Could Keir Starmer’s Blueprint For Power Be About To Disappear?
- Will Allen
- Mar 19
- 5 min read
When parties return to power, the blueprints that get them there are usually found on paper, or in the datasets that fill party spreadsheets. The guide the UK Labour Party turned to as it pursued power was altogether different. For one, the guide it relied on didn’t exist on paper but halfway around the world, in a tangible political project. Over successive years, Keir Starmer has looked across the world to this instruction manual, weaving its directives into his party. Following this living blueprint for power has yielded remarkable success for Labour in the UK, returning it to power after 14 long years in opposition. Now, in government, Labour are once again relying on its plans to transform the UK. Unfortunately for the Labour Party, the model it has so often relied on could be about to vanish.
The blueprint I am referring to is, of course, the Australian Labor Party (ALP). For almost five years, the ALP has been one of the north stars the UK Labour party has looked to as it completed its long walk back to power. It’s not without reason, the two parties are and have always been strikingly similar. Throughout their respective histories, both parties have been the driving force of progress in Australia and the UK, delivering ambitious programs of change which have pulled each country further forward into the future. More recently, however, the two parties were able to trace their similarities to the ballot box, where they were spurned by successive losses - the 2010s saw each party spend the better part of a decade (or more) trapped in opposition.
This period spent in the lonely wilderness of opposition drew the two parties together, even as they sat on opposite sides of the world. In 2019, both parties were (again) crushed at the ballot box, and both replaced their leaders with two remarkably unremarkable men: Anthony Albanese and Keir Starmer. Both men were seen as a safe but boring pair of hands, who could steward their party back to power. These two uninspiring men quickly set about transforming their respective parties in remarkably similar ways: dragging each towards the centre ground, casting off radical elements, and promising to underpromise.
It is no coincidence that these moves were almost identical replications of one another. The two leaders had noticed each other, and were swapping notes and slogans. Where Anthony Albanese moved the ALP, Keir Starmer and the UK Labour Party followed suit. Always two steps behind, Starmer carefully watched each move, and slowly reshaped UK Labour in the image of Albanese’s ALP as it moved closer to power. Within a short space of time the two parties, thousands of miles apart, appeared to become one, promoting similar policies and speaking with the same language.
Last year, having faithfully followed its blueprint for power, the UK Labour Party finally returned to government. At the July election, Starmer once more modelled his party on the ALP - shackling his party to regressive tax promises and stringent debt rules. He ran on a platform of change, but produced a manifesto which promised almost nothing to voters. Unsurprisingly, this playbook yielded a result that mirrored the 2022 Australian election. While the Conservative Party collapsed and Labour won a majority, its foundation for power was built on a smaller slice of the vote than ever before. Voters spread their votes far and wide, to new parties, independents, and those on the left who produced detailed policy and decisive visions.
Still, UK Labour’s attentive gaze to its sister party down under has so far paid off handsomely. In just five years - using Albanese’s ALP action plan - it has rebuilt itself from the worst defeat in decades into a party with a vast majority in the House of Commons. Unfortunately, down under, this blueprint UK Labour has so often sought to replicate has slowly unravelled.
For all its success refashioning itself for power, Albanese’s party has stood uncharacteristically still in government. While there have been overtures to workers, a reworking of the tax system, and ambition - if you can call it that - to build more houses, make healthcare simpler and expand childcare, when you take a step back, Labor’s record in Australia is one of modest improvement, cooked up by a prime minister afraid to make any decisive moves. Apart from gambling on a referendum to enshrine indigenous rights into the constitution (which failed largely thanks to Labor’s unwillingness to defend the plan), Labor’s time in power is best defined by what it has refused to do. Again and again, the party has cowered in the shadow of its promise not to raise taxes, paralysed by a fear of losing voters, who have regardless turned the other way.
This tinkering around the edges has yielded little support for Labor, and in a matter of weeks Albanese will have to call an election - one that could very well end his party’s ambitions for the future. As it stands, Albanese and his party are on course to lose their majority, and possibly their grip on power altogether. Having spent three years in government, the party is now under attack from all sides. To its right, Labor is facing off against a Liberal-National Party that has slowly strengthened its position in the polls. To its left, Labor is fending off a collection of greens and independents who are targeting the party in its traditional heartlands in inner cities. As a result, Labor has been strung between two radically different political projects, and made no good choices.
After a term in power, Albanese has refused to decisively change the course his party has chartered, sticking to his promise to underpromise. Over and over, he has refused to revisit his out of date promises on tax and spending, and now, with an election looming, the clock has all but run out for Labor to enact the bold vision many voters expected. Rather than growing into government with confidence, Labor has shrunk from it, delivering an ever more blinkered vision for Australia. Albanese and his party can only hope to secure enough voters through small political changes actioned in government.
If Australian Labor falls at the next election, UK Labour would do well to learn the lesson that promising to underpromise is no winning bet - especially in a fractured political environment with parties circling on all sides. Looking once more to the ALP, Keir Starmer and his Party can unshackle themselves from caution and move with purpose towards a brighter future. The Labour Party can silence the intellectual quietism that has taken root after following the ALP and learn that voters expect governments to grow into government and drive change, or get out of the way. Such a moment will require Labour to go further and faster than it thinks it can, removing the arbitrary rules it has placed on itself. If the party cannot pull itself away from this faltering model of governance, the electoral clock will continue to tick down until disaster strikes.
To forge a path ahead, one that leads to electoral victory, UK Labour will need to unshackle itself from the failures of a blueprint that has tinkered around the edges of problems. As he heads into the future (with or without the ALP in government), Keir Starmer will need the courage to forge his own path of progress that can deliver change. To do this, Starmer may have to look to the Australian Labor Party one final time and take a bold step into the future.
Komentarze