Let Starmer Carry the Failure. Let Labour Carry the Renewal

That is not because Starmer is doing a good job. I don’t think he is. Nor is it because Labour does not need a different kind of leadership. I think it does. But from a purely electoral point of view, replacing him now could leave Labour weaker rather than stronger.

No new Labour leader is going to walk into Downing Street and visibly transform the country in the time available. Some of the government’s problems are self-inflicted. Some are failures of leadership. Some are the result of a brutal economic inheritance. Some are simply the reality of government: meaningful change takes time, often happens in unglamorous policy areas, and rarely cuts through quickly enough to shift the public mood.

The danger is that Labour replaces Starmer too early, a new leader inherits the same constraints, spends the next couple of years being blamed for not fixing them, and then arrives at the next election looking like the second failed Labour prime minister rather than the fresh start the party needs. Labour would not have one damaged leader. It would have two.

A better, colder strategy would be for Starmer to stay in place for now. Let him absorb the blame. Let the media, the opposition and the public focus their anger on him personally. Let the story become: this was a Keir Starmer problem, rather than proof that Labour itself has nothing left to offer.

Meanwhile, Labour should start elevating its next generation. Put them in visible jobs. Let them front the areas where the government is making progress. Let them own the policies that work. Let them build relationships with the public before they are formally asking for the keys. Then, closer to the election, Labour can make the break. Starmer goes. A new leader comes in with enough time to define themselves, but not so much time that they become fully contaminated by the old government’s failures.

At that point, the pitch has to feel like a different Labour project: more optimistic, more patriotic, more emotionally alive. It cannot be a reheated New Labour tribute act or another managerial promise to “deliver”. It needs to be a serious modern story about national renewal: Britain as a creative, open, inventive middle power with strong institutions, world-class universities, cultural reach, industrial potential and a future that does not have to look like managed decline.

That requires Labour to be much clearer about what it is for. And it has to begin with the emotional claim Reform has been allowed to own: Britain looks after other people better than it looks after you.

That is the story Reform tells, in one form or another. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes by implication. It sits underneath the anti-immigration rhetoric, the anger about hotels, the suspicion of London, the resentment towards universities, the attacks on welfare, the contempt for liberal institutions, and the sense that every other group has a claim on the country except the people who have lived here all along.

I don’t think that story is true. But it is effective because it attaches itself to things people can see. A lot of people who have moved from Labour or the Conservatives to Reform are not bad people. Many are not especially ideological. They are angry, disappointed and tired of being told things are getting better when the place they live tells them otherwise every time they walk down the high street.

They see boarded-up shops. They see betting shops, vape shops, charity shops and empty units where there used to be banks, butchers, cafés and useful local businesses. They see coastal towns that once had civic pride now looking as though they have been left to rot. They see former industrial areas where every promise of regeneration seems to arrive as a press release and disappear as a planning dispute. Into that gap, Reform offers its simple explanation: you have been forgotten, others have been put ahead of you, and Britain no longer belongs to you.

Labour cannot rebut that with statistics. It cannot scold people out of feeling abandoned. It cannot tell them that their lived experience is wrong because some national indicator has moved in the right direction. It has to answer with visible change.

This is where the next Labour project needs to begin: with the places people feel have been neglected for too long. Not with another vague regeneration fund, another logo, or another minister in a hard hat pointing at a laminated board showing a future transport hub. With work people can actually point to.

That means repaired high streets, cleaner public spaces, better buses, reopened community buildings, support for independent businesses, grants to bring empty units back into use, clinics people can access, markets that feel alive, maintained parks, public toilets, libraries, street lighting and youth centres. These are the things that sound mundane in a manifesto but change how people feel about where they live.

Some of this needs to happen quickly. A lick of paint does not solve structural inequality, but visible neglect creates political despair. When people live somewhere that looks abandoned, they conclude that they have been abandoned. Labour needs to make the first signs of repair impossible to miss.

The irony, of course, is that many of the things Labour now needs to make visible are exactly the sorts of things European regional funding used to help support before Brexit: public realm improvements, local infrastructure, business support, skills programmes, community facilities, environmental work and the quiet civic maintenance that made neglected places feel noticed. The signs with the EU flag on them may have been easy to mock, but they often marked something real: a rebuilt square, a training programme, a business centre, a restored public building, a local project that would otherwise have struggled to happen.

That is not an argument for re-running 2016. It is a reminder of what was lost when Britain chose to stand apart from European structures that had, imperfectly but materially, invested in some of its most overlooked places. Labour should be careful not to turn this into a “you voted against your own interests” lecture. That would be fatal. It can say something more useful: the old model has gone, and the promised replacement has not been good enough. If we are serious about national renewal, Britain now has to rebuild that capacity ourselves.

There is also a tax story here. At the moment, too much of the burden falls on physical businesses trying to keep local places alive. A small shop in a struggling town pays rent, business rates, energy bills, staff costs and local overheads, while large digital businesses can extract value from those same communities without contributing in anything like the same visible way.

The UK already has a Digital Services Tax, charged at 2% on the revenues of large search engines, social media services and online marketplaces that derive value from UK users. Labour could turn this into a much clearer political argument: if we want thriving town centres, we cannot keep taxing the physical high street as if the internet never happened. This is not about punishing technology companies for being successful. It is about rebalancing the system so local businesses are not carrying a disproportionate share of the cost of maintaining the places we all depend on.

Reform feeds off decline. Labour has to become the party that repairs it, without pretending every town can be transformed overnight or promising some twee market-square fantasy. The promise has to be credible and visible: these places are not being written off.

The NHS has to sit inside that same argument. Most British voters, including many on the right, still have a deep emotional attachment to it. Labour should stop talking about the NHS only in operational terms: waiting lists, reform plans, productivity targets. Those things matter, but they do not touch the deeper truth, which is that the NHS is part of who we are.

That is where Labour can draw one of its strongest contrasts with Reform. Nobody thinks the NHS is perfect. Everybody knows it needs repair. But the choice is between rebuilding a public institution most people love and allowing it to be hollowed out, outsourced and pushed towards an American-style model that very few British people actually want.

The same is true of welfare. Labour does not need to defend every part of the current system uncritically, but it does need to separate reform from cruelty. A lot of right-leaning voters would be surprised by where Reform’s instincts lead when you move past the slogans. The public may be sceptical of welfare abuse, but that is not the same as wanting people with serious disabilities, long-term illness or genuine need treated as a burden. Labour should be much more confident here. The system should be fair, and people who need support should not be thrown to the wolves.

Only once Labour has taken people’s immediate sense of neglect seriously can it talk honestly about Brexit. Because Labour still does not know how to do that.

The worst version is easy to imagine: “You were lied to. You got it wrong. Now admit it.” That would be politically useless. Millions of people voted Leave for reasons that were sincere, emotional and often rooted in real frustration. They wanted more control. They wanted the country to feel less remote. They wanted politics to answer to them rather than to institutions they did not trust. Labour will get nowhere by making those voters feel stupid.

But it also cannot keep pretending Brexit is working. The right way to talk about Brexit is economic rather than moral. Britain made a big economic bet on the shape of the world, and that bet has not paid off.

The hope was that leaving the EU would make Britain a more agile global trading nation. Less tied to European rules. More open to the wider world. Better able to strike deals with America, Asia and emerging markets. But the world has moved in the opposite direction. America has become more protectionist. China has become more dominant. Global trade has become more fragmented. Supply chains have become more political. In that world, being outside your nearest major trading bloc has made Britain more exposed.

The Office for Budget Responsibility assumes that Brexit will reduce long-run UK productivity by around 4% compared with remaining in the EU, and that both imports and exports will be around 15% lower in the long run than they otherwise would have been. Labour should not lead with GDP charts, though. Most people do not experience GDP. They experience prices, jobs, paperwork, delays, lost orders, weaker public finances and the general sense that the country has less room to move.

The language needs to be simpler. We tried a big national experiment. We were told it would make us more prosperous. It hasn’t. Britain is poorer than it needed to be, and some parts of the economy have paid a much higher price than others.

For people in London working in finance, tech or professional services, Brexit has often felt manageable. Annoying, perhaps. Occasionally expensive. But not existential. For manufacturers, exporters, food producers, farmers and smaller businesses trading with Europe, it has been much harder. If you make specialist components in the Midlands, sell cheese from Somerset, build machinery in Yorkshire, export shellfish from Scotland, or run a small business that depends on European customers, Brexit did not feel like sovereignty. It felt like forms, delays, costs and lost trade with the people closest to us.

A future Labour leader should be able to say that we are not going back to the arguments of 2016, and we are not asking people to relitigate how they voted. But we do have to be honest about what has happened since. Britain is poorer outside the European trading system than we were told it would be. The world has changed. Our economy needs a closer, more modern relationship with Europe.

That phrase matters: a closer, more modern relationship with Europe. The point is not to pretend the last decade did not happen, or to suggest Britain can simply walk back in and demand all the benefits of the old arrangement without the obligations. Any new deal will probably be worse than the one Britain used to have. We gave up a uniquely strong position. But a worse deal than the one we had is still better than refusing to improve the one we have now.

This is also where Labour can make Reform look smaller. Reform’s answer is to double down on isolation. Labour’s answer should be to repair the damage in the national interest. British businesses need to trade. British workers need good jobs. British manufacturers need supply chains that work. British farmers and food producers need easier access to their nearest customers. British families need a country that is richer, more stable and less alone.

Brexit was sold as a way to make Britain stronger. Making Britain stronger now means rebuilding the relationships Brexit weakened.

This is about more than trade. It is also about the kind of economy Britain wants to build. For too long, national growth has been imagined through a narrow set of places and industries: London, Manchester, finance, professional services, tech, property, hospitality, consumption. Those sectors matter, but they cannot carry the whole country.

If Labour is serious about renewing towns outside the great service-economy centres, it needs an industrial story that reaches beyond coffee shops, logistics sheds and call centres. That means advanced manufacturing, clean energy, engineering, climate technology, creative technology, medical devices, biotech, robotics, defence, public transport, housing retrofit and AI applied to real-world industries rather than just software companies selling tools to other software companies.

There is a skills story here too. Town renewal cannot simply be about beautification. It has to connect to education, apprenticeships, technical colleges, universities, local employers and new industries. If you want people to believe their town has a future, there need to be decent jobs within reach. Not jobs that technically exist somewhere in the region, but jobs people can imagine their children doing without having to leave and never come back.

That is where a better relationship with Europe matters again. Closer ties with Europe would make it easier for manufacturers to trade, for universities to collaborate, for researchers to work across borders, for creative companies to reach audiences, for engineering firms to plug into supply chains and for British towns to participate in an economy bigger than the domestic market alone. Europe is not a distraction from national renewal. It is one of the conditions that makes national renewal easier.

Once Labour has made the practical argument, it can start to make the bigger one: Britain needs a new account of its place in the world. This is where Labour has to reclaim a language of national pride.

One of the mistakes progressives make is assuming that visible patriotism is automatically reactionary. It isn’t. A lot of people putting up flags across the country are not doing it because they hate anyone. They are doing it because they want Britain to mean something. They want to love the place they are from. They want a story about the country that feels bigger than decline.

The problem is that the story they are being offered by Reform and parts of the Conservative Party is cramped and backward-looking: Churchill, the war, the Blitz, empire, standing alone, a version of Britain permanently lit by the glow of past achievement. There is nothing wrong with honouring courage, sacrifice or national resilience. But when patriotism gets trapped there, it becomes less about what Britain might become and more about defending a selective memory of what Britain once was.

That is how you end up with a culture war around the National Trust. The problem is not that the National Trust hates Britain. It is that it takes the country’s history seriously enough to look at all of it: the country houses, the gardens, the philanthropy, the art, the exploitation, the slave trade, the wealth and the violence that often sat behind the polished stone. A mature country should be able to handle that.

Labour needs to offer a more adult patriotism, one that does not sneer at national pride or build it on denial. There is another British story available: public service, libraries, parks, universities, the NHS, the BBC, local government, mutual aid, trade unions, scientific discovery, engineering, design, theatre, music, literature and law. A story about a country that has often been at its best when it has built institutions bigger than the individual, and then invited the world to learn from them.

Britain helped shape the industrial revolution. It built railways, factories, universities, civic museums, public libraries and municipal infrastructure. It also produced many of the movements that fought to humanise the consequences of that industrial power: labour rights, public health, social housing, universal education, the welfare state. That is a far richer source of national pride than nostalgia for empire, and it points forwards. If Britain once helped shape the industrial revolution, the question now is how it shapes the next one.

Britain is no longer an imperial power. It is not a superpower. It cannot pretend the world works as it did in the 19th century, or even the late 20th. But it remains a country with extraordinary cultural reach. British music, film, television, theatre, publishing, comedy, fashion, games, design and journalism still travel around the world. Some of the most admired shows, songs, books, performances and creative companies have been shaped by British talent. Culture is one of the main ways Britain makes itself felt in the world.

It is also one of the places where British values are carried most effectively. Not through ministerial speeches, but through stories, humour, language, drama, criticism, invention and taste. That is why institutions like the BBC matter so much. The BBC is not perfect. No national institution is. But the constant political habit of doing it down has become self-defeating. It is one of Britain’s most recognisable cultural institutions, one of its most trusted global brands, and one of the great nurseries of British creative talent. Writers, producers, actors, directors, presenters, journalists, composers, editors and technicians have passed through it, learned their craft, and gone on to shape culture far beyond these islands.

Defending the BBC should not be treated as a narrow culture-war position. It should be part of an industrial strategy for British creativity. The same is true of theatres, libraries, universities, museums, art schools, music venues, public service broadcasting and local cultural spaces. These are part of the machinery through which Britain produces the thing it is still unusually good at producing: culture that travels.

Our universities matter for the same reason. They are among Britain’s great national assets, producing research, talent and economic value while also projecting British values into the world. People come here to study law, medicine, politics, engineering, design, economics, literature and public policy. They encounter a liberal democracy, imperfect but real. They build relationships. They absorb habits of argument, criticism, institutional life and civic freedom. Many take those experiences back into government, business, civil society and culture around the world.

That should be a source of pride. Instead, universities have been dragged into the immigration argument as if international students are simply a number to be reduced. International students are not just a funding mechanism, though in practice they do help keep many universities afloat. They are also one of the ways Britain remains connected, influential and admired.

Immigration has to be managed. Communities need infrastructure. Housing, schools, transport and healthcare need to keep up. But Britain’s openness to students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and skilled workers has been one of the reasons the country has continued to matter. A confident country does not shut the door on people who want to learn here, build here, create here and carry some version of Britain back into the world.

This is the kind of national pride Labour should be reaching for: Britain as a modern European country, open, creative, democratic, institutionally serious, internationally connected, and honest about both its strengths and its limits. The next version of Britain will not be built by pretending the past can be restored. It will be built by asking where the country is genuinely strong now, where it can become stronger, and what role it wants to play in a more unstable world.

There is another part of this patriotic argument Labour should be much more willing to make. Defending Britain means defending British democracy.

For years, Britain has been too relaxed about Russian money, Russian influence and the way hostile states seek to shape public life without having to invade or occupy anything. This is not about seeing Kremlin plots behind every bad opinion. Labour needs to be careful here. Overclaiming would be easy and politically stupid. Underplaying the problem would be just as foolish.

The Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report warned that the UK had become one of Russia’s top intelligence targets, and that Russian influence in the UK had become “the new normal”. The House of Commons Library summarised the report as saying that Russian oligarchs had used business interests, donations to charities and donations to political parties to influence UK affairs.

Then there is Nathan Gill, the former Reform UK leader in Wales and former MEP, who was jailed for taking bribes to make pro-Russian statements while he was in the European Parliament. He pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery relating to activity between December 2018 and July 2019. Labour should not pretend this proves every Reform voter has sympathy for Putin. That would be absurd and offensive. But it does raise a fair question about the kind of politics Reform has helped normalise.

Why are the loudest self-declared patriots so often relaxed about foreign influence when it comes dressed in the right sort of grievance? Why does their suspicion of elites seem to disappear when the money, media ecosystem or political style comes from people hostile to Britain’s democratic interests? Why is the flag treated as sacred, while the institutions that protect the country are treated as disposable?

Real patriotism is not just waving a flag. It is defending the courts, the civil service, Parliament, independent journalism, public service broadcasting, universities, the security services, the rule of law and the integrity of elections. It is taking hostile influence seriously, whether it comes through money, media, lobbying, disinformation or useful idiots repeating talking points they barely understand.

Labour should say plainly that Britain’s democracy is part of what makes the country worth defending. If hostile states want to weaken Britain, they do not need to defeat it militarily. They only need to make people distrust every institution that holds the country together. That is why attacks on the BBC, the courts, universities, the civil service and Parliament should not be treated as separate culture-war skirmishes. Together, they form a pattern: a slow erosion of the things that make Britain governable, credible and free.

A serious patriotism would defend those things, while still accepting they need reform. A country which casually destroys its own foundations is not becoming more sovereign. It is becoming easier to manipulate.

The same patriotic frame can be used against Reform’s relationship with America’s hard right. Labour should be much more willing to draw a line between Britain and Trump’s America, and it should do this in patriotic rather than smug liberal terms.

We do not want American-style healthcare. We do not want American-style politics. We do not want public life governed by billionaires, conspiracy theories and permanent grievance. We do not want Britain turned into a tribute act for the American alt-right. That is the trap for Nigel Farage. Make him own it.

Reform wants to present itself as the party of common-sense patriotism. Labour should challenge that directly. Is it patriotic to weaken the NHS? Is it patriotic to leave British manufacturers with more barriers to their nearest markets? Is it patriotic to import the worst instincts of American politics? Is it patriotic to exploit the decline of struggling towns while offering little more than anger in return? Is it patriotic to weaken the institutions that make Britain harder for hostile states to manipulate?

Labour should not tell Reform voters they have been conned. That will only make people defensive. It should show them what Reform really means in practice: your NHS less safe, your town no better off, your local businesses still struggling, your country more isolated, your politics nastier, your public services weaker, your future sold as sovereignty while power moves further away from you.

Then Labour needs to offer something better than managerial competence, technocratic caution or another promise that the adults are back in the room. It needs a project.

Repair the towns. Rebuild the NHS. Reconnect with Europe. Defend the institutions that make Britain worth belonging to: the BBC, the NHS, the National Trust, our courts, libraries, universities, museums and parks. Back manufacturing. Fund the creative industries. Support small businesses. Treat neglected places as national assets rather than electoral problems. Make Britain feel confident without making it cruel.

That is the emotional territory Labour should want to occupy. The party does not need to become more left-wing in some abstract factional sense, and it does not need to chase Reform into performative cruelty. It needs to become more visible, more concrete and more willing to talk about national pride in a way that does not sound embarrassed by the country.

This is why replacing Starmer now may be the wrong move. The next Labour leader needs to arrive carrying renewal, not inheritance. They need to feel like the answer to the failure, rather than another stage of it.

Starmer may be competent at parts of government. He may be better suited to international diplomacy than some of his domestic critics allow. He may be capable of incremental policy work that matters more than the headlines suggest. But he does not create confidence. He does not make the country feel larger, braver or more imaginative. He does not give people the sense that Britain is entering a new chapter.

Labour needs someone who can speak to Reform-curious voters without contempt, to Green-curious voters without defensiveness, and to the wider country without sounding embarrassed by ambition. It needs a leader who can say that Britain has been badly run without implying that Britain is finished. Someone who can talk about flags without sounding frightened of them, immigration without cruelty, Europe without reopening every wound from 2016, and the NHS, the BBC, universities, manufacturing, science and culture as parts of the same national story.

It needs inspiration. It needs hope. It needs a leader capable of making people feel that the country can become more than the sum of its current frustrations. That person has to come from the next generation of Labour leadership.

So let Starmer carry the failure for a while longer. Let him absorb the anger. Let him become the symbol of the caution, drift and disappointment of the first phase of this government. But do not waste the time. Use it to build the next story. Use it to elevate the next generation. Use it to make visible repairs. Use it to prepare a more honest argument about Brexit, Reform, the NHS, neglected towns, British culture, British institutions, hostile influence and Britain’s place in the world.

Then make the break.

The next election will not be won by pretending the last few years have gone well. They haven’t. It will be won by separating Labour’s future from Starmer’s failure, while giving voters something more hopeful than Reform’s politics of grievance.

Britain does not need to be told it is broken. People know what they can see. The task is to show them it can be repaired, and then give them a reason to believe it can become something more.