While the war in Iran has diverted public attention away from the Labour Party’s continued failures, it won’t last long. Interest in the Government’s continuing scandals and broken promises will soon pick up and Starmer will pay the price. Despite the Prime Minister siding with public opinion over the war, this strategy will not boost his popularity, or Labour’s, in the long run.
The war against Iran is good news for Sir Keir Starmer in only one meaningful respect: it has reduced public attention on Labour’s domestic pathologies, infighting and betrayals.
Front pages, TV bulletins and social media that were chock-a-block with tales of leadership challenges and failed policies have rightly focused more on the war against Iran in recent weeks, the greatest, most significant development in global geopolitics since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Given that almost all domestic news is bad news for Labour, this has granted the Prime Minister a breather.
One scandal that has yet to fully capture the public’s imagination as a result of the war is the extraordinarily fishy tale of how Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s erstwhile right-hand man, suffered the theft of his mobile phone. We are told that it was taken from him last October, and that key messages pertaining to Starmer’s catastrophic appointment of Lord Mandelson as US ambassador have gone missing.
All too conveniently, they were not backed up. The police recorded the wrong address at first, and the theft wasn’t treated as a vital loss from a key Government figure.
It is equally absurd that Lord Mandelson is only now going to be asked to hand over messages from his personal phone. Does anybody really believe that only official accounts are relevant in such situations?
The Government has been fortunate with the timing of the war, but this run of luck won’t last. Its inability to get anything right, its remarkable susceptibility to scandal, the low quality of its top personnel, its record of abject failure, its endless broken promises and its congenital inability to tell the truth will return to view as public focus on the war diminishes.
I’m equally sceptical about how much Starmer’s actual approach to the war has helped him. We are supposed to believe that his attempts at clumsily standing up to Donald Trump has benefited him, but I can’t detect any of that in overall voting intention polling.
Yes, Nigel Farage is close to the unpopular Donald Trump, but I’m not sure that is as important to Reform’s recent slippage in the polls than the slight reduction in the salience of the migration crisis, the main driver of that party’s popularity. The politics of migration is seasonally correlated. More illegal immigrants make the journey in small boats when the weather is warm, so even that might change soon.
Starmer’s unusual alignment with public opinion over the war will not help him much (I regret that more people in the UK aren’t supportive of what Trump and Netanyahu are seeking to achieve). Any positive effect will be largely cancelled out by other factors.
The first is that Reform supporters are the most pro-Trump, and therefore are less likely to switch sides because of this war. Their degree of support should not be exaggerated, but many Reform voters like Trump’s style and crave the idea of a high-energy populist leader committed to rebooting the UK. They also care about tackling Islamist extremism. Trump fans represent a smallish minority of UK voters but account for a big chunk of Reform voters.
This spills over to other attitudes, as a poll by More in Common confirms. Reform voters are the most likely to support Israel and the US (with 44 per cent stating that they sympathise more with their side), against four per cent whose sympathies lie more with the Iranians. The rest are split between backing neither side (34 per cent, a good proxy for a more isolationist sentiment), supporting both equally or being not sure. For the Tories, support for Israel and the US is at 28 per cent, against seven per cent for Iran. For Labour, it is 16 per cent versus 14 per cent, the Lib Dems 10 per cent versus 15 per cent and the Greens – shockingly but not surprisingly – just four per cent support Israel and the US and 38 per cent support the barbaric, Islamist regime.
All of this limits the boost to Labour from the overall unpopularity of this war, and will also limit the hit to Reform. Green supporters are now so extreme that they are unlikely to find Starmer’s cautious, often contradictory approach to the conflict convincing. They will dislike the fact that the UK is quietly helping out in the Middle East, shooting down drones. Few, if any, Green or Lib Dem voters will switch back to Starmer.
The second reason why I’m sceptical that his position on the Iranian regime will sustainably help Starmer is that the economic impact from the conflict will be bad for Britain, and that voters ultimately blame their leaders, not foreigners, for problems at home.
The Tories were largely held responsible for the cost of living hammering from the Ukraine war, even though Vladimir Putin, a bloodthirsty tyrant, was the real guilty party.
It is possible, as I do, to support the US-Israeli war against the Iranian regime while accepting that there will be a hit to the global economy; the key now is for the US to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Regardless of whether they succeed in doing so, the reduction in the available supply of oil, gas and some other products will push prices up and inflict great damage on the economy.
Ominously, the OECD believes Britain will be hurt by more than any of the other G20 economies, with growth down to 0.7 per cent in 2026 and inflation at four per cent. This will punch a large hole in Rachel Reeves’s public finances, exacerbate the cost of living crisis, lead to declining real wages and possibly even higher taxes. It will be a disaster for the Government, especially given that Reform and the Tories will be able to argue that Ed Miliband’s deranged energy and net zero policies have dramatically exacerbated the impact.
For all of the short-term anti-US and anti-Israel sentiment whipped up by demagogues, this war will continue the shift rightwards on matters of energy, net zero, resilience and defence, damaging Labour and helping Reform and the Tories.
Starmer has also proved himself to be an incorrigible welfarist, further confirming to centre-Right voters that he isn’t up to the job. Why is the Government even discussing some sort of energy bailout? It is true that Reeves has deliberately tried to limit the scope of any of this, but her response – price controls and unfairly blaming businesses for “price-gouging – simply confirms her deepseated socialistic vision.
The minimum wage is at an all-time high and welfare payments have increased. The point of such a generous safety net is that consumers are already being protected from shocks. Yes, an exceptionally large increase in energy prices that threatened to bankrupt millions would need an emergency assistance package. But for now, we should not be discussing yet more handouts, and Labour should not be weaponising a wartime price shock to further undermine capitalism. My prediction: this war won’t save Starmer from the mother of all reckonings.
Comments
Post a Comment