Starmer can draw lessons from Labour's past

Now that he has been in the job for a few weeks, we might start thinking about what kind of Prime Minister Keir Starmer will prove to be – and in a more tribal political sense, what kind of Labour Prime Minister he will try to be. 

Every person who has held the office tries to bring their own stamp to it, but how will his time look compared to the other Labour Prime Ministers and what lessons can be drawn from their experience? The Labour Party was founded in 1900 and since that time there have been six Labour Prime Ministers: Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Each tenure can offer Starmer, the seventh, some lessons, if not always a model to follow. Ramsay MacDonald, a great Scottish socialist, was the first Prime Minister from the Labour Party. As Prime Minister he had to decide how to respond to the Great Depression of 1929, at a time when his party was unwilling to take the measures MacDonald felt were necessary to protect the economy from complete collapse. MacDonald’s view was that if such harsh measures were not taken, it would be the poor who would suffer most.

He provides an example of the hazards for a PM of having to choose between party and country, because faced with this stark choice, MacDonald split his party and became Prime Minister of a government dominated by the Conservatives. The price MacDonald paid for this decision was to be treated like a pariah within the Labour Party. To this day, the thought or talk of the split arising from MacDonald’s decision haunts the party. Starmer will certainly hope there never comes a moment when that choice becomes necessary, and will be mindful of steering the ship away from that danger.

This lesson about avoiding splits was central to the many Prime Ministerships of Harold Wilson. He however can teach Starmer about another, contradictory danger: the danger of playing it too safe.

Wilson was arguably a more electorally successful Prime Minister than Tony Blair. He contested five general elections as Labour leader, entering government as Prime Minister after four of them: in 1964, again in 1966 and twice in 1974.

Wilson was intellectually brilliant and electorally successful, he was a superb political tactician, a witty speaker, and was fantastic in the House of Commons. He was PM for eight years, and he left office at a time of his choosing. But what he had learned from MacDonald was the determination that the Labour Party under his leadership would never split under any circumstances. As a result, his time in office was characterised by caution and an unwillingness to consider big decisions. He brought this to such a fine art that he barely campaigned in the first referendum on EEC membership, a referendum he himself had called. And today, apart from winning elections and not splitting his party, most political commentators would struggle to name one substantial achievement of his. Keir Starmer should certainly take note of this.

James Callaghan succeeded Wilson. Callaghan never won an election, losing to Thatcher in the 1979 election. He is chiefly remembered for presiding over the infamous ‘winter of discontent’, when the trade unions rebelled against the pay policy of the Labour government, ensuring Labour’s electoral defeat. Starmer will be remembering this as one public sector union after another looks for a pay increase now.

But it is in another aspect of Callaghan’s premiership that there is a deeper lesson for Starmer, and can provide insight into what happens and what you might do (or not do) if you believe you have lost the argument. In Callaghan’s time, the major issue was how to control inflation. The belief in Callaghan’s government was that to do that you had to control the rate of pay increases through a national wage policy. Sticking to that was a key reason that the Callaghan government got into trouble with the unions.

But just at that time a new idea emerged on the political right, which was that to control inflation you had to have your Central Bank reduce the supply of money in the economy. This was the central idea of monetarism: that if you reduce the supply of money, there will be less cash chasing limited goods, and so prices would fall. There would then be no need for the government to control wages, which could then go up or down in response to market demand – but that, of course, would also likely lead to recession and rising unemployment.

This theory was of course embraced by Thatcher. What is less well known is that Callaghan had to some extent accepted the idea himself and knew that the approach he had been using would lose him the 1979 election. But even though he knew it, he could not change course, and so it proved: he lost. So Starmer may wonder at times during his premiership whether some things he is saying might not prove to be wrong in the end. Will he be able to change course while mid-stream?

Then, of course, there is Tony Blair. By his decision on Iraq, Blair tested to the extreme the idea within the Labour Party that they should never split. Before he made that decision to go to war, Blair’s tenure can provide examples to Starmer about how to campaign against your own party, how to keep yourself at the centre of public debate, and about how to broaden your appeal.

Blair was a master of what is called controlling the political weather – whether you agreed with him or not, people were always talking about what he was doing. Blair also campaigned less against the Tories and more against his own party. The creation of ‘New’ Labour was essentially a technique to attack ‘Old’ Labour, and so reassure people who would never vote for the old that they could choose the new. Starmer has copied this technique by constantly talking about how his party has ‘changed’ from when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.

Blair succeeded in campaigning against his old party but he did not succeed in a wider ambition, which was to unite the Liberal Democrats with Labour in what he imagined would be an unstoppable electoral coalition. If the Tories and the Reform Party re-unite their votes in the next general election, Starmer may well find himself returning to that strategy.

Then there is Gordon Brown. He is the Labour PM most like MacDonald: brilliant, passionate, and of course, Scottish. He was and remains intellectually a giant but not suited to many of the trivialities of modern-day politics. The question from Brown which will confront Starmer is: can you master both the serious matters and the trivialities of politics?

Finally, that leaves the Labour Prime Minister that every Labour leader would like to be: Clement Attlee. Attlee led the great Labour government of 1945-'51, which founded the National Health Service. His story is less an example and more a challenge: how to be both unassuming and great, and be remembered for it. How Starmer would like that. Perhaps the only way to do it is to save the National Health Service, which given where it is right now, might be as fine an achievement as founding it.