A sufficiently 'horribilis' year for Prime Minister Starmer

LondonOn June 16, during the G-7 summit in Canada, Donald Trump and Keir Starmer appeared before the media to let the world know they had signed a trade agreement, albeit a small one. And while they were doing so, the US president got caught short. Quickly, the premier British bent down to pick them up.

Months before this episode, on February 27, another moment took place in the Oval Office of the White House that will swell the footnotes of the current Westminster term. Starmer visited Trump for the first time since his re-election and premier He presented himself with a letter from King Charles III inviting the President of the United States to a second and exceptional state visit to the United Kingdom, which will take place in September. There is no precedent, nor justification, beyond the use of flattery as a diplomatic weapon. Starmer did not come away from Washington unscathed. Even the hostile press congratulated him for such hypocrisy.

Both highly symbolic moments could largely define Keir Starmer's first year in power, since On July 4, 2024, he won the general election with an overwhelming majority. and his very watered-down Labourism –even more so Tony Blair's Third Way–, returned to government after fourteen years of punishment, purgatory and Brexit ToryA year in which Starmer has been very uncritical of Benjamin Netanyahu despite the war in Gaza, and extremely submissive to Donald Trump, to the point that a few days ago, during the NATO summit held in The Hague, announced that it would buy 12 F-35 aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Starmer was the first to oblige and pay.

The revolt of the discontented

But while the premier In high politics in the Netherlands, a revolt by 126 Labour MPs was brewing in Westminster, scuppering the reform of the disability benefits law, which is due to be voted on in the Commons next Tuesday. Starmer, servile to the owner of the White House, was implacable with the most vulnerable. With the fiscal goal of saving some €6 billion and the official excuse of ensuring that the system remained sustainable and equitable, the prime minister wanted to review access to benefits for surviving disabilities and mental health problems. Various NGOs have protested a lack of empathy, and a third of the party's foot soldiers have told him enough. Starmer has swallowed his case and has had to back down.

This has been the latest about-face in a month, which shows, on the one hand, that his authority is shaken, and on the other, that his personal political instinct and that of his closest team cannot read either the atmosphere on the street or the mood of the majority of the rank and file.

The second about-face in the last thirty days is also related to social security contributions. The government restricted the Winter Fuel Allowance to most elderly people on high or upper-middle incomes. But pensioners are a classic voting powerhouse, and tapping their pockets means pushing them into the arms of the Conservatives—if they aren't already there—or, worse still, the far right. The move generated a lot of opposition among those over 65, as they felt it broke with the universal principle of this energy support.

Thus, at the beginning of June, Treasury Secretary Rachel Reeves announced that she was reversing many of the changes made. This change of heart was undoubtedly influenced by: The victory of Nigel Farage's Reform Party in the local elections in England in early MayBut the damage was done. And not by chance, and largely thanks to Farage's demagoguery, according to which Starmer has "betrayed the pensioners" and is allowing the country to be invaded by immigrants, now the far-right group. He leads the polls. There are four years left until the elections., "and politics, a week is a long time," as Harold Wilson said. But the premier He only has 19% approval rating from the electorate, and this is a big problem.

Regret for "The Island of Strangers"

Another sudden change of course took place as Starmer flew to the aforementioned G-7 summit in Canada. Under pressure from all sides, premier The government has agreed to open a national inquiry into sex offender gangs. According to a recent report by social affairs and child poverty and marginalization specialist Louise Casey, these criminal groups abused at least 1,400 children and teenagers between 1997 and 2013. The official inquiry will determine whether the police, social services, schools, and local authorities covered up the crimes. The far right has accused working-class Pakistani Muslims of being responsible, while those implicated in cities such as Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, and Oxford are also responsible.

Starmer has four years to improve access to housing and the National Health Service and to make Brexit work – squaring the circle in Tony Blair's words – because it can't possibly work, he said this week. But in the premier –a convinced supporter of the European Union, and who worked for a second referendum– is what defeats him is his lack of charisma, his right-wing bias, and his timid prudence. Union leader Sharon Graham nailed it with a lapidary phrase: "The people wanted change with a capital C, not a technical and bureaucratic management of power."

Management that, on top of that, has been tainted by a terrible symbolical blunder. During a speech on May 12, he said that "in a diverse nation like ours, we run the risk of becoming an island of strangers, and not a nation moving forward together." The reason: the large number of immigrants arriving. Starmer admitted this very weekend, in an interview on The Observer, that neither he nor any of the members of his writing team thought that his words evoked those of Enoch Powell, a fascist leader already active in the 1930s, who in 1968 gave a speech known as the Rivers of Blood, in which he stated that Britons risked becoming "strangers in their own country" precisely because of immigration. The Labour left, which Starmer and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, have sought to annihilate, turned on him, accusing him of embracing Powell's racist rhetoric and, by extension, that of Nigel Farage, which threatens to tear down the walls of traditional Westminster politics.