Written by Willow Imam
Illustrated by Laura Liu
It’s a popular rule in politics that “oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them” — if the people are satisfied with the state of the country, there is no incentive for them to support a different party.
This was the case in 2024, when the fourth Conservative Prime Minister in seven years called an election and attempted to steer a party, divided since Brexit and mired in endless scandal to electoral victory — expectedly, he did not succeed. In their place, the Labour Government emerged as the returning power in Parliament after 14 years away.
Labour certainly relied on that rule during their campaign — their party motto (“Change”) was certainly not a particular goal like “liberty” or “prosperity”, but more an ideologically ambiguous statement saying “at least we aren’t those guys”. This tactic of electoral “greater evil” stoking even seemed to work — 34% of Labour voters did so in order to “get rid of the Conservatives”.
But what do you do when you’ve been elected on a mandate of “anything but them”? The answer: fail.
In appealing to some nebulous form of ‘change’ during his campaign, he admittedly attracted voters. But all he seemed to do in the end was back himself into a corner, creating an unidentifiable and unachievable goal for his premiership. This constantly allowed people to be disappointed that he had not achieved his goals and encouraged the treatment of any short-term costs, such as increasing taxation or cutting spending to fill the ‘black hole’, to be treated as a sign that he was just the same as the Conservatives.
The vague expectations Labour cultivated have inflated public hopes to unrealistic levels. As a result, many now judge Starmer’s performance as harshly as they judged Liz Truss, the Prime Minister who crashed the economy less than a month into her tenure.
And that was only for those who had faith in the beginning: to many, Labour’s lacklustre attempt to appeal to people through policy was both immediately obvious and called into question their goals as a governing party. One 2023 Labour MP remarked that Starmer seemed content for the election “to amount to a referendum on the performance of the governing Conservatives rather than a choice between competing visions of politics and justice”, and that it is difficult to identify “what he seeks to accomplish beyond achieving office”.
Yes, Starmer had incredibly high expectations placed on him as the first Labour PM in more than a decade; yes, he inherited a £22 billion shortfall from the Conservatives; and, yes, he had the job of fixing a system that was, in many ways, broken — these are all real challenges that he faced on entering office. But he certainly didn’t make it easy for himself to stay popular, if one is arguing he ever was.
It isn’t even necessarily true that Starmer is making the country worse: in multiple ways, one can reasonably argue that he has addressed some of the issues most important to Labour voters, such as increasing real wage growth at an above average rate. Starmer has simply set such an ambiguous expectation for himself that more than half of Labour voters expected “a fair amount of change or more” within a year, a goal that the allegedly change-averse Starmer was not likely to achieve.
This is all compounded by a country that the majority of the public feels is structurally broken — whether it’s a wealthy elite that controls political decisions, skyrocketing immigration, or every kind of crisis that one can think of (housing, employment, health — really, just take your pick), the people are demanding radical change. For a government that relied on the roadside car crash that was Cameron’s, May’s, Johnson’s, Truss’, and Sunak’s Conservatives to get into power, assembling an alternative ideological vision of society is a tall order.
The tactic of “hope your opponent is weaker than you are” is always an inadvisable one; however, it is especially unwise as your number of opponents starts to grow — as Reform and the Greens absorb the change-seeking right and left, Starmer will have to figure out his policy platform if he wants to still have a job come the next election.
