Starmer’s lurch to the right

“For reasons which they could not comprehend…they found themselves made strangers in their own country”.1
—Enoch Powell, the “Rivers of Blood” speech, 20 April 1968.

“[W]e risk becoming an island of strangers”.2
—Labour prime minister Keir Starmer, 12 May 2025.

Coincidences do happen.3 However, Starmer’s claim he had no intent to echo Powell’s racist demagoguery in a speech on immigration in May this year falls rather flat. The intensity of governmental efforts to micromanage the news cycle and the preparation that goes into the writing and delivery of speeches by mainstream politicians make such denial implausible. Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech is among the most famous in 20th century British political history. Starmer himself referred to it in a House of Commons debate last year. Specifically, he accused the then Tory prime minister, Rishi Sunak, of softness towards the far-right Reform UK party, led by “Nigel Farage, who said he agreed with the basic premise of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’ speech”.4

The responses to the respective speeches by Powell and Starmer tell a story about the trajectory of the politics of immigration over the intervening 57 years. One day after his speech, Powell was sacked from the Conservative shadow cabinet by party leader Edward Heath, who described his words as “racialist in tone”.5 Starmer remains, for now at least, the Labour prime minister.

The parallels between Starmer’s speech and Powell’s go beyond the eye-catching lines quoted above. Powell claimed, purportedly based on a conversation with a “middle-aged, quite ordinary working man” and letters from constituents, that migrants were putting pressure on school places, hospitals, employment and a supposed “British” culture.6 Starmer similarly referenced a supposed failure of migrants to integrate and learn “our language”, the import of “cheap labour”, migrants taking university places, and “pressure on housing and…public services”.7 Talking points that once incited National Front solidarity rallies and racist marches, notably a walkout on the London docks in support of Powell,8 have become normal discourse from frontline Labour politicians. The previous Tory administration, which brought us the infamous Rwanda deportation plan and which Starmer had once argued was soft on Farage, would now be decried by Starmer as conducting an “experiment in open borders”.9

Perhaps most remarkably, Starmer’s speech also contained the following line: “People…will try to make this all about politics…targeting these voters, responding to that party. No I am doing this because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in”.10 Yet what principles can we discern from a politician who, just five years earlier, wrote: “We must never accept the Tory or media narrative that often scapegoats and demonises migrants.

Figure 1: Poll ratings/general election results. Source: Pollbase, www.markpack.org.uk/opinion-polls/

Problems of low pay, housing and public services are not caused by migrants—they are caused by a failed economic model”.11 Those words came in the context of the contest to succeed left-winger Jeremy Corbyn as leader of a party still containing a good number of Corbynistas. By 2025 the situation was quite different. Corbyn stands outside of Labour, an independent MP; party membership has fallen from the around 564,000 under Corbyn to below 309,000 today;12 and Reform handsomely won the 1 May local elections, gaining 677 council seats and taking control of ten councils. What Starmer might actually “believe” about immigration, or anything else, is lost in the mists of ill-conceived realpolitik.13

Ill-conceived because Starmer’s tough stance on migration will not save his premiership from its descent into ever-deepening woes. As figure 1 shows, the collapse in Labour’s support has been precipitous, a 9 percent fall in the eight months after last year’s general election. Labour losing popularity as it governs is not new—its support fell steadily after the May 1997 election brought Tony Blair to power—but previously it took several years to register these kinds of declines. Moreover, as pointed out in earlier analyses in this journal, Starmer starts from a much less solid base.14 Blair won 63 percent of seats on a 43 percent vote in 1997; Starmer won a similar proportion of seats based on just 34 percent of votes. As figure 1 also shows, in contrast to earlier declines in support for Labour, the traditional alternatives, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, have not been significant beneficiaries. Instead, “other parties” lead the polls, for the first time—other than a brief spell in summer 2019 as the Theresa May government collapsed and Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party succumbed to attacks from the right. Today, Reform, a hard-right, racist party, leads the way, with polls in late May putting it at 29 percent, seven points clear of Labour. The Green Party also reached 10 percent in polls.15 The big three traditional parties together now command less than two-thirds of support from the electorate—before the 2008-9 economic crisis, this had never dropped below 80 percent.

It is Farage and his party that now largely set the tone for mainstream British politics. As the Bagehot column in the Economist puts it: “Neither Labour nor the Conservatives know how to deal with him politically. Each offers a similar slogan: ‘Nigel Farage is right—don’t vote for him’”.16 However, while Starmer may be courting Reform voters, this is precisely the group least interested in voting Labour. Three quarters of those who say they support Reform also say they would never consider a Labour vote—compared with just half of Tories and between a sixth and a seventh of Liberal Democrat or Green supporters. Reform’s existing voters, if they voted in recent elections, have largely cast their ballot for the Conservatives or for Reform’s predecessor, the UK Independence Party. Nor will anti-immigrant rhetoric solidify existing Labour support. For 87 percent of those supporting Reform, immigration and asylum rates are among the top three issues facing Britain, but for current Labour supporters that drops to just 16 percent. It is true that Labour supporters are defecting, but they are not all streaming towards Reform, nor are they attracted by its racism.17

In other words, Starmer’s emphasis on immigration will not help him secure support from Labour’s existing or traditional base, or draw new support towards the party.18 On the contrary, by accepting the terms of debate set by Reform and echoed by the Tories, the result will be to shift the axis of British politics further to the right, further enabling the far right in all its forms.19

Why Labour crumbles

It is also worth stating that Starmer’s criticisms of immigration are as wrong-headed as such arguments have always been.20 Net migration to Britain peaked two years ago, in summer 2023, and has been falling rapidly since, halving by the end of 2024.21 The 2023 rise in net migration was not, contrary to the myths spouted by the media and echoed by politicians, driven primarily by refugees arriving in small boats.22 Overwhelmingly, new entrants were here to study or to work.

Students sponsored by China, India, Pakistan or Nigeria have bankrolled much of the chronically underfunded higher education system in Britain.23 Market competition between universities involves chasing after such students to plug gaps in the university funding model, often involving huge outlays on superficially attractive new campuses at the expense of staff delivering teaching or research. The bursting of this bubble due to intensifying global competition, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and successive governments threatening to clamp down on student visas is now driving a wave of attacks on university workers. Of those migrants who came to work, overwhelmingly this was to fill gaps in the National Health Service or in social care, addressing the lack of recruitment and training of nurses, and the appalling conditions and pay levels in the care sector.24

The approach taken by Starmer is not about “the numbers”. It simply radicalises the approach of previous Labour administrations and politicians, including in periods during which net migration was far lower. An infamous incident in 2010 illustrates this. Then Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, in Rochdale campaigning for the general election, was invited by his aides to meet a 65-year-old Gillian Duffy, who attacked his economic policies—but also criticised him over the arrival of Eastern European migrants.25 As he walked away, Brown was caught on microphone muttering “bigoted woman” and criticising his aides for setting up the encounter. In the furore that followed, rather than defending the views he uttered when he thought he was in private communion with his team, Brown issued a grovelling apology.

The socialist journalist Paul Foot, in a classic text on Enoch Powell published in 1969, made the same point about the Labour response to the Rivers of Blood speech. This followed some relatively progressive measures, such as the Race Relations Act, promoted by a “liberal” current within the government, combined with earlier retreats in the face of racist pressure over immigration:

While [Labour prime minister Harold] Wilson attacked Powell verbally, his government hastened to put into practice the demands which Powell was making… After a token resistance…the “liberals” in the Labour cabinet have crumbled almost as fast as the opportunists, with the results that two years of painstaking and successful race relations work was torn to shreds by a single speech from Enoch Powell.26

Foot outlines an explanation for this pattern:

The most significant characteristic of these liberals was their elitism… In a period of few public statements about racialism, and where the government enjoyed the complete cooperation of the official [Conservative] opposition, these quiet liberals scored some notable successes… Powell’s speech swept all this aside, and, to their horror, the liberals in race relations discovered that they had no army with which to confront Powell’s…the Labour Party did not contemplate calling a demonstration to counter the pro-Powell demonstration of dockers… When such confrontation was forced upon them…they joined the opportunists and has-beens in retreat.27

In other words, Labour crumbles to the right, not because of the personal conviction of Labour politicians, nor the salience of the issue itself, but because adequately confronting the right would require a class response. Not only would this necessitate building a mass-based anti-racism; it would also require a wider explanation of the suffering inflicted on working class people. Starmer could have stood up on 12 May and said that the lack of affordable homes and high rents were a product of the scourge of landlordism and a dysfunctional financial system; that the lack of decent, well-paid work reflects the fact that capitalist investment is driven by profitability not human need; that the health service and education system are being run down because the super-rich have not been taxed sufficiently to properly fund these services. However, to do so would involve mounting a class-based critique of the system—and invite efforts to bring about radical change through class struggle to remedy its ills.28

There are varying degrees of capitulation, but the repeated pattern of Labour governments reflects a systemic flaw, common to any party committed to the goal of holding office within a capitalist state and overseeing a capitalist economy. This cannot be seen simply as a flaw in the practice of government, one that can be corrected by a shift in policy or personnel. For instance, a recent column by the radical author and campaigner George Monbiot emphasises the role of advisors along with a tendency of unaccountable government to succumb to the “demands of rentiers, oligarchs, non-doms and corporations”.29 These are all factors, but such accounts do not sufficiently situate these pressures in the context of a capitalist society structured around class division and a drive for profit.

As this suggests, the limits of what is regarded as feasible are, in the final analysis, set by the logic of capitalism and its attendant exploitations and oppressions, and by the pressure that can be brought to bear on the state by mass struggle. Labour is, as Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein explain in their classic analysis, what Lenin called a “capitalist workers’ party”, seeking to attract support and votes from workers, and hence holding out the prospect of reforms, but also seeking to maintain and manage British capitalism.30 One consequence, discussed below, is that as the economic situation worsens, the limits of reformism become more pronounced. Another consequence is that Labour systematically dismisses class interests in favour of a supposed national interest, claiming that on the national terrain class tensions can be reconciled. Starmer, again, has taken this nationalism to extreme lengths. Has any Labour leader so bedecked their public appearances with Union Jacks?

A deepening pattern

I have focused here on the issues of racism and immigration, which neatly illustrate the point, but the shift to the right is not confined to these questions. Starmer has had the misfortune to become prime minister at a moment not just of growing economic woes but also huge political flux that he is ill-equipped to navigate. He is caught between a desire to prop up elements of the old neoliberal centre of politics and a lurch towards a rapidly developing alternative set of pro-capitalist politics, represented by figures such as Trump, blending elements of neoliberalism with authoritarian statism and a highly illiberal attempt to escalate the culture war.31

Traditional neoliberals were hardly innocent of oppressive rhetoric and policies. Blair and Brown were happy to wield Islamophobia in their prosecution of wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. Their ministers engaged in scapegoating of Roma or Eastern European migrants when it suited them. They could, though, at least boast some long-overdue liberal reforms in the area of LGBT+ rights. Labour lowered the age of consent for gay men to that for heterosexual sex; repealed Section 28, which had restricted teaching about homosexuality; introduced civil partnerships; and introduced the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, which gave a limited right for some trans people to change their legal sex. The gains were sluggish and partial, and all were testimony to the generations of LGBT+ people who had fought over these issues, but there was progress. Starmer, by contrast, is moving to reverse progress in key areas. Nowhere is this clearer than in his welcoming of the transphobic Supreme Court ruling in April that “woman” in the Equalities Act refers only to “biological women”.32 The response has been mass mobilisations of trans and non-binary people and their supporters on a scale hitherto unprecedented in Britain.33

Starmer also remains committed to cutting disability benefits, risking plunging hundreds of thousands into poverty and triggering a revolt among dozens of his own backbenchers. The prime minister has sought to justify the cuts through a crude, victim-blaming rhetoric, claiming the benefits run “contrary to those deep British values that if you can work, you should… We believe in the dignity of work and we believe in the dignity of every worker, which is why I am not afraid to take the big decisions needed to return this country to their interests whether that’s on welfare, immigration, our public services or our public finances”.34 Increased military spending at the expense of cuts to welfare, along with reductions in overseas aid, has merely compounded the anger among campaigners and those on the left.

Over Palestine, only in late spring, following a year and a half of genocidal atrocity, did sections of Labour’s leadership even begin to seriously ask questions about Israel’s actions—though apparently this did not extend to efforts to block the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Israel.35 By this point evidence was incontrovertible that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is seeking to ethnically cleanse Gaza and complete the 1947 Nakba.36 Images of starving Palestinian children were being broadcast across the globe, evoking for some memories of the Ethiopian famine in the early 1980s. Labour’s leadership were presumably also given confidence when Trump snubbed Netanyahu during the US president’s tour of Middle Eastern despots, who are not only important potential sources of US investment but also play a growing role in international diplomacy amid the geopolitical chaos.37

As all this suggests, Starmer represents the culmination of a pattern in post-war Britain, in which Labour in office has been cursed with ever more right-wing leaders. Clement Attlee gave way to Harold Wilson and James Callaghan; Wilson and Callaghan, to Blair and Brown; Blair and Brown, to Starmer.

Had he won the 2017 general election, and the margin of the popular vote was just 2.3 percent, Corbyn would have appeared as the great exception to the pattern. His leadership of the party marked an eruption—within the framework of Labourism—of a variant of left reformism. Elsewhere in Europe this has generally taken the form of the creation of a separate party to the left of mainstream social democracy.38 Nonetheless, Corbynism’s rapid rise and fall mirrors those of such left reformist organisations, with the added complication that the left of the party was forced to cohabit with an entrenched right wing in a single organisation.

The rapid breakthrough of such currents and their all too frequent decline is a response to the same pressure that is driving mainstream social democracy rightwards: the tightening limits encountered by reformism. Labour and its equivalents, such as Pasok in Greece, the French Socialist Party or the German Social Democratic Party, have largely accommodated to these limits and lost support as a result. Meanwhile, the new left-reformist currents explode into the space vacated by the mainstream parties, but tend to flounder as they approach or attain office. For much of the left commentariat, the resulting crises of left-reformism are a matter of indifference. They can move on from enthusiasm for Rifondazione in Italy in the early 2000s, to Syriza in Greece before it took office in 2015, to Podemos in the Spanish state before it entered a governing coalition in 2019.39 Until recently, the Portuguese Left Bloc had become the latest great hope of such commentators. However, its vote collapsed from 10 percent in 2015 to just 2 percent in elections held in May this year. This reflects its decision to spend the 2015-21 period helping to prop up a government led by the country’s social democratic party as it attacked workers.

Figure 2: Britain’s economic malaiseSource: ONS data

The issue here is not that reforms are impossible. The issue is that the declining vitality of capitalism, rooted in a long-term decline in profitability, accompanied by growing debt-dependence and financial fragility, means that the gains of those at the top increasingly rest upon curbing the aspirations of the mass of workers. This has become especially true since the 2008-9 crisis, an expression of the exhaustion of the economic model that had developed after the turn to neoliberal policies in the 1980s (see figure 2). Conversely, delivering reforms requires a higher degree of confrontation with the capitalist class, at a time when the low levels of class struggle by workers in countries such as Britain mean the ruling class is hardly in a mood to concede reforms. Spending could potentially rise without class confrontation—but only if states were willing to tolerate an ever-growing public debt burden. As recent years have shown, the bond markets through which governments issue debt operate as a powerful constraint on elected politicians. This includes those on the right, such as Trump or Liz Truss during her brief tenure as British prime minister, as much as those of the left.

As Rob Hoveman argues in this issue of International Socialism, the economic constraints are likely to increase. Trump’s attempt to wield the tariff weapon to improve the US’s industrial and economic fortunes, hitting erstwhile allies and rivals alike, risks both a global economic slowdown and the unleashing of inflationary pressures. Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have already committed to contain public sector spending, hardwiring their drive to impose austerity through their adherence to their “fiscal rules”.40 Should the British economy tip into a full-blown recession, the assault on spending and on workers will get a lot worse. This plays to the advantage of Reform, who are now looking to replace the Conservatives as the major party on the right. Farage’s hodgepodge of economic and social policies opportunistically blends Thatcherite tax and public spending cuts with promises to remove the unpopular two-child cap on benefits, to reinstate winter fuel payments for pensioners and to enact a form of state ownership of utilities.41 That these plans are not logically consistent or even feasible is hardly the point. They will be blended with attempts to blame migrants, disabled or LGBT+ people, environmental protections and other potential scapegoats—attacks enabled by mainstream politicians such as Starmer.

While it is possible that at some stage Starmer’s miserable performance will induce a leadership challenge, the MP John McDonnell, currently suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party, is surely optimistic in thinking “party members, affiliated unions and MPs” might return the party to the relative radicalism of his and Corbyn’s period of leadership.42 The likeliest candidate to replace Starmer would be the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, who has been busily leaking memos critical of Reeves’s attempts to cut public spending. Rayner’s proposal is to prevent such cuts by restricting migrants’ access to benefits, pensions and the National Health Service.43 The crisis of representation for progressive workers will not be addressed through a Labour “left” cut from this cloth.

How should the left respond?

The genuine challenges of constructing electoral alternatives to the left of Labour do not mean we should not try.44 As International Socialism went to press, there were indications that a range of different left electoral groupings and figures were keen to mount a challenge at the 2026 local elections. There is plenty of raw material for such a project. Four new independent MPs were elected alongside Corbyn at the 2024 general election, in large part due to outrage over Labour’s position on Gaza. There is now a large array of local councillors, elected on some kind of left platform, and quite a few parliamentary and council candidates came a close second in recent elections.

What form should a left electoral challenge take? The Green Party has so far been a significant beneficiary of Labour’s shift to the right, with four MPs and 859 councillors, and quite a few former Corbynistas have joined the party’s ranks. Zack Polanski, its deputy leader, is currently running for election on a left-leaning eco-populist platform. However, the Greens cannot offer a consistent left alternative to Labourism. They remain a strongly electorally oriented group, rather than being anchored to a principled socialist politics. In local government, the Greens tend to operate much like other parties, pragmatically pushing through cuts and attacks on workers to meet budget constraints. On both occasions during which the party led Brighton and Hove council, from May 2011 to May 2015, and from July 2020 to May 2023, Green councillors clashed with refuse workers over pay and conditions, leading to strikes. In Bristol, where the Greens lead the city council, they have accepted extensive cuts, with the usual talk of “tough decisions”, rather than mounting a serious challenge to central government. These are both areas in which the Greens have pitched left to pick up votes. In North Northamptonshire council the Greens have expressed a willingness to work with Reform because the Green’s anti-racist stance “isn’t really relevant locally”.45 Elsewhere in Europe, there is extensive experience of Green Parties operating as part of ruling coalitions to prosecute wars or impose austerity.

A second possibility, the creation of a new full-blown left-reformist party, is presently unlikely. It would, anyway, in the absence of high levels of class struggle, be likely reproduce the kinds of problems identified above, favouring reformist pragmatism and seeking to domesticate or squeeze out anti-capitalist currents.

A third approach, simply grouping together existing networks of left councillors, is far too unambitious. Moreover, such networks are heterogenous, with some rooted in a “community” politics hardly distinguishable from traditional social democracy.

A fourth possibility is that revolutionary socialists could just stand their own candidates. However, if this were confined to a tiny handful of seats, it would do little to address the issue of working-class political representation, and, if carried out more widely, would probably end up with derisory votes in most areas.

A far better alternative to all these options would be a loose network of left candidates, perhaps with a shared logo and some key points in common in their manifestos. This basic programme ought to include not just economic issues, such as taxing the rich to fund welfare and public services, but also support for Palestine, for migrants and for LGBT+ people. This would create a framework in which both revolutionaries and left-wing reformists could stand, without either having to surrender their political independence or their political principles, with each benefiting from the sense of a wider challenge to Starmer.46

For revolutionaries, independence is critical.47 Within our tradition, electoral work is both subordinated to struggle and an opportunity to try to galvanise and promote wider struggles, through the creative use of elections themselves and through the platform granted by winning office. This focus on mass working-class self-activity means we do not have the luxury of focusing on elections alone. Pushing back the likes of Reform, and the smaller fascist groups currently gaining confidence from their rise, will involve organising and sustaining large-scale anti-racist and anti-fascist activity.48 While the creation of a left electoral challenge might limit the further growth of Reform and give confidence to those who wish to oppose it, as I have suggested, it is unlikely to attract many of those who have already cast their vote for Farage’s party.

As Héctor Sierra argues in his article in this issue, the tactic of the united front, which brings together revolutionaries and reformists in common activity on the streets and in workplaces, has been key to countering far-right movements in the past and remains so today. Such an approach can be generalised to other areas. As the attacks from Labour intensify, initiatives such as We Demand Change, which held a 2,000-strong summit in London in spring, and which has since held large regional meetings, can galvanise resistance to Starmer’s government as well as providing a necessary space to debate left-wing alternatives.49 This can build on existing and developing struggles, including the major strike in refuse collection against a Labour council in Birmingham, and the moves towards national ballots over pay among school teachers and junior doctors, and over job cuts among university staff.

As our article on the united front also emphasises, the construction of united fronts depends on the existence of a sufficiently sizeable and effective core of revolutionary socialists. The fact that revolutionaries are not subject to the self-imposed limitation afflicting Labourism and reformism, setting themselves against capitalism rather than trying to tame or manage it, is not an excuse for sectarian isolation. Rather, it means that revolutionaries can most consistently and effectively respond to the aspirations of working-class people as they move into struggle and seek to show, through the debates that necessarily arise within common activity, the necessity of forging a mass revolutionary socialist alternative.

Joseph Choonara is the editor of International Socialism. He is the author of A Reader’s Guide to Marx’s Capital (Bookmarks, 2017) and Unravelling Capitalism: A Guide to Marxist Political Economy (2nd edition: Bookmarks, 2017).

Notes