Editors at National Review Online explore the latest British prime minister’s downfall.
Keir Starmer’s decision to step down as the U.K.’s prime minister will come as a relief to many Britons, including many in the Labour Party.
To be fair, Starmer’s fall has been from a height that was something of an illusion. Labour’s electoral triumph in July 2024 was less than it seemed. Years of Conservative infighting and incompetence had meant that the election was Labour’s to win. It did so, but with just over a third of the vote, barely more than it managed in the 2019 election. Labour’s huge parliamentary majority owes a great deal to the way in which Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system punished a right wing divided between Nigel Farage’s ascendant Reform UK and the flailing Tory party.
Labour was therefore never as popular as its impressive haul of parliamentary seats appeared to show. It sank in the polls within months, as the forces of political gravity took their toll. These were sped on their way by darkening economic clouds, Starmer’s grim indifference to his more sensible election promises, and the prime minister’s own style, leaden and authoritarian.
With his decision to exit, there has been some rose-tinted commentary about Starmer’s “decency.” That may be true of Starmer the man. We are not in a position to know. It is not, however, true of Starmer the politician. The government he led indulged in class warfare of the most spiteful kind. To take one example, under Starmer, the U.K. has become the only country in Europe to impose a standard-rate VAT on private school fees. That is bad enough, but to impose a tax hike that some parents (and thus some schools) could not afford in the middle of the school year was an exercise in cruelty.
Starmer’s government was infected by authoritarianism, perhaps most notoriously demonstrated in his obvious fondness for online censorship, curious in someone who rose to prominence as a “human rights” lawyer until it is understood that his notion of human rights was based on the ideas of a radicalized “centrism.”
