony Blair in a trilogy of films, grew up in the town. The Marxist academic and political activist Professor Gwyn Williams, in his radically explosive history of Wales TV series; “The Dragon has two tongues”, used to point to the fire breathing Abbey Works of Port Talbot as the real beating heart of Wales. In opposition, Labour had resolutely opposed plans to end steel producing at Port Talbot. It was working with the unions to keep the blast furnaces open and keep thousands of direct and indirect jobs associated with the plant. Port Talbot and its steelworks was not going to be allowed to go the same way as the decimated south Wales mining valleys.

Port Talbot steelworks is of course now closed and being demolished. Despite all of the promises, Labour continued with the Tory policies. The works will, we are told, be replaced by new arc furnaces, but employing a fraction of those who once worked there. The furnaces will melt down scrap metal. The specialist steels will henceforth be produced from new blast furnaces built in India by Tata, Port Talbot’s owners. If a brave new future lies ahead for the town’s youngsters it may lie elsewhere, or in driving white vans around delivering stuff. Just up the road from Port Talbot is the town of Maesteg, also Labour since any one can remember. At the AGM of the local Labour Party last year, eight people turned up. Back in 2016 there were 148 members present.

Labour is dying on the ground in south Wales. If members don’t leave of their own accord, they will likely be assisted on their way by those around Starmer who long ago decided that killing the party off was the best cure for deviant thought. In elections, those who still vote, are heading off elsewhere. Nigel Farage and Reform UK are the chief beneficiaries. Here is a spokesperson for a major UK polling company in early 2025: “Our polling should be a wake-up call for everyone. Reform UK is emerging as a major political force in Britain. The idea that Reform hurts the Conservatives more than Labour is plainly nonsense. As our polling graphically shows, the vast majority of seats Reform would win if there was an election today are from Labour, as are most of the seats they would take on a swing of 3% or less.” In fact, there are 89 Labour seats at immediate risk. And the response from party panjandrums? “Play Farage at his own game! We can deport more people than him!” (We can even use Reform UK’s colours in our ads.)

Polling also shows disastrous falls in Keir Starmer’s personal ratings since the general election. His rating for being “in touch with ordinary people” has fallen from +4% in June last year to -34%. His rating for “representing what ordinary people think” has plummeted from +1% to -39%.

There are four years to the next General Election. It is highly unlikely that Keir Starmer will then be Prime Minister, especially if local elections, and more importantly elections in Wales and Scotland prove to be disastrous. Which means that on the current trajectory, we can look forward to endless media speculation as to who will replace him. Will it be West Streeting? Or, more likely, Angela Rayner? But what difference can this make if the political choice is between Reform Coca-Cola and Labour Pepsi? I mean, you would buy the real thing, wouldn’t you?

There is little reason to suppose that Britain is that much different from all of the other de-industrialised, unequal and unhappy countries elsewhere in Europe and the Americas. It is all a question of “when” not “if”. The centre cannot hold and the so-called “centrists” know nothing of political economy or class politics. All that is holding back the Right currently is an electoral system that can sustain large majority sitting governments for years at a time.

So, with the Right resurgent, with Labour clinically dead, what are we all waiting for?

Right now, there is a huge constituency that feels no longer represented. It may broadly be described as consisting of large sections of the working class, joined by growing numbers of a middle class now experiencing what the working class was put through in the final decades of the last century. Many no longer vote – and polls never take account of this of course. Others are looking for a new home and yet others may join them if they can find somewhere that seems welcoming and familiar. Labour’s traditional constituency is peeling away, and if elements of it can be dissuaded from running towards the mirage that is Reform UK, then it is essential that a new movement is built from below and very quickly indeed. The foundations are there for it; they lie in the union movement, those who believe that they have been abandoned by the main parties, those who would describe themselves as anti-war, ethnic minorities, women, students and many young people facing a future that is much poorer than that experienced by their parents.

In short, we need a new Popular Front, built around the principles and policies of the trades unions, the Green and environmental movements and the peace movement, and invested heavily in the former heartlands of the Labour Party. This will be a new anti-monopoly capitalist and anti-war movement, rooted in the principles and policies of democratic socialism. In Parliament we already have the base level for this; it can be found in the Nationalist parties, in the rump of the remaining Labour Left; the Greens, the independents and some Liberal Democrats. Their number are likely to be boosted as more and more Labour MPs see the writing on the walls. There needs to be a new Left leadership and one that is as dedicated to re-building a powerful grass roots movement, one that has real ownership over policy. We have seen how a ruthless and determined elitist group can capture and gut a historical political party for its own ends, and we cannot allow that to ever happen again.