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LONDON — Keir Starmer has been attacked for a lack of ideology; for leading a Labour Party lacking solutions of its own.
But with a U.K. general election looming on the horizon — and with Labour polling more than 20 percentage points ahead of the ruling Conservatives — the British opposition leader is now in urgent need of a policy platform ahead of his bid for Downing Street next year.
And lacking a long-term political project, or even a wonkish think tank, to call his own, Starmer is instead looking abroad for policy inspiration — and even tapping up ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair for ideas.
Aides say it’s typical of the pragmatic — if sometimes underwhelming — approach to politics that has typified his three-year leadership.
“Keir is quite evidence-led in his style,” one senior aide said, “so international models really convince him.”
Multiple Labour officials say shadow Cabinet ministers are being encouraged by Starmer and his policy team to look closely at the policies of progressive parties around the world that have swept to power over recent years.
Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson headed to Australia earlier this month to study how Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party pledge to make childcare more affordable might have helped swing his election victory last year.
Lisa Nandy, the shadow leveling up secretary, has traveled to east Germany to see how poorer parts of the country have tackled regional inequalities.
Starmer himself met German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), during a visit to Berlin. Starmer’s campaign director Morgan McSweeney has also visited SPD headquarters to discuss electoral strategy.
Starmer’s policy team is in regular touch with the German embassy in London as they weigh up the German approach to digital policy, and the SPD’s championing of causes such as social housing and raising the minimum wage under Scholz’s election campaign slogan aus Respekt — “out of respect.”
In the next few months, Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow business secretary, is hoping to visit Germany and Singapore to study their innovation and skills policies. And a visit to Washington is also on the cards to consider what Labour might learn from Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, as the U.K. party fleshes out its green and climate policies over the months ahead.
“Labour, when successful, always learns from its sister parties — learns about policies that work, and about policies and approaches and language to be avoided,” said John McTernan, a former political secretary to Blair who also went on to advise Julia Gillard’s Labor Party in Australia.
Another key Blair adviser, Philip Gould, had famously spent time working for Bill Clinton after he toppled sitting U.S. President George H. W. Bush in 1992, ending a long period of right-wing dominance in American presidential politics — before Blair repeated the trick in Britain in 1997.
Running out of time
For Starmer’s critics on the left of the party — who view him as overly-conservative in his approach — some meaty policy announcements cannot come soon enough.
“I do worry about how little there is out there [in terms] of where they would go in quite important areas of public policy at the moment,” said Andrew Fisher, Labour’s former director of policy under Starmer’s radical left-wing predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.
Fisher cited housing, social security and education as three examples where he said Starmer needs to start laying out policies now — because “not all of them will be easy wins, and [some] might be things that people need convincing on.”
“As of now, I couldn’t think for the life of me what would go on a Labour Party pledge card going into the next election,” Fisher added.
To that end, Starmer will attempt to set out the parameters of his general election manifesto in a speech in Manchester Thursday morning, setting out five “bold missions” for his Labour administration.
But a senior Labour MP, who is an ally of Starmer, said they were concerned Starmer still lacks a “ready-made political project.”
“His program is a standard, soft-left, social democratic one,” they said. “Nothing that’s going to shock anybody. But translating it into a narrative, or into a project that captures the zeitgeist of the moment the country is going through — that’s a much harder thing.”
“The question right now is who is going to do Labour thinking?” one SW1 strategist pondered. “Who is going to be the Rachel Wolf of the Labour ’24 manifesto? It is hard to put a name and face on it at the moment.” Wolf is the well-respected think tank veteran and political strategist who authored Boris Johnson’s election-winning manifesto in 2019.
In lieu of a think tank
Starmer is unlike previous party leaders such as Blair and the Conservatives’ David Cameron, who were closely associated with favored think tanks before they won power. Blair famously lifted policies from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), while some of Cameron’s closest political allies formed Policy Exchange as he began his own rise to power.
Even Liz Truss had the Institute of Economic Affairs — yet there has been no such ideas factory pumping out Starmerist policies since he became Labour leader in 2020.
Instead, aides say Starmer and his team are “taking policy soundings from all over the place” as they try to compile a program for government.
Shadow ministers and Starmer’s own policy team have been talking to a raft of think tanks including the IPPR, the Fabian Society, the Tony Blair Institute and the Centre for Social Justice. The policy team also speaks regularly to a core group of people who work directly in the NHS, while Starmer and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves meet regularly with Tony Danker, head of business lobby group the CBI.
Starmer’s big-tent approach, a second Labour aide says, is influenced by an unconventional route into politics — having run a major public service, as director of public prosecutions, rather than being a traditional “Westminster/West-Wingy type” who has been lurking in SW1 for decades.
“The most important thing to understand about Keir is that he isn’t a normal Labour politician. He had a career before politics, he has a hinterland outside politics, and he hasn’t spent his life tied up in Labour Party debates, feuds or theory,” said Chris Ward, Starmer’s former deputy chief of staff, who now heads up the Labour unit at the political consultancy Hanbury Strategy.
“When it comes to policy, he’s driven much more by his values and experiences. He tends to think in terms of whether a policy will work and what difference it will make to people’s lives — not which part of the Labour Party it came from.”
Officially, trade unions, grassroots party branches and other affiliated voices can also get directly involved in Labour policymaking, through the party’s National Policy Forum. But party insiders stress that in the end, strong leaders will usually get their way on key policy decisions.
And Starmer, famous to the point of mockery for his forensic approach to detail, takes a keen interest in the plans being drawn up by his top team. There is “nothing scarier” than being grilled by Starmer on policy, the first senior aide quoted above claimed.
The leader was on holiday abroad last summer in the run-up to Labour’s totemic call for a windfall tax on energy companies, but was waking up two hours before the rest of his family to go through papers each morning and ensure he was across the plan, the second aide said.
Starmer’s office is said to have worked in tandem with Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s team on radical proposals announced in January to overhaul family doctor services.
Back to Blair
Starmer’s immediate predecessors as Labour leader have been keen to distance themselves from Blair, who fell out of favor with much of his party after being prime minister for a decade between 1997 to 2007.
But Starmer has been less squeamish about talking directly to Blair about policy and strategy ideas, as well as to Blair’s immediate successor as PM, Gordon Brown. The Labour leader confirmed last year he holds regular discussions with Blair and Brown, noting drily that he was “particularly keen to talk to people who have won elections.”
Peter Hyman, a former Blair adviser, has even been brought into Starmer’s top team to help “tell the story” of Starmer’s policies, and has recently been sitting down with separate shadow Cabinet teams to look for a central argument running through their policy platform, a current aide said.
Hyman had left politics in 2004 to teach in an inner-city comprehensive school, eventually co-founding a brand new school in the heart of Stratford.
Blair’s old speechwriter, Philip Collins, wrote Starmer’s first in-person party conference speech as leader in 2021.
‘Oven-ready’ government
Indeed, it is the frustration Blair felt over what he failed to achieve in his first term in office that is said to be playing on Starmer’s mind when drawing up his policy platform.
His policy team is working up green papers that they can hand over to civil servants as soon as they are granted access to the Whitehall machine.
Notably, Starmer has recruited a cabal of ex-civil servants to his cause, including former Treasury official Ravinder Athwal, who is taking a lead on writing the party’s general election manifesto, and Starmer’s head of domestic policy Muneera Lula, who was previously a high-flyer at the former Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Tom Webb, Labour’s director of policy and research, previously spent time at the Department for Work and Pensions.
Starmer is also reportedly looking for a senior civil servant to be his chief of staff to help him prepare for the reality of Downing Street life.
“At some point, six to 12 months before an election, access talks will be granted between the opposition and the civil service — and Labour will want a reasonably firm sense of what their big ‘day one’, ‘month one’, ‘year one’ priorities are,” said Emma Norris, deputy director of the Institute for Government.
Time is running short for the Labour leader to finalize his plans.
Stefan Boscia contributed reporting.
