24
Starmer’s squandering of a historic election victory is a tragedy nearing its finale | Rafael Behr
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
24 points (100.0% liked)
UK Politics
4389 readers
260 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
One reason for Starmer's unpopularity is his consistent promotion of shitty policies: attacking handicapped people, gutting trans peoples' rights, pandering to Reform bigots on immigration, ID cards, authoritarian bullying of pro-Palestinian activists and protesters. None of those is an inevitable consequence of his being the PM, except in the sense that Starmer is making these unforced errors while he's PM.
Are you referring to the supreme court case? It wasn't Starmer, and it didn't gut trans rights; it said that it was legal to designate a space for biological women. Maybe there's something I forgot about though. I don't think this is making him unpopular though, as Starmer's views on the issue are pretty mainstream.
Is very popular and cannot be an explanation for his unpopularity.
A sensible policy but yes, everyone knows it's unpopular so this was an unforced error
Palestine Action should never have been banned. But Yvette Cooper did that, and let me remind you of the past home secretaries, PMs and governments who gradually made the law on protest more and more repressive, who oversaw much worse anti-immigration pandering, who said more definitive things about trans issues, and so on and so on.
I'm not saying that Starmer would be some wonder-kid in other circumstances, I'm saying that his unpopularity is absurd and utterly disconnected from his actual performance.
Yes it can. Reform voters see this move as disingenuous, so don't change their mind on Starmer, while Labour's base sees it as a betrayal so opinions sour.
I haven't seen those polls. It just doesn't seem plausible to me that all these Reform voters - most of whom haven't yet voted for Reform, what with their popularity being low at the last election are so beguiled by Farage that they don't believe any Labour proposal on reducing immigration. Those that are so beguiled... presumably believed Farage's praise of the proposals.
Remember what has driven the increase in Reform's popularity - it's high levels of overall migration, conspicuity of small boat crossings, and conspicuity of asylum hotels. These things have all got worse, and Reform's popularity rose on the back of it. We're not talking about dyed-in-the-wool cult followers here, but people who believe (wrongly in my view) that immigration is a massive deal.
To back this up with real data, this Ipsos poll has 2024 Labour voters saying 64% to 4% (yes, four percent) that immigration is too high versus too low. (23% "about right", rest "don't know"). That's 64% of people who voted Labour at the last election primed to like this announcement and clearly not so enamoured of Farage that they don't trust Labour to implement it. Yeah, some of them may have been holding their noses to vote Labour for other reasons, but nose-holders exist in all camps, so I think this is strong reason to believe that the policy is likely overall to be very popular.