Britain’s new Prime Minister is said to have been named after Keir Hardie, Labour‘s first parliamentary leader.
The original Keir — who died in 1915 — did not live to see a Labour government, but his namesake has just led his party to an unprecedented election victory.
Though his majority falls short of the 179-seat majority won by Tony Blair in 1997, Starmer has inflicted the worst defeat on the Conservatives in that party’s long history.
The new Labour government will have a strength relative to the principal opposition party not seen since the 1935 election and the National Government coalition.
That might mean, however, that Starmer has more in common with, not Keir Hardie, but a politician of a very different kind.
Sir Keir Starmer (pictured) a Labour government with a majority not seen since the 1935 election and the National Government coalition
Britain’s new Prime Minister is said to have been named after Keir Hardie(pictured), Labour’s first parliamentary leader
For the prime minister with the huge majority in 1935 was the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, who personified a good many things that the young Left-wing firebrand Keir Starmer grew up detesting.
Baldwin’s tragedy was that his domestic priorities were over-ridden by a mounting international crisis and an urgent need for rearmament that he dismissed as too expensive and unpopular. Starmer risks the same fate.
The Conservatives, so dominant in 20th-century British politics, have only narrowly escaped the fate of the Liberals between the wars when they ceased to be the second-largest party.
If the worst forecasts had been correct, the Tories might have come third after the Lib Dems on Thursday.
Fortunately, the voters preserved the Conservatives as the official opposition — albeit with their smallest parliamentary representation since Britain became a democracy in 1832.
This is just as well. For we can have no illusions: Labour has no credible plan to revive economic growth in the UK, and the Lib Dems are not much better.
The country’s only hope as we stumble towards the next bond market panic and/or sterling crisis is that a chastened Tory Party will finally get back to its foundational first principles — small government, balanced budgets, low taxes and sound money, but also well-funded armed services — after a leftward wrong turning that has lasted one third of a century.
In the wake of such a rout, the Conservatives must conduct a rigorous post-mortem and take a look, not just at recent history, but at events over more than three decades.
Niall Ferguson: ‘Labour has no credible plan to revive economic growth in the UK, and the Lib Dems are not much better’
With interest rates sky high, the cost of servicing that debt is bound to crowd out other spending priorities, including defence leaving the UK unprotected
When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, we supporters of Margaret Thatcher thought we had won our decades-old argument with the Left.
Some, such as my friend Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist, even thought it was ‘the end of history’ — the irrevocable triumph of liberal democracy and market capitalism.
Wrong. And not long after the euphoria of the 1990s — the decade of the ‘peace dividend’, when Western nations felt able to reduce their spending on defence — we were slapped in the face by a succession of crises.
We thought we were building one world based on globalisation and the worldwide web. Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the global war on terror. This was followed by the world financial crisis of 2008-9, the Covid-19 pandemic and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Monetary policies of zero interest rates and quantitative easing made a government spending spree possible in response to these shocks.
Now, with public debts at much higher levels and interest rates still elevated, comes the reckoning.
According to the International Monetary Fund, Britain’s public debt relative to gross domestic product has risen by a factor of three since 2001, more than for any other member of the Group of Seven advanced economies.
With interest rates where they are, the cost of servicing that debt is bound to crowd out other spending priorities, including defence.
In 1936, Winston Churchill attacked Baldwin’s government for its slowness to rearm. With the economic position the new government has inherited it is essential that is not repeated
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. After the ‘peace’ across Europe fell behind on its defence spending
All developed democracies face three structural problems. First, ageing populations want long and comfortable retirements. But it is hard to satisfy this demand without higher taxes and more immigration, both of which older voters hate.
Second, the advance of information technology has not really boosted productivity but, instead, has put a premium on politics as entertainment (think Nigel Farage on TikTok).
Finally, the resurgent geopolitical threat posed by Iran, Russia, China and North Korea — the new ‘axis of ill will’ — means that all western countries need to increase defence budgets at a time when domestic priorities are more politically compelling.
A rational policy would seek to stimulate entrepreneurial energies and investment, to remove poverty traps and other disincentives to work, and to divert government spending from wasteful consumption to investment in defence technology.
The lesson of Baldwin’s tenure, alas, is that the Starmer government almost certainly won’t adopt such an approach.
The election of 1935 had cemented Labour’s role as the official opposition and reinforced its commitment to disarmament, even as the storm clouds gathered.
But, then, Baldwin’s Conservatives were not much more hawkish.
He spelt it out on the campaign trail: ‘I give you my word that there will be no great armaments.’
In a famous exchange in the Commons on November 12, 1936, eight months after Hitler had reoccupied the Rhineland, Churchill attacked Baldwin’s government for its slowness to rearm as ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent’.
Baldwin replied with the cynicism of the veteran politician. The voters, he said, would not have accepted it: ‘I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.’
With the Luftwaffe’s strength seemingly far outstripping that of the RAF, Churchill’s comment was damning: ‘I have never heard such a squalid confession from a public man as Baldwin offered us yesterday.’
The economic reality that Keir Starmer inherits from Rishi Sunak is hardly the one that John Major passed to Tony Blair.
Net debt stood at 40 per cent of GDP in 1997. This year, it will be in the region of 93 per cent.
Britain already spends more on debt interest than on defence. Despite recent signs of economic improvement, that gap will only widen as growth limps along between one and two per cent. This is much closer to the 1930s than the 1990s.
It is the British way to congratulate the winner of any contest, but with congratulations must come a warning.
The public detests the Tories. It does not love Labour or the new Prime Minister. And the challenges he confronts will require the courage to lose what little popularity he possesses.
Mr Baldwin lacked that courage. We shall soon see if Sir Keir has it.