Who are Labour's people? It is alienating all voters

Telegraph

21-05-2025

Keir Starmer is bad at maths. I'm not talking about the state of the economy or Lord Alli's expenses, egregious proof of the statement though these may be. No; I'm referring to the basic number-totting that his Government must do to keep their electoral coalition together.
All governments make calculations about people they feel they can, essentially, afford to lose. Sometimes this is quite a sizable quotient; consider Mrs Thatcher in the North of England or Tony Blair's assault on the countryside. It wasn't until 2019 that Tory support recovered in the North. Until 2024, post-Blair Labour never won more than a handful of rural or even semi-rural seats. Nevertheless, these decisions were made with a clear eye on electoral calculus.
Such a shallow-but-wide electoral coalition as Starmer achieved last July was never going to be permanent. Given that voters' primary motivation at the polls in 2024 was 'we are furious with the Tories', there was little prospect of maintaining the sort of polling that delivered majorities – though often thin ones – to Labour candidates across the country.
However, rather than build a practical base in the light of threats to this broad alliance from Reform and the Lib Dems, instead Sir Keir seems to be performing a 'death by a thousand cuts' on his own potential coalition. Less than a year in, the question remains, who is the Government governing for? Who are 'Starmer's People '?
We can work out which groups they are prepared to ignore and isolate – a list that seems to be growing by the day. Short of individually stuffing dog poo through every letterbox in the nation it is hard to discern what the strategy is.
On their own, each group is possible to isolate; from the tiny demographics of Chagossians and hereditary peers to the more problematic subsets of farmers, fishermen, families who educate their children privately, pensioners, those living in rural areas aggravated by Labour's fanciful ambition to decarbonise the grid by 2030, the list of people who appear vindictively targeted by Government decisions grows longer by the day.
In systematically picking fights with numerous groups, the Starmer administration perhaps assumes that each is small, or irrelevant enough to make little difference. Now, taking every fight on its own, this may be correct. It was once true that the assembled might of UK agriculture could have brought down a government. These days, alas, that is no longer the case.
However – and this is where Keir Starmer's maths unravels – these battles add up. At some point, enough straw really will break the camel's back. You may not be able to please all of the people all of the time, but you at least need to please some of them. We are fast reaching the tipping point where more voters have good reason actively to hate this administration than passively tolerate it.
Even the Government's attempts to woo key voter groups or demographics are marred by a fundamental problem: each rhetorical turn is almost always followed by a totally contradictory act of policy. For example, the ' Island of Strangers' speech, which at risk of isolating the bien-pensant urban liberal voting base from which Labour HQ is mainly drawn, will have potentially stirred something among disenchanted ordinary voters outside London, for whom the realities of migration are more than a nice new Thai restaurant in Primrose Hill.
However, this being Starmer, it was instantly followed by promises of an EU freedom of movement scheme which would enable Britain to become a dumping ground for stubborn youth unemployment on the Continent (plus their dependants), totally contradicting, both in word and in spirit, what might have been achieved.
People are already suspicious of the PM, a singularly disingenuous politician, and this sort of bipolar policy fluctuation only furthers the distrust. This is tequila slammer politics; for every bite of lime, there must be a flick of salt, and a burning swallow. And, as with too many tequila slammers, people are already beginning to feel sick. The cumulative effect is that there will be no 'political children' of Starmer; nobody will say they owe him their prosperity, their home, their livelihood or liberty, as they might have said of Thatcher or Blair.
After all, the young who might benefit from EU mobility schemes may yet plump for the Green Party. Even the middle-class frequent flyer could be disappointed; despite ministers' efforts to hype it up, the deal doesn't automatically allow Brits to use EU lines at airports. NHS staff may cheer the spending boost the health service received last year but, despite the NHS's size, this demographic still isn't enough to carry the day.
The Johnson experience should serve as a warning. Conservatives are still being punished for the decision to break faith with the millions who repeatedly voted for migration control by ushering in levels unprecedented in British history. If recent polling is anything to go by, they may be punished forever. Yet Sir Keir is repeating the fundamental Tory mistake of 'talking Right, governing Left', ultimately winning neither. For all the rhetoric about 'smashing the gangs', the numbers in migrant hotels continue to rise, and wherever a new hotel opens it creates a new cohort of irate locals to swell the ranks of the growing anti-Labour coalition.
Unless something changes radically, this time next year will usher in a further round of local ballots when these numbers will become electoral reality. In short, bad as Keir Starmer may be at maths, the maths is looking a good deal worse for Keir Starmer.