Who is Labour and what is the political ideology of Keir Starmer’s party in the UK?

Today is election day in the United Kingdom. It comes only a few short weeks after Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that he would dissolve parliament during a rainstorm in front of 10 Downing Street. The polls close at 10 PM, and the first round of results can be expected before midnight.

Who is the leader of the Labour Party?

The Labour Party, historically one of the two largest parties in Britain, is expected to achieve a significant victory tonight. However, they will have a challenging task ahead. The party’s leader, Keir Starmer, entered parliament in 2015 and has held his current position since early 2020 following the removal of Jeremy Corbyn. Before entering politics, Starmer was a lawyer, earning his law degree from the University of Oxford in the mid-1980s. He has a background in human rights and, in 2015, authored legal opinions challenging the legality of the Iraq War. Starmer is married to Victoria Starmer, an employee of the National Health Service. The couple has two children.

Starmer’s time as leader

Corbyn, who represented the constituency of Islington North for more than forty years, has been expelled from the party. Since Corbyn’s removal, the Labour Party has shifted towards the right, moving closer to the position held by the Tories, who have also moved in a rightward direction. Compared to Corbyn, Starmer is much more moderate, and after Corbyn’s ousting, a message was sent that progressive party members are not to lead on policy.

After the Tories defeated Labour in 2019 and Starmer was named leader, he has worked to attract Conservative voters. Starmer has made several public comments that mark this shift in the party’s politics. Late last month, he said his government would increase deportations and named Bangladesh as one of the nationalities that could be targeted under this kind of policy. Starmer attempted to walk back his comments by saying he was not talking about those seeking asylum.

Back in 2020, as protests took place around the globe after the police murder of George Floyd, Starmer shocked some members of his party by defending the police, labeling calls to decrease police budgets to fund emergency response professionals who may be better equipped to assist a person experiencing a mental health crisis as “nonsense.” As noted by Foreign Policy, these comments came shortly after news broke that “Metropolitan police officers had taken selfies with the bodies of two murdered Black women.”

In addition to his public comments, allies of Corbyn and more left-wing party members have accused Starmer and other Labour Party leaders of “purging” progressive candidates from their lists. Some members of parliament who were passed up by the party during this election have decided to run as independents, including Corbyn, who was barred from standing as a Labour candidate. This move, coupled with Starmer’s policy on the War on Gaza, which has essentially mirrored that of the Tories, has led to dissatisfaction within a section of his base. Polling data from YouGov UK shows that since the end of May, when elections were announced, Labour has seen a ten-point drop in the polls. Whether that has to do with the Tories running a more effective campaign or Starmer and party leaders failing to meet the moment, we won’t know until the votes are counted and the results announced. It could be neither, and Labour could outperform the polls. Time will tell.

What Labour plans to do to rebuild the NHS

Wait times for the National Health Service (NHS), Britain’s public healthcare system, have grown, as has the number of private contracts offered to companies to provide certain services within the NHS.

Labour has made strengthening the NHS a major pillar within their platform. The Health Foundation, a health policy organization, reported in October 2023 that the median wait time stood at 14.5 weeks, with “only 58% of people [...] being treated within 18 weeks.” The organization did not underplay the challenges, saying that addressing them “will require significant investment alongside sustained focus and effective supporting policies” and cited precedents to support the argument that it is possible to bring down wait times.

The party’s manifesto commits to adding 40,000 appointments daily to NHS calendars for two million more appointments a year. Additionally, Labour says it intends to modernize the healthcare system, shifting focus to preventative healthcare that can be accessed at the community level to avoid the current situation where people wait until a problem is life-threatening to seek treatment.