‘The grass may look greener on the other side, but it rarely is’

I have a rather unfashionable opinion, but one I believe is quietly shared by many other Labour MPs and members.

I don’t believe we should change Leader and Prime Minister. I don’t want there to be either a challenge to Keir Starmer (though I think he would win one) or, that horrible euphemism for political surrender, an “orderly transition”.

I don’t downplay the extent of our defeats last Thursday in the local, Scottish and Welsh elections. They weren’t just typical mid-term losses, they saw a catastrophic wipeout in some of our historic heartlands. They could have been even worse, the record-breaking 1,496 seat losses were 500 below the most extreme scenarios predicted by academics and pollsters. But that is no comfort to the 1,496 Labour councillors who lost roles they cared passionately about through no fault of their own, many of them my friends and allies for decades. Nor to CLPs in former strongholds from Hackney to Sunderland to the Rhondda who now join my own North Durham in fearing they are on the road to becoming Labour’s “land of lost content”, to quote Houseman: 

“the happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”

Keir Starmer is not perfect, he has made political mistakes, he is unpopular with voters, but the idea that he is personally solely responsible for losses on this scale and that bundling him off the stage and replacing him with any of the good colleagues whose names are being bandied about would have prevented this defeat or would somehow magically restore Labour’s electoral fortunes, is an escapist fantasy.

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Any other Labour leader would face the same unprecedented electoral challenge, with Reform as insurgent populists on the right chewing through our “old core vote”,  the working class in industrial and post-industrial Britain, and the Greens doing the same to our “new core vote”, young people, the progressive middle classes and ethnic minority voters in the big cities and university towns. There is probably a common interest among all those voters in having the cost-of-living crisis addressed and public services restored after years of Tory cuts, but they have diametrically opposite views on the very high salience issue of migration, and to a lesser extent on the balance to be struck between net zero and reindustrialisation. That’s assuming the hugely divisive issue of the UK’s relationship with Europe doesn’t rise up the political agenda again. 

Keir Starmer did manage to create a coalition in 2024 that included not just these two flanks of our potential support but also former Tories in places we had never won before, from Cornwall to rural Suffolk, and winning back our lost Scottish bastions from the SNP. Gordon Brown couldn’t do that. Ed Miliband couldn’t do that. Jeremy Corbyn certainly couldn’t do that. It wasn’t easy or an inevitable byproduct of Tory unpopularity. If we could just conjure up a 411 seat landslide every time the Tories were unpopular we would be laughing. Keir is only the second Labour leader in my lifetime to win any kind of sustainable working majority, and only the fourth Labour leader to do that in our entire history. Many of the colleagues who are writing him off only owe their seats in Parliament to his efforts, those of Rachel Reeves, and the tactical and strategic genius of the much-demonised Morgan McSweeney. 

He managed this having turned around the most extreme of inheritances, a Labour Party down to just 202 MPs, its worst performance since 1935, morally compromised by antisemitism, financially ruined, organisationally hollowed out, and with every appearance in 2020 of being an ungovernable mess of factional infighting.

In government, whilst the mistakes the public hold against us have been few but extremely damaging, the many policies we have already driven through are things any Labour Government would be proud of: rail and steel nationalisation, a massive extension of workers’ rights and renters’ rights, higher minimum wage, benefits and pensions, lifting the two child cap to reduce child poverty, Pride in Place funding for deprived communities, breakfast clubs, in-school nurseries, trade deals around the world, fairer funding for councils, staying out of the war in Iran…

I’m not saying this because the achievements of the past should mean we forgive the failings of the present, but because no one should ever underestimate the determination, steel and ability to deliver of the current incumbent Labour Prime Minister.

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Any other Labour leader would have to deal with the same series of policy dilemmas that are putting the British state under immense pressure and making it so difficult for us to hold our electoral coalition together. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. A US President who is unpredictable and threatens to tear up every post-WW2 foreign policy certainty. A military threat from Russia that requires rapid and extremely expensive rearmament. Climate Change. The economic impact of Brexit and Covid. Inherited ruinous levels of government borrowing and debt repayments. Crumbling public services. A deeply unequal society. Unaffordable housing and energy. Spiralling welfare budgets. Immigration that was not controlled by the Tories, whether that was the legal “Boris wave” or the illegal small boat crossings. Cost of living pressures that mean people are miserable, afraid and angry.

Anyone that says they have easy policy answers, easy ways to square these circles, or can sell the difficult answers with better comms – all without alienating any of the voters we need to secure re-election – isn’t a serious enough person to be put in Number 10.

And leadership speculation and contests come with a price tag attached, as we know from watching the Tories go through a rotating cast of PMs and senior ministers. Rancour and infighting that leave embittered sacked ministers plotting a comeback on the backbenches. Bond market jitters about political instability and lack of fiscal seriousness that drive up the cost of borrowing and reduce what we can spend on public services. Precious months, with little government decision-making possible, wasted on a contest or on a lame duck PM waiting out the arrival, via an incredibly difficult to win byelection, of the king-over-the-water, for that “orderly transition” (which assumes no one else is ambitious too, has 81 PLP allies, and forces a contest). Months more wasted while new ministers and SPADs get to grip with new departments with the same old policy problems. Relationships ruined. Divisions deepened. The public perception of politicians as backstabbing gameplayers focused on their own careers strengthened even more.

The grass may look greener on the other side, but it rarely is, and the wall you need to climb over to get there is strewn with razor wire and broken glass.

We are less than two years into a Labour government elected with a huge parliamentary mandate and a huge public desire for dramatic political and economic change. Let’s not focus on swapping out our Prime Minister in the vain hope of a poll bounce, which will either need to be used on an immediate election (which even if we win it, won’t see 411 of us coming back) or will dissipate just like it did when Brown replaced Blair in 2007. Instead let’s  work together with Keir to deliver that change and implement our manifesto. If we deliver a better life for the people of our constituencies, Labour’s best days in North Durham or any other constituency in the country remain ahead of us.

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