It's The Centrism, Stupid

Centrist American political commentators are mystified that Keir Starmer's time as UK Prime Minister has crashed and burned. He did everything they wanted and everyone hated him anyway.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who lurched the historically center-left Labour Party to the political right in his tenure leading the party, resigned this morning. His approval ratings at the end of his tenure leading the country are historically abysmal.

Starmer embraced the right wing anti-trans movement, overseeing a ban on gender affirming care for trans youth in the National Health Service (NHS), he welcomed a right wing policy on immigration, consistently appearing to be a champion for racist Brits and not winning a single new voter from it.

"We risk becoming an island of strangers," Starmer said after introducing a white paper in 2025 promising to "take back our borders."

On culture issues, Starmer was the socially conservative hard liner that US centrists have implored the US Democratic Party to become for years. Economically, he was a mixed bag to be honest. UK newspapers are obsessed with culture wars even as much as US newspapers are, and Starmer did his best play to the approval of a small handful of failson editors on Fleet Street and got exactly nil political purchase from the effort.

This is the recurring story for Starmer's tenure and centrism overall. Centrists spend millions, write constant articles, and advisors are paid handsomely to tell center left parties that right wing voters can be won by tactically adopting right wing positions for hot, divided issues like trans rights and immigration.

This is a grand fiction. And Starmer proves it.

Starmer executed the usual centrist strategy and in the process he lost his own voting base without winning any new constituencies. In the UK's multi party system, this has allowed the left wing Green Party to pick up waves of disaffected former Labour voters. At the same time, moving his party hard right on immigration has allowed the right wing Reform party to lurch even further to the right on the issue.

Last week, groups of far right racists firebombed several homes in immigrant communities in Belfast. Starmer's weakness to stand up to the right and protect immigrants created the environment where those racists felt empowered to lawlessness. If "everyone knows" immigration is an inherent danger to British identity, then it covers all sorts of sin in retaliation.

This was Starmer's Britain.

Under the Starmer regime, the UK has transformed from an international safe haven for trans people to an international nightmare. The MAGA movement could only dream of implementing the nationwide restrictions on trans life seen in the Starmer's UK.

You can't bargain your way into defeating the far right. Over and over and over again, center left politicians in the US have sought to strategically soothe the anxieties of center right voters while punching left and over and over again, they lose elections.

One only needs to look at the Biden presidency and the Harris campaign in the US to see what happens under the Starmer strategy. Biden and other Democrats sought to outflank Trump to the right on immigration, introducing a bill that gave into to every right wing policy goal. Trump implored congressional Republicans to oppose the bill in an election year and Democrats tried to paint him as soft on immigration as a result.

In response, Trump took the policy concession and took an even more extreme position on immigration, the now infamous "Mass Deportations Now" slogan seen on hundreds of signs at the GOP convention. One nation's mass ice roundups are another nation's racist gang firebombings.

But if the next Democratic president tries to implement the pre-2023 Democratic policies on immigration, they will now face accusations of lurching left on the issue to an extreme degree compared with the failed Biden immigration bill.

This is the ratchet at work. Conservatives crank policy to the right, liberals lock it into place through compromise. But the center left voter base is tired of this old two step and it transcends parties.

The Harris campaign similarly lost its base when they first shut out Palestinians from the Democratic convention and then sent Bill Clinton to Michigan to extoll the benefits of our one sided relationship with Israel. And then there was the embracement of Dick Cheney, a notorious Islamophobe. She was wishy washy on trans issues and vowed to have the most lethal military in the world.

Harris's rhetoric in some of these matters would have fit in at a GOP convention and it cost her votes. While lefty voters in the UK can turn to the Green Party as an alternative, in the US those same voters will just stay home, as they did in 2024.

There's no evidence that Harris converted any voters with her centrist rhetoric, but there's plenty to show she didn't convince her own lefty base to turn out.

Ironically, the Harris campaign turned to a top Starmer advisor Deborah Mattinson for advice on how to win in 2024 and well... it didn't go so hot.

Looking at Starmer's downfall now is an opportunity for US Democrats to gaze into a crystal ball into their own futures. It looks likely Democrats will take back at least the House in the midterms this year, and will have decent odds to take back the White House in 2028.

Once again going down the centrist path is a road to unpopularity. If you're a politician in a center-left party, you should govern in a center-left way. Given Donald Trump's historic unpopularity, there is no excuse to hand it to Republican policies in any way. Don't listen to the Never Trump Republicans in pages of the New York Times, most of them still vote for Republicans.

And there's like 5 of them.

Just repudiate the right at every chance, and implement lefty policies that work. Right wing voters will never vote for you and there is not a moveable enough center to cede policy to the right.

Let Starmer's downfall be a warning against centrism, not a destiny.

Thank you all for reading! I am back from vacation, sort of! The usual Friday post will likely come on Saturday or Sunday due to even more travel!