The Lessons Keir Starmer Should Learn From Sadiq Khan
The London mayor won a historic third term in the face of fierce opposition from the Conservative party, the press and a far from supportive Labour leadership
The Labour leadership sometimes acts like it is half-ashamed of London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
Speaking at the count of his party’s victorious new West Midlands Mayor, Keir Starmer rattled through a list of the party’s achievements in these local elections, which conspicuously omitted Khan’s historic third term victory.
The omission is not a one off. Relations between City Hall and Team Starmer have long been uneasy. During the course of his leadership, Starmer has shot down multiple proposals from the London mayor, most recently his call to be handed powers to impose rent controls in the city.
Relations between the two men were most seriously tested last year after the Labour leader spoke up against Khan’s plans to expand the Ultra Low Emission Zone in London, and effectively blamed him for the party’s defeat in the Uxbridge by-election.
Starmer’s call for Khan to “reflect” on the scheme, caused fury among those around the Mayor, who believed it would only deepen public opposition to the mayor’s plans.
Khan’s team believed, rightly as it turned out, that public opposition to the expansion would quickly fade once it was implemented and most Londoners realised they weren’t directly affected. They also questioned whether Starmer’s calls to delay ULEZ were merely a pretext to scrapping it altogether.
As one City Hall source put it to me at the time: “when do they expect us to delay it until exactly? Never I assume”.
Khan ultimately ignored Starmer’s public intervention and pushed ahead with ULEZ in the face of huge opposition from Labour’s political opponents and large parts of the press. Even when the Conservative party decided to run Susan Hall’s campaign as a de facto referendum on the campaign, Khan held firm.
The result was that Khan won a significantly increased majority in the face of a Conservative campaign of disinformation, outright lies and Islamophobia. His vote in Uxbridge, meanwhile, went up.
At the same time, London’s air will now become significantly cleaner, leading to the avoidance of potentially thousands of premature deaths.
Khan’s principled stance stands in stark contrast to Starmer, who in the face of similar opposition, quickly abandoned his own plans for a Labour government to spend £28 billion a year on green projects.
Here’s the big lessons the result in London should really teach the Labour leader.
Don’t Turn Away From Every Fight
The abiding characteristic of the Starmer leadership has been to back away from progressive proposals in the face of any serious opposition from the Conservative party and its supportive newspapers. We saw that clearly with the £28 billion U-turn, and we’re seeing it again with his gradual retreat from Angela Rayner’s plans to significantly expand workers’ rights.
The logic of such retreats is obvious. By making Labour as small a target as possible for their political opponents, Starmer has given himself a clean run to Government. Nobody looking seriously at these local election results should suggest that this approach is not working.
However, doing so risks longer term problems. As we have seen from the collapse in support among Muslim communities and the ongoing rise of the Green Party in these elections, there is a likely future in which a dangerous split emerges in Labour’s current support base. It is very easy to see how the Greens, or another party to the left of a Labour Government, would quickly start to cause them serious problems, just as UKIP, the Brexit party and Reform have caused problems for the Conservatives.
This is not about lurching to the left in the same way the Conservatives have lurched to the right in Government. The huge victories enjoyed by the Labour party this week means there is little prospect of Starmer abandoning his basic strategy.
However, there is a balance to be struck. Tony Blair’s Government enjoyed huge support in its early phases, not by conceding every fight to the Conservatives, but by winning the argument on genuinely progressive policies.
His implementation of ideas like the minimum wage, devolution and increased public spending, allowed Labour to forge a coalition between centre ground and left wing voters that kept the party in government for 13 years.
The risk for a Starmer government is that the one-sided nature of his current policy platform will leave him immediately vulnerable to attack not just from the party’s traditional opponents on the right, but from their left flank too.
Of course Blair did suffer similar opposition from the left in the latter part of his premiership, on Iraq and other issues, but the risk for Starmer is that such opposition is emerging even before he enters Downing Street.
Stand for Something
While it’s clear that the public has decided that it’s time for a change, it’s not clear that they understand what that change will actually be.
In focus groups, voters regularly report not understanding what, if anything, the Labour leader stands for.
“There is this general feeling that nothing works in the country,” the pollster Luke Tryl told me last year.
“But when you ask people about Labour, they say ‘well, you know, I’m probably going to vote for them because we need a change and this lot have blown it, but I just don’t think they’d do anything differently or I haven’t heard them say they will do anything differently’.”
Right now this probably doesn’t matter too much, given the cataclysmic collapse of the Conservative party. However, such low voter enthusiasm could quickly cause problems for Labour once they are in Government. Once it is Labour, rather than the Conservatives, who are in charge of fixing the issues that pre-occupy voters, their willingness to give Labour the benefit of the doubt could quickly collapse.
One way to avoid this fate would be for Starmer to actually stand for something. In general voters are willing to give leeway to their leaders in hard times, if they are able to articulate where they stand and the path they are taking to a brighter future.
One of the main criticisms of Khan’s leadership in London is that he doesn’t have much of a record to point to. I think this is largely unfair. Unlike his predecessor Boris Johnson, Khan has been mayor of the city during a long period in which the Governing party has been openly hostile to him. George Osborne’s decision to starve City Hall of cash, particularly on transport, has meant that Khan has been unable to invest in the sorts of big transport projects that were begun under his predecessor, but one, Ken Livingstone.
Yet despite this hindrance he has implemented a hugely controversial, and principled scheme to improve London’s air, while also freezing most TfL fares and continuing with investment in cycle infrastructure.
His funding of universal free school meals for primary school children in London is also a hugely progressive policy and the first effective expansion of the welfare state in many years.
It also stands in stark contrast to Starmer, who has already ruled out scrapping the Government’s hugely regressive two child limit on benefits, which experts believe is the biggest cause of childhood poverty in the UK.
Use Your Soapbox
When Blair created the London mayoralty in 2000 he only handed it a very limited set of powers, in contrast to the mayoralties they were inspired by in the United States.
The result is that incumbents in City Hall have had to use the position as a platform for other issues. For Boris Johnson, that involved using it as a platform for his own career ambitions. Yet for Khan, who does not appear to share such ambitions, it has involved standing up for things he actually cares about. Whether it was picking a fight with Donald Trump, criticising Corbyn’s leadership over antisemitism, or speaking out about Israel’s actions in Gaza, Khan has used the soapbox of his mayoralty to make his views heard.
This is not an approach that has been taken by the Labour leader. Instead, at every turn Starmer has appeared hesitant to speak up on any issue until it is 100% clear which way the wind is blowing.
We saw that most disastrously last October, where his initial unequivocal support for the Israeli government, in line with the Conservatives, led to his shocking comments appearing to support Israel’s right to cut off food and water to Gaza.
The result has been a major breach of trust between the Labour party and Muslim voters which could take many years for the party to repair.
Fair Weather Friends
Not everyone at the top of the Labour party has been a fair weather friend to Khan. The Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting has long been commendably vocal in standing up against the vile Islamophobic attacks made against the Labour mayor by Conservative politicians and their allies over many years, even in the face of severe pushback.
Such strength is important in politics. As Khan has shown with his willingness to stick to his guns over ULEZ and other issues, voters will ultimately reward those politicians who show strength, even when they might sometimes disagree with them.
Beyond anything else, that is the lesson Starmer should ultimately take from Labour’s historic third term victory in London.
There is a stark contrast between Starmer-Reeves and Blair-Brown in terms of preparing for government. Blair & Brown came to power with a wide set of minutely debated and fully formed policies which they proceeded to implement, in notable cases to excellent and long-lasting effect.
Starmer's only known policy is not to lose the next election. We do not need a Vicar of Bray as our next Prime Minister. For a start I don't suppose the notorious Vicar of Bray (qv) cared a jot about Europe was or that there is an economic law that says your most important allies must needs be your closest neighbours. Starmer has no such excuses.
Starmer has already betrayed the people of this country by failing to explain to them what a disaster Brexit truly is. My fear is that his entire premiership will be one rolling betrayal of his promise to restore our liberal democracy and the institutions, infrastructure and reputation of our country. Literally everything, including women and children in Palestine, refugees, and the entire green movement (which is essentially most importantly driven by our children and grandchildren), is a candidate for betrayal in his search for power. So patronising, and so stupid.
Starmer is weak and your assessment of his character is accurate. Khan has shown himself to be a principled and capable leader and therefore a threat to Starmer. For this reason, I am expecting the government under Starmer to somewhat undermine Khan in the coming term.