(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Keir Starmer: What do young fans think about the Labour leader? [1] [] Date: 2024-05 It’s an overcast Saturday evening at England’s Glastonbury Festival in June 2017. A huge crowd has gathered in front of the Other Stage to watch the grime artist Stormzy, who is still two years away from being the first Black British solo artist to headline the festival’s main Pyramid Stage. The fans in the crowd wave flags and hold drinks – and they chant. Stormzy hears them and smiles. “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn, hey!” he sings. The crowd joins in, louder. The camera pans to a woman wearing a bootleg Nike top with the word ‘Corbyn’ underneath the swoosh logo. “Glastonbury, this is what it’s all about right now,” says Stormzy. In 2024, a rather different atmosphere surrounds Corbyn’s successor as leader of the Labour Party, former top prosecutor Keir Starmer. Starmer became leader in April 2020, yet still faces questions four years on about what he really stands for. His changeable positions and Foxtons-like demeanour have left people unsure, suspicious or hostile. Starmer’s personality, or lack thereof, may not have hurt his poll ratings – but membership has tumbled. During Corbyn’s leadership, the party reached a record 500,000 members. It now stands at 395,811, according to members of its National Executive Committee. Get our free Daily Email Get one whole story, direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up now A new biography of Starmer (whose title, ‘Keir Starmer: The Biography’, offers little in the way of answers) by Tom Baldwin quotes former leader Ed Miliband: “Keir is nobody’s faction. I think he is bemused by the labels – he is nobody’s -ite.” But is anybody his -ite? And what do his young supporters – the demographic to which Corbyn spoke so clearly – see in him? Bayley Dickin, a student at Keele University, feels that being a Starmerite is defined by a sort of realist ambivalence. “I like the man,” he tells me in a measured tone. “I think he’s done very, very good things. But I don’t think the term ‘Starmerite’ has any equivalence whatsoever with the term ‘Corbynite’.” What does he mean? “If you were a Starmerite because you envisioned some great saviour who’s going to make the world great and thought ‘isn't he amazing and infallible’, then I think you’ve completely missed the point,” he says. “You’ve got to meet people where they are; you have to be realistic, pragmatic. Sometimes that comes across, or is represented as, boring.” But he adds: “Generally, the direction he wants to send the country is the direction I think it should be going. I think he is a competent man.” This is hardly a ringing endorsement, but it seems Starmer is a man who inspires reluctant loyalty. “He comes off as a decent guy,” concedes 26-year-old Elshad Karbasi, a junior doctor who grew up in west London. “I think he’ll be a decent prime minister. I’m not going to say he’s going to transform the country, but I think he’ll be a decent prime minister.” How would he describe him in three words? “Decent” – that word again – as well as “normal” and “hardworking”. Public opinion research firm More in Common found voters shared some of these sentiments. The firm produced a ‘word cloud’ to summarise its results: words like ‘honesty’ and ‘fairness’ were shown in small writing, to denote the number of people who had volunteered them. The phrases ‘don’t know’, ‘no idea’ and ‘nothing’ appeared in a much larger font. Karbasi, who is heavily involved in the BMA trade union for doctors, joined the party in December 2023. He had previously voted both Labour and Liberal Democrat (tactically). His support for Labour, in part, is because of a hatred of the Conservatives. “I support nationalisation of the railways, gas, water, electricity,” he says, “but it’s also partly because I think the Conservatives have destroyed this country.” Most of the people willing to speak to me for this article were white men. I asked them to describe a typical young Starmerite. Picture this: a man in his mid-to-late twenties, in a professional career, who probably wears a shirt and has “glasses”. Probably “looks a bit like Sebastian Payne or Michael Gove”. He’s “quiet”, “pragmatic, patriotic and progressive”. Starmer’s supporters, they reckon, probably “go to Pizza Express,” drive a Honda or a Volvo, read The Observer at weekends and have The Times app on their phones. Crucially, perhaps, given Starmer’s ascent through Labour as shadow Brexit secretary, this idealised Starmer fan “voted to Remain”. Jake Swinburne, from Hartlepool, does fulfil some of these criteria, even if he is too young to have voted in the 2016 referendum. For him, Starmerism is necessarily defined not by specific beliefs, but by an ability to bring Labour to power. “I want Keir Starmer to be prime minister,” says the 21-year-old. “[Starmerism] is not even necessarily a political ideology – it’s more a series of attitudes and a determination to win and the appreciation that winning general elections is the only thing that really matters, because without winning, we can’t do anything.” Swinburne, who is now involved in his local Labour group, says growing up literally next door to Peter Mandelson shaped his politics, describing himself as a fan of New Labour, though he admits: “I had a bit flirted with Corbynism in the early years after the 2019 election, but just realised we’d completely messed up.” Realism also defines Swinburne’s position: “Starmer’s not perfect by any stretch, but he’s much better than the alternative.” Ciaran Tobin, a student at the University of Oxford who grew up in Nottingham, agrees that Starmerism is defined by its pursuit of power. “His main goal is getting into government,” says Tobin. “Keeping every single policy is kind of secondary at the minute.” For some of the people I spoke to, the thing Starmer is accused of by critics on both the left and the right – that he changes his mind too easily – is his biggest draw. “Changing your mind or changing position is not a bad thing,” says Karbasi. Starmer won the 2020 leadership election on a platform of ten pledges. This included a Green New Deal, nationalising “rail, mail, energy and water,” and promoting “peace and human rights”. Once elected, Starmer largely abandoned these pledges. He scrapped Labour’s promise to spend £28bn on green investment, has appeared to step back from commitments to nationalising utilities, and initially refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, almost going as far as to appear to be excusing war crimes. He is willing to change course, marketing himself as “flexible”, which his supporters praise – but those to the left of Starmer, such as grassroots movement Momentum, see this as a betrayal of the members who put him in power in the first place, or even an attempt to outflank the Conservatives. Those to the right of the leader, meanwhile, simply see it as bad governance. But not Lucy*, the only woman who answered my call-out for young Starmerites – albeit anonymously. “I don’t think voters are sitting there with tick boxes,” she tells me. “I think it’s more about an overall sense of direction of the country and [his] experience, rather than the 10 pledges thing.” She adds: “I think his commitment to compromise is appealing. He is willing to change course and I’m not against that.” Lucy, like many I spoke to, wouldn’t “openly” call herself a Starmerite. Her support of Starmer came off the back of watching her traditionally Labour supporting constituency, and family, swing to the right. “My seat went Conservative in 2019 for the first time in its history, and that was reflected in my dad's voting patterns,” she says. “I think he voted Brexit and Tory and my uncle voted UKIP.” Starmer’s embrace of what she believes are traditional Labour values – some that have been monopolised by the right – resonates with her. “Something that I really agree with him on is his stance on what it means to be a patriot,” she says. “Keir Starmer definitely has embraced patriotism in a way that I find really appealing.” Corbyn, she feels, failed in the way he communicated problems of class: “I think the reason Jeremy Corbyn didn’t appeal to enough people to win was that he talked about poverty and class in a way that was about systems and things being put upon people. He kept reminding people that they were poor.” “I think Keir Starmer has a better way of communicating class and workers’ rights and workers’ necessities without sounding as condescending as maybe Corbyn did.” There’s also an optimism, it seems, that Starmer may be more left-wing than he appears. “Some of those [ten] pledges we simply couldn’t afford to do,” says Swinburne, “and some of them I think we will see implemented but he’s just not talking about it.” Karbasi agrees: “He’s probably more left-wing… I hope that when he becomes prime minister, he’s a bit more relaxed and will steer the country in a bit more of the left-wing direction, particularly economically.” Perhaps this hope – or wishful thinking – is an attempt to rationalise policy positions that have not landed well with Starmer’s younger fans. Lucy, for instance, feels Labour should be more radical with its environmental commitments, and, when we spoke in early February, had struggled with Labour being slow to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. “I really, really cannot see why they’re not matching the SNP position on that,” she says. “I really find that difficult, especially with what’s going on in Rafah.” Labour has now called for a ceasefire from both Israel and Hamas, but has been criticised for doing so through its own parliamentary motion, which was less critical of Israel than the SNP’s original text. The ensuing dispute overshadowed the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in much of the British press. Labour’s mishandling of trans rights issues also comes up with a number of young Starmerites. In February, Starmer condemned Rishi Sunak for making a transphobic joke during Prime Minister’s Questions while the mother of murdered trans teenager Briana Ghey was watching. Yet Starmer seems fickle in his allyship, having dropped a Labour pledge to allow self-ID for trans people, and using the term “adult female” to refer to women – a form of words long ago co-opted as a slogan by anti-trans activists. His young supporters are also critical of his failure to expel MP Rosie Duffield, who has been investigated by the party for ‘liking’ tweets from notable transphobes, as well as accusations of antisemitism. The investigation was dropped, with Duffield claiming she had been “completely exonerated”. “I don’t think [Starmer] is a transphobe at all, but I think he’s been far too willing to let people like Rosie Duffield get away with things,” says Swinburne. Knowing what a politician stands for, and being compelled by their ability to communicate those beliefs, is a key part of politics. But when does a strong personality become a personality cult? Boris Johnson’s thriving fanbase helped lead the Conservatives to a large majority in 2019. It also resulted in a leader who seemed to consider himself untouchable, who oversaw a party mired in scandal and finally stepped down in disgrace. Nor is the adoration of a particular group a guarantee that success will follow. Corbyn’s wild support boosted the Labour Party membership and helped drive a huge electoral swing in 2017 – but it wasn’t enough to get him into Number 10, and the party lost millions of votes in 2019. Prizing personality over policy, then, may be a route to eventual defeat. But after all his U-turns, does Starmer excel in either category? Perhaps he doesn’t need to. Labour at the time of writing is almost 20 points ahead of the Conservative Party in the polls. How much of that is down to Starmer, as opposed to Tory chaos or wider economic factors, is hard to say. For his young supporters, it doesn’t matter: politics for most if not all of their living memory has been a story of corruption, poverty and scandal, and so to them “decent” seems good enough – for now. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/who-is-keir-starmer-young-starmerites/ Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/