The Tory-fication of Keir Starmer: a student’s perspective
Leader of the Opposition Keir Starmer last week announced a significant U-turn to Labour’s environmental policy, cutting planned investments in green industry from £28 billion a year to just £4.7 billion, should the party win the next general election. It is just one of many recent policy reversals from Starmer in recent months, who is widely seen as moving Labour closer to the political centre, in a very obvious departure from his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, it’s even a departure from the earlier rhetoric of Starmer himself. In his leadership campaign in 2020, he ran on a largely idealistic platform, self-describing himself as a socialist and pledging to nationalise key industries like energy and mail.
Since then, policies under the Starmer Labour Party have changed drastically. In July 2022, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced the party had scrapped the nationalisation of any public services. During the public sector strikes last summer, Starmer instructed his shadow cabinet not to protest on picket lines, and even sacked leftist MP Sam Tarry for disobeying this order. Perhaps most depressingly, Starmer even dropped his pledge to abolish tuition fees last May, framing the damage the ruling Conservatives have done to the economy as a scapegoat.
Clearly, as Starmer flirts with the prospect of power, he is simultaneously cosying himself up to the corporate class. Once the party of the working class, most Labour policies in 2024 are largely interchangeable with those from the Conservatives.
From the perspective of a student, the selection of insipid policies offered by Starmer inspires little confidence. Throughout my time at university, I always justified the expense of ludicrous tuition fees with the comfortingly naive thought that someday in the future, the Tories will be voted out of Downing Street, and a progressive and innovative government would sweep to power and cancel student loan payments to everyone’s relief. But as I enter further into my 20s, the idealism of youth is gradually swallowed by the disquieting realism of adult life. It is increasingly apparent that there is no prospect of a white knight to make living any easier, and the government that replaces our current one will be fundamentally similar and corporate in most tangible respects. And so will the next one after that, ad infinitum.
Somewhat wistfully, the optimistic campaigns of both Corbyn and Bernie Sanders in the U.S. are being left further and further behind, associated in my mind with the idyllic and carefree days of pre-drinks in student halls or my sixth-form holiday. Fast forward a few years, I am now facing the end of my university career in an economic climate which has rendered my humanities degree comically unemployable. And so grows the nascent dread— very soon, I am leaving the comforting security of student life and entering into an increasingly bleak job market, with the certainty of being burdened with an onslaught of bills for decades with which previous generations have not been encumbered.
From an older viewpoint, my dread probably reads as entitled whinging. There is nothing more unbearably student than denouncing ‘the illusion of choice under capitalism’. Moreover, to those with established careers and settled lives in their 30s and 40s, the concept of post-graduate anxiety is not a new one— in a way it’s comforting to know that my current apprehensions are universal and transient. But this does not make our qualms any less valid, particularly as the realisation sets in that under the inspiring Starmer, things are unlikely to change any time soon.
Given the abysmal current polling of the Conservatives, compounded with two heavy by-election defeats this month, Labour’s victory in the next election is all but assured. Starmer has effectively been handed a blank cheque to govern with whichever exciting and outlandish ideas one could conceive of. As the state of the country deteriorates, is it too much to ask for something a little different?
