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Sir Keir Starmer won a historic landslide just over a year ago, sweeping into office with a parliamentary supermajority the likes of which the United Kingdom had not seen since the years of Tony Blair. In his victory speech on the steps of 10 Downing Street, he promised to use that majority to “end the chaos of 14 years under the Conservatives” and deliver sweeping and immediate “change.”
During the campaign, Labour called the election, “a moment where we can turn the page on a set of ideas that, over 14 years, have consistently left us more vulnerable in an increasingly volatile world.” It was exactly what the British public, reeling from two decades of recession, austerity, and a chaotic exit from the European Union, were demanding.
Then something went wrong. Many voters believed the logical first step would be for Starmer to renounce the neoliberal policies that had gutted the country’s once vaunted health and social services, as well as vast swaths of the UK technology and industrial sectors. Instead, he and his team doubled down on the old thinking, to devastating effect. Rather than reverse the austerity of his predecessors, he pursued new cuts. Instead of directly challenging concentrated corporate power, he promoted deregulation.
Perhaps most galling for many of his supporters, Starmer has pursued a far more corporate-friendly agenda than even the Tories, in a quixotic bid to court American tech oligarchs and the Trump Administration.
Today, Starmer’s once sweeping mandate has completely evaporated. His personal net favorability rating is -47, which places him among the most unpopular leaders in the world. The Labour Party, which got 37.5% of the vote last year, now polls [ [link removed] ] below 20% — level with the shell of the Conservative party that they just vanquished and the newly ascendant Liberal Democrats and Greens. The resulting political vacuum is now being filled by the party that precipitated Brexit, the nativist and reactionary Reform UK, which now clearly leads in many public polls.
Rumors that Starmer’s disastrous tenure might soon end grow louder [ [link removed] ] each week, with some members of Labour, like MP Clive Lewis, saying openly that: “He doesn’t seem up to the job.”
Since the days of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, many in the Democratic Party have felt a kinship for Labour and have often coordinated broadly on policy and messaging. Consider, for instance, a recent high-profile conference [ [link removed] ] in London co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress.
This relationship is exactly why U.S. liberals should take the right lessons from Starmer’s implosion. Like British voters, most Democrats – and indeed most U.S. voters – are enraged at the state of society – and an economy that seems to work only for the few – and are looking for leaders able to channel that anger into transformative change. What they don’t want is the warmed-over, pro-corporate laissez faire policies that got us into this mess, yet which Starmer and many mainstream pundits in the Democratic Party continue to push.
It should have been clear from the depth and multifaceted nature of Britain’s economic crisis that the Starmer government needed to offer more than minor tweaks to the radical pro-monopoly and pro-financier policies Blair imported from Larry Summers’s 1990s Washington policy machine. Not only did that thinking result in a well-documented series of economic and political catastrophes – including the worldwide financial crash of 2008, the transfer of vital industrial capacity to China, and the rise to power of increasingly autocratic and anti-democratic tech corporations – but millions in the UK and U.S. have been in rebellion against these policies for a full decade now.
In the case of the UK, the country’s economic decline was accelerated by a brutal anti-working class and anti-poor austerity campaign by Tory Prime Minister David Cameron starting in 2010. Some estimates suggest those cuts — which chainsawed social spending [ [link removed] ] by more than 25% in some years — lopped as much as half-a-percent off annual GDP growth [ [link removed] ] each year since they went into effect, with the result compounding over time.
The vote to leave the European Union in 2016 – driven by the racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric of radical right politician Nigel Farage and amplified by foreign exploitation of the manipulation mechanisms in social media – only deepened the country’s crises by raising barriers to trade with the UK’s main economic partner. The global inflation spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK harder than most other large democracies — peaking at an eye-watering 11% in October 2022. This led the Bank of England to keep UK interest rates higher than most European nations, putting a further drag on growth.
When voters finally cast aside the Tories, it was a call for a dramatic break from that status quo, and a demand to hold self-dealing elites and predatory corporations accountable for the country’s sharp and largely preventable economic decline.
Once in power, however, Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, appear to have concluded British voters would settle for a more predictable version of Tory rule. Rather than take swift action, Starmer began to talk of a “calm and patient rebuilding.” Instead of transforming government, he promised that the state would “tread more lightly on your lives.” Starmer and Reeves stopped presenting the UK’s economic and political crisis as a result of bad economic ideas and instead framed it as a case of poor management.
They made their first major mistake within weeks of taking power, announcing plans to means-test the UK’s winter fuel allowance, a universal benefit that helps pensioners keep warm. They claimed the action would save £1.3 billion—a rounding error in the nearly £400 billion social services budget. What it also did was eliminate a longstanding benefit to some 9.3 million pensioners.
That misstep has become symbolic of the Starmer government’s neo-Tory approach. Promises to bring key industries like rail transportation and mail delivery back under state control have been cast aside in favor of new “public-private” partnerships that mainly favor the private investor. Even more concerning is that they installed more business figures in key regulatory bodies than the Conservatives, leading to fears that they will continue to underinvest in public enterprises, and perhaps even sell off additional vital infrastructure.
The lesson here is not that state control of industry is in any way superior to state regulation of privately owned industry. It’s that whichever of these paths a government chooses, it must carefully structure both external competition and internal governance of the corporation to prevent dangerous concentrations of power and control, the highest quality of service at the best possible price, and incentive for true technological innovation.
This points directly to another Starmer failure. The one area where the outgoing Tory party had actually improved on its predecessors was in pursuing competition policy that protected UK markets from being further monopolized and colonized by international tech and finance giants. Under Prime Minister Theresa May, the United Kingdom had begun revitalizing its approach to corporate concentration. For a few years, the nation’s top regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, was one of the global leaders on competition policy, taking on giants like Microsoft, Facebook, and Adobe.
It was a pivot birthed from both economic and political necessity. During the initial period of the 14-year Tory rule, the UK government stood aside as foreign corporations snatched up many of the country’s most prized firms. Superstar artificial intelligence firm DeepMind, for example, was acquired by Google in 2014, and world-leading British chip designer ARM was scooped up in 2016 by Japan’s SoftBank. But under the approach pioneered by May, when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission moved to block the sale of ARM to Nvidia in 2022, the CMA was ready to join the effort.
Much of the energy behind May’s reforms can be traced to the Brexit vote in 2016. After the final result veered widely from pre-referendum polling, both the Government and House of Lords launched investigations into the structure and behaviors of social media platforms and dominant tech platforms generally. These led to passage of the ambitious [ [link removed] ] Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act.
Six years later, in a symbol of just how dramatically Starmer has reversed May’s approach, his government fired the chair of the CMA for being too tough [ [link removed] ] on U.S. tech platforms and replaced him with a former Amazon executive.
The irony is that the Starmer government is currently on the verge of one truly popular achievement: a Workers’ Bill of Rights. This bill would ban most exploitative gig contracts, end the practice of “fire and rehire,” and grant workers fundamental rights from day one. Polls show [ [link removed] ] the reforms enjoy overwhelming support across the political spectrum, especially among the voters Labour is losing to Reform UK.
But few voters have heard about the Bill of Rights. That’s because Starmer and Reeves barely mentioned the idea—a damning rebuke of their messaging as well as their priorities.
To fully grasp the tragedy of today’s Labour government, it helps to go back seven years to when the party – then in opposition – actually attempted to identify policies and narratives designed to address the anger revealed by the Brexit vote, as well as the practical challenges posed by the sudden separation from the European Union.
In 2018, then Shadow Chancellor Reeves detailed [ [link removed] ] in the clearest possible terms the political and economic harms created by extreme concentration of power and control.
“Civic life, the ethos of public service and the social virtues that govern our behaviour toward one another have all been subjected to market forces and thus weakened. Nature, knowledge, social relationships and vast swathes of our personal data have been captured by corporations and commodified. None have been more voracious than the new monopolies of platform capitalism like Google, Facebook and Amazon, all three of which exert a monopoly power over knowledge and information. They block competitive markets, avoid taxation and impose oppressive control over their employees. And they use their monopoly power to extract and commodify information about the personal lives of consumers.
Britain needs to restore its national economy and build institutions that improve wealth creation, social security, and quality goods and services. Old and new monopolies need to be broken up to ensure that markets are competitive.”
In September of that year, the Labour-connected think tank IPPR released a comprehensive report [ [link removed] ] calling for the UK’s “data and digital infrastructure” to be “organised as collective goods” and regulated in the public interest. The report was covered in depth by almost all Britain’s main newspapers and broadcasters.
These ideas remained very much part of the intellectual and policy discussion in 2024 and in the days after Labour finally won power, promoted not only by IPPR but – less forcefully – by a policy group directly connected with Starmer, Labour Together. Which only sharpens the question of why Starmer and Reeves then chose to impose such a retrograde, pro-corporate, pro-Big Tech agenda.
Much of the answer appears to lead directly to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a policy shop called the Tony Blair Institute. Although Blair founded TBI in 2016, its influence began to swell in 2021, thanks to an enormous infusion of funding from Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who has donated or promised more than [ [link removed] ] £257 million (equal to some $343 million).
Blair has used this shop not only to repackage his disastrous pro-corporate “Third Way” policies of the 1990s, but to promote an even more extreme vision of regulatory laissez- faire, especially vis-à-vis the dominant tech corporations. This includes a plan [ [link removed] ] to transfer vast caches of government data on individual citizens – including their most private health information – to Oracle and Palantir.
Practically, the vast infusion of cash into TBI has warped debate within the broader Labour community. Thanks to Ellison’s support, TBI has been able to hire hundreds of up-and-coming policy experts and Labour-friendly business executives in the UK, and train them in the delusional orthodoxies of neoliberal thinking. Even combined, the budget of groups like IPPR and Labour Together are but a tiny fraction of TBI’s annual $150 million+ budget. As a result, once in power, Starmer and Reeves found they had little choice other than to staff much of their government with TBI operatives and trainees.
Starmer has attempted to reframe his full-on embrace of Third-Way laissez-faire as an exciting new opportunity for growth and progress. His line is simple: the core problem of Western society isn’t corporate power or inequality, but self-imposed scarcity. [ [link removed] ] Decades of burdensome regulation, particularly in sectors like housing and energy, have created a bureaucratic morass that chokes off economic vibrancy. The solution is a government designed to cut through red tape and usher in a new era of supply-side growth.
If this all sounds similar to the core message of the “Abundance” campaign in the United States, you would not be wrong. In fact, in the late September conference with the Center for American Progress, Starmer used exactly that word to describe his thinking [ [link removed] ].
The obvious question is whether Starmer and Reeves can recover their footing and reputation. And if they can’t, can the leaders who replace them?
In mid-September, Elon Musk provided them with one opportunity for a second chance, by sponsoring a rally by tribalist provocateur Tommy Robinson, whose actions are so extreme even Nigel Farage has denounced him. The rally, which attracted as many as 150,000 marchers, featured a call by Musk for a new UK government with the warning: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you.”
Musk had drawn little backlash for his role in fomenting violence in places like Southport. But this overt interference in UK politics, combined with violence by rally-goers that left 26 police officers injured, sparked a new level of reaction against Musk and tech oligarchs broadly, with calls for action by leaders in both the Liberal Democrat and Tory parties. But, although Starmer criticized Musk for inciting violence, thus far he has said nothing about how he might actually regulate the behavior of platforms to prevent similar or worse abuse of power in the future.
For U.S. liberals, two lessons stand out from Starmer’s political and moral collapse. First, it is absolutely vital not to align with Starmer and Reeves until they demonstrate a clear commitment to fighting oligarchy and autocracy and protecting British democracy and sovereignty.
The second? Democrats should make sure to steer clear of almost every one of Starmer’s signature policies, at least until he and Reeves demonstrate they understand what this moment of crisis demands.
As Starmer’s freefall demonstrates, trying to simply manage neoliberalism towards progressive ends is a good way to destroy not merely your own legitimacy and that of your party, but of the democratic state you have been entrusted to lead. The dominant fact of modern life is people’s deep sense of powerlessness in a political economy controlled by a few increasingly lawless corporations and oligarchs. Voters don’t want lectures about process. They want bold action.
This edition was written and edited by: Austin Ahlman, Barry Lynn, Max von Thun, George Colville, and Anita Jain

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