Labour’s Coalition Has Shattered, and Starmer Needs A Theory to Rebuild It

For almost as long as I can remember, the electoral coalition that sustained Britain’s Labour Party has been fragmenting. Blairism, for all its successes, was designed as a solution to the learned helplessness of workers after their trade unions were smashed.

Then came the breakthrough of the Scottish National Party (SNP), largely among the Catholic working class of Scotland’s industrial belt. Then, as early as the mid-2000s, there emerged a white, English identity hostile to the cosmopolitan culture of the major cities. Then came — in its various guises — the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the Brexit Party, and Reform.

But by mid-morning on 8 June 2026, the Labour Party was facing fragmentation so profound that it prompted dozens of Members of Parliament (MPs) to call for Keir Starmer to resign, less than two years after leading Labour to one of its biggest ever parliamentary majorities.

Labour’s vote collapsed in Wales — a country where Welsh working-class identity and Labour identity had been virtually synonymous. Much of that vote went to Plaid Cymru, a left-nationalist party that wants the Principality to leave the United Kingdom.

Simultaneously, Labour lost iconic urban councils to the Green Party, whose sudden surge to 200,000 members under the leadership of Zack Polanski gave it hundreds of seasoned activists who had once backed Jeremy Corbyn.

In some Muslim communities there was also a shift to the Greens, over the single issue of Gaza, but also to a troubling layer of religious, sectarian “independents” who have mobilised against Labour on an overtly socially conservative programme.

Finally, a slew of councils in former industrial heartlands swung to Reform, with the right-wing populist party adding a layer of “respectable” community figures alongside the gallery of open racists and misogynists it routinely stands.

Labour under Blair remedied the disintegration of class identity and party loyalty by creating a “big tent” coalition: Muslims, African-Caribbean people, students, graduates, public-sector workers, and above all young working people with kids; the Welsh working class, a big enough segment of the Scottish working class to challenge the SNP, and the urban salariat.

If that, too, has now disintegrated, it is tempting for the party’s critics to believe that social democratic politics in Britain are over. According to this theory, the centrifugal forces pushing trans-rights activists to fight lesbian feminists, Muslims into hostility against Zionist Jews, young men into hostility to feminism, and the manual working class to wage war on “the lanyard class” — that is, the people on the other side of the desk guarding access to every public service — are too strong to contain in a single party whose flag is red.

The evidence for such pessimism is strong. Out of every 100 people who voted Labour in July 2024, only 46 stuck with the party in last month’s local and devolved assembly elections. Of the rest, 22 per cent went Green, 16 per cent Liberal Democrat, 6 per cent Reform, and 5 per cent Conservative.

And underlying all of it is the rise of distrust in politics and the state. Only 12 per cent of Britons answering the British Social Attitudes survey in 2025 trusted government to put the country’s interest before their party’s.

The main dividing line in politics is now age and education. Only 5 per cent of graduates vote Reform. Only 6 per cent of 18-to-24-year-olds vote Conservative. Even in a society wracked by economic hardship, stagnation, infrastructural decline, and poor public services, the main animating issues are around identity: Gaza for Muslims and young radicals, immigration for manual workers on low incomes.

Before charting potential recovery paths for Labour, it is worth recording why the previous attempts failed.

As I look back at Blairism and the “Third Way”, what strikes me is how important it was that the collapsing “natural” solidarity of tight-knit industrial communities should be replaced by new solidarities, based on community, social entrepreneurship, and a shared vision of “Britishness”. None of it really happened, or when it did, briefly during the 2012 Olympic Games, it was quickly eroded by the poison of cultural identity.

Keir Starmer’s remedy was supposed to be “delivery”. Focus laser-like on growth, crime-fighting, clean energy (the rhetoric avoided the word Green), good education, and a restored National Health Service (NHS), and the classic working family of the focus groups would surely reward the new government — and cut it some slack after 14 years of Tory failure.

But while Starmer’s ministers have delivered against a host of technocratic targets and social democratic values — nationalising the homes that armed-forces families have to live in, renationalising the railways, and passing the biggest package of workers’ rights for 20 years — they could not create a narrative strong enough to offset the growing enmity between religious, national, and ethnic identities, and between the poor and the state.

So the future of Labour, indeed its survival, depends on whether Starmer or a replacement can come up with something different.

Much of the blame has been placed on Starmer himself. He is a poor communicator. His decision to meet Trump’s insults and indignities by playing dumb has diminished him in the eyes of many who want to see Labour come out fighting for its values.

But Labour’s problem goes far beyond that. At its most fundamental — and this might seem perverse given the intense practicality of governance — this is a failure of theory.

Labour has no language and too few concepts with which to understand what is happening — to the economy, the polity, or a cultural landscape lit up with the rhetoric of hate.

Fundamentally, the left social democratic current Starmer and his ministers belong to — often called the “soft left” in Labour circles — has no theory of capitalism and its crisis. The right of the party did under Blair: Keynesianism has failed, neoliberalism and globalisation rock, we need to go with the flow and reduce the negative impacts on the poor.

But now that neoliberalism has failed, the party’s leaders seem incapable of describing or conceiving what kind of economy they want to replace it with. Instead, we have a bricolage: the neo-Blairites around the science ministry believe artificial intelligence and big pharma might save the UK. The traditional socialist left want more nationalisation and workers’ rights. Many Labour MPs seem obsessed with delivering welfare benefits to those whose stories of insecurity and ill-health they must listen to at every Friday constituency surgery. Meanwhile, those tasked with fiscal policy do so with their hands tied by pledges to avoid borrowing and raising taxes that look unsustainable.

From the sum of these parts, nothing greater is possible. Writing in July 1932, in the aftermath of a devastating general election defeat the year before, the Labour thinker Richard Tawney put his finger on the essential problem with the “soft left”:

“It is its lack of a creed. The Labour Party is hesitant in action because it is divided in mind. It does not achieve what it could because it does not know what it wants.” Labour programmes, Tawney complained, “are less programmes than miscellanies — a glittering forest of Christmas trees with presents for everyone”.

But in a period of stagnant growth and geopolitical peril, where economics is a zero-sum game, there cannot be presents for everyone, only generalised disappointment and anger.

I think there is a way back for Labour, and indeed Starmer — who now faces a challenge from the Blairite former minister Wes Streeting and likely from Andy Burnham, the successful Labour mayor of Manchester. But it involves theory before it comes to practice.

Labour must narrate, through both words and actions, what is wrong with the society it is trying to stabilise and the economy it is trying to energise. And that is quite easy if you are prepared to use grown-up terms from political theory rather than the euphemistic baby-talk of a speech written for clipping on social media.

The free-market model of capitalism is broken. The globalised economy is fragmenting into rivalrous blocs. We have become victims of Trump’s tariff war, of China’s industrial dumping, and of Russian aggression. To deliver anything like rising living standards and more affordable living costs, we need to adopt an economic model so radically different from the old one that it might not feel like capitalism at all.

And we need it to deliver up front: above all to the working families whose taxes are paying for an increasingly generous and impossible welfare system.

In a stagnant global economy, amid low domestic growth and high inflation, redistribution means taking from the rentiers and giving to the workers. That doesn’t just mean taxing hedge-fund managers and the platform monopolies; it means curtailing the buy-to-let empires of small landlords, capping rents, and capping the prices of energy and some consumer goods. Not tomorrow, now.

In turn, it means changing the self-imposed fiscal rules that prevent borrowing to rearm and invest.

But these are just the baselines for survival. Labour is, philosophically, deeply uncomfortable with the fact that a section of the working class has embraced white racist identity politics. “My voters are the salt of the earth”, Labour MPs routinely say, even as more than 100,000 people march behind the convicted racist thug Tommy Robinson.

Being prepared to draw a moral red line against racism, and against the criminal conduct of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, is an urgent task for Labour: it long ago lost the inveterate racists; it is now losing four voters to the Greens and left-wing nationalists for every one it loses to the right. As the right inhabits the territory of values, voters want the left to do so as well.

It is not about embracing identity and exclusivity. It is about projecting the universalist values that form the antidote to them.

Ultimately, the way back for Starmer lies in forcing this fragmentary, five- or six-party political ferment into the straitjacket of the first-past-the-post electoral system. Those who voted for the Greens in protest over Gaza, or over the desire for a more generous welfare system (the Greens barely mention decarbonisation, where Labour is actually delivering well), might be persuadable to return if faced with the prospect of splitting the progressive vote and delivering far-right MPs in multi-ethnic university towns.

Working-class families with no great hostility to the Tories or Reform might, again, be open to voting Labour when faced with the deep fiscal and financial-market instability that will emerge as the prospect of a Farage-led government approaches.

In Scotland and in Wales, Labour will simply have to reinvent itself as a properly separate national party. Starmer’s aides mooted this for Scotland last year but recoiled from the loss of control it might involve. Now, the creation of allied but separate Scottish, English, and Welsh parties seems obligatory (the party does not campaign on principle in Northern Ireland, leaving its sister party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), to do so).

I do not know whether Starmer will survive the coming challenge. I hope he does: it would be better for those who want to lead Labour in government in the 2030s to set out their stalls towards the end of the decade. But as they do so, I want them to return to the principle Tawney outlined in the depths of the 1930s:

“Either the Labour Party means to end the tyranny of money, or it does not. If it does, it must not fawn on the owners of money and the symbols of money.”

Starmer, still reeling from a scandal triggered by Peter Mandelson, one of the most dedicated fawners on money ever born, would do well to make Tawney’s words compulsory reading for everyone who wants to be part of the solution.