Starmer's two urgent challenges after a week of unrest

By Martin Ivens

Swift justice has made hooligans think twice about joining the mobs that brought mayhem to Britain’s streets last week. Round-the-clock courts and firm policing have, at least temporarily, acted as a deterrent to more of the violence whipped up on social media by far-right agitators.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned that “if you provoke violent disorder on our streets and online, you will face the full force of the law.” As I predicted last week, the threat of civil disorder has played to the PM’s strengths as a former Crown Prosecutor. In 2011, Starmer called on the full might of the state to suppress copycat riots spreading from the capital.

Yet Starmer cannot rest on his laurels in such a disturbing outbreak that has shaken the country and its image abroad. He must address two urgent political challenges arising from the disorder. First, hooligans and racist agitators prey on real social discontents — their crime may, as he puts it, be “pure thuggery” and as such inexcusable. But there is a backdrop and it is no accident that the riots occurred in seven out of the 10 most deprived urban areas in the UK. Any Labour government will have to tackle economic failure as its core mission. And it cannot afford to be seen to dismiss how easily rabble rousers gained a grip on local communities in Labour heartlands — including those it boasted of winning back from the Tories only a few weeks ago.

Second, on the Right and in the twittersphere, a narrative is being propagated, most noisily by Elon Musk on X but backed by some Conservative and populist Reform party politicians, of “two-tier Keir,” who cracks down on the far right but is soft on left-wing extremism. No smoke without a lick of flame. In opposition, Starmer bent the knee to the Black Lives Matter movement not long after some of its supporters had broken the pandemic curfew and assaulted police officers. BLM voiced genuine concerns about racism in the police. More recently, although pro-Palestine demonstrations on London streets have mostly been peaceful, the police are also accused of turning a deaf ear to those who chant anti-Semitic slogans. It’s easier said than done to make arrests on the spot when policing a march in the tens of thousands.

Starmer’s politics, like most of his senior colleagues, are instinctively “soft-left” progressive. There are many more former followers of Gordon Brown than Tony Blair in his Cabinet — even his tough Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves voted for the Brownite Ed Miliband for leader in 2010 over his brother David, seen as “heir to Blair.” Yet it is from Blair, Labour’s most successful leader ever, that the PM needs to take inspiration. After all, it was Labour’s most successful electoral leader who came to power famously declaring that Labour must be “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime,” a formulation with broad national appeal, then as now. The state must be seen to be even-handed in enforcing law and order too.

Four weeks ago, Blair wrote a prophetic article for The Sunday Times advising Starmer to take a tougher approach to law and order and avoid “any vulnerability” on so-called woke cultural issues. He also suggested that the new government had to control Britain’s borders to see off the populist threat from Reform which “had pillaged the Tory vote … but poses a challenge for Labour,” adding “We need a plan to control immigration. If we don’t have rules, we get prejudices.” Back-seat driving from a predecessor is not always welcome, and Keir world is divided about how far to follow templates from the New Labour era and its tone.

But this is a useful period for Starmerites to study: A succession of Blair’s Home Secretaries were forced to address the problem of Islamist terrorism after 9/11. There were bomb outrages in British city centers that threatened to undermine community cohesion. New Labour’s strategy was to safeguard ethnic minorities from racism while reassuring the white majority that the state would hunt down the UK’s enemies. Blair’s government also made a crackdown on anti-social behavior a key part of its domestic program, albeit with varying success.

The alternative to addressing these concerns is electoral disaster. Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor, was a skillful machine politician with a powerful intellect, but he had a tin ear for popular concerns and was doomed in the 2010 general election when he was accidentally recorded saying that a lifelong Labour voter was a “bigoted woman” when she raised immigration on the doorstep. Thereafter, Tory governments also lost authority when they made extravagant promises to limit immigration they couldn’t keep. As former Tory Cabinet minister Grant Shapps said yesterday, Rishi Sunak should never have made it a key pledge “to stop the small boats” of migrants illegally arriving across the English Channel from France, a broken promise that came back to haunt him all the way to the election.

The voters don’t want the impossible, they just need to know that the government has “taken back control,” the slogan that delivered Brexit. It’s not a question of absolute numbers — the voters understand that skill shortages have to be filled with foreign labor — but of enforcing a “fair” system. Post-Brexit, the Tories also promised to “level up” Britain’s depressed post-industrial towns, where standards of living lag far behind those of the prosperous English south. There’s the outline of an agenda here for Starmer too.

Perhaps he will be a lucky general: Changes to the immigration system by the last Tory government will bring down numbers of legal migrants this year. That, and a rosier economic outlook, gives him breathing space to work on his own plans for border security

One Blairite figure at the heart of the PM’s court is ideally placed to tie the strings together. Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s head of political strategy, cut his teeth in politics taking on the fascist British National Party in his poor east London borough, Barking and Dagenham. In common with the deprived areas where the riots broke out this week, the borough was a cheap dumping ground for asylum seekers. Immigration numbers were high and there was competition for social housing. McSweeney focused on crime and working class patriotism to wipe out the BNP in the 2010 general election.

Working for Starmer as director of campaigns until the election, McSweeney set out to convince voters that Labour had abandoned the far-left politics of its previous leader Jeremy Corbyn — “Change Labour, change Britain” was his formula for electoral victory. McSweeney displayed the same ruthlessness with left-wing candidates and dissidents in the party machine as he had with the BNP.

The long game for Labour is to improve economic growth. Over the short term, the government will be on alert for more outbreaks of disorder. But in the medium-term, Starmer and McSweeney need a language of reassurance — not for white nativist thugs who brought chaos to our streets, but for the more sizable group of law-abiding but resentful voters who think the conventional political parties ignore their concerns.