Keir Starmer’s Anti-Populism Is a Politics of Hopelessness

In Britain, populism is dead, or so claims much of the country’s pundit class. The Brexiteer wave has subsided, Corbynism has been crushed, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party only won five seats in July’s general election. Keir Starmer’s premiership, then, is said to mark a return to politics as usual. After a painful populist interlude, the adults are back in the room.

Yet, if populism is no more, its specter seemed to haunt the Labour Party Conference in late September. As Starmer took the stage in Liverpool, he proclaimed that British politics remained marked by “people who still hanker for the politics of noisy performance, the weak and cowardly fantasy of populism.” His government will, he insisted, take necessary tough decisions to remedy the economic mess left by the previous Conservative administration and move beyond the “politics of easy answers.” Throughout the conference, the message discipline across the front bench was clear. Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, only two days earlier prescribed Starmerism as the “antidote to cynicism and populism.”

This anti-populism is clearly a recurring theme in the rhetoric of Starmer and his allies. Why, then, in post-populist Britain, does populism remain such a fixation?

It has become a cliché in academia to refer to populism as a contested topic, with competing definitions trying to make sense of the notoriously slippery concept. Nevertheless, a growing consensus has emerged to define populism as a politics that pits “the people” against “the elite.” As such,…