The Labour Party is dead, and Starmer has killed it

There has been a strange refusal to understand the scale of Labour’s collapse. Perhaps because still, somewhere, it is believed that Keir Starmer saved the Labour Party in 2020, and because Labour is in office with a huge undeserved majority. But getting a notional national 17 per cent vote share in the local elections, is easily the worse share of the vote Labour has had in its entire history as a national political party. Losing Wales as it has, where it received 11 per cent of the vote, is no passing malaise.

This is not a sudden development. New Labour and Starmer’s Party has been losing vote share since 1997, from 43 per cent in 1997 to roughly 30 per cent in 2010 and 2015, the same levels achieved by Michael Foot. Labour lost Scotland in 2015. Jeremy Corbyn temporarily took Labour back to Blair and Wilson levels of support, but Starmer’s Party only managed 34 per cent of the popular vote in 2024 and has lost vote share at an extraordinary pace ever since.

Nor can what has happened be seen as the British iteration of a general crisis in social democracy. The revival under Corbyn was based on a social democratic programme. Furthermore, Labour has been losing votes to social democratic parties like the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. Nor did New Labour or Starmer’s Party suffer from a failure to communicate – on the contrary its message has got through very clearly, and the progressive electorate does not like it.

I call it Starmer’s Party for a reason. Keir Starmer keeps referring to “my Labour Party”, and indeed to “my government”. This is new – no previous leader claimed the party as his in this way, nor trespassed on the monarch’s headship of government. More than that, Starmer insists, still, that he and Morgan McSweeney saved the party.

Continued in the New Statesman 17 May 2026