After an insufferably long election campaign, the Labour leadership race has come to a close, with the “soft left” shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer winning with a clear majority of 56.2% of the vote. His deputy will be Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary Angela Rayner winning the concurrent deputy leadership race with 52.6% of the vote in the third round of . This comes as a surprise only to the Twitterati, who have spent the months following Corbyn’s resignation convincing themselves that Rebecca Long-Bailey, as the natural successor to Jeremy Corbyn, was sure to win the contest on socialist policies. In reality, her candidacy was so weak it couldn’t even get 30% of the vote. It felt like the Corbynite left was simply trying to manufacture a new Corbyn campaign, and from my observation it all seemed very forced, like an attempt by a defeated and demoralised left to muster up momentum that it did not have and could not be found against the natural instinct of a brutally defeated party to distance itself from the movement that led it to defeat.

Naturally, the Labour left on Twitter has reacted furiously to their defeat, having been rejected not just by the public at large, but the majority of their own party. The fear amongst leftists in the Labour Party is that Starmer will turn the party back to the right, that is to say back to being a centre-left party, so in come the constant cry of “Blairite” and the performative chopping up of Labour membership cards by devoted Corbynites. What if I were to tell you that Keir Starmer isn’t going to continue Blairism? What many Labour supporters forget about Blairism is that, as was the case with Corbynism, it emerged from very specific conditions. Specifically, Blairism emerged as the result of the Labour Party under Tony Blair accepting the neoliberal consensus and becoming its socially progressive wing. In the years since Labour had been voted out of power, the political landscape has changed dramatically. Neoliberalism has since declined to the point that it is a political liability for any mainstream party, and rising to occasion are varying forms of populism both from the left (Sanders, Mélechon, Iglesias etc.) and the right (Le Pen, Salvini, Meuthen etc.), all of which share the following in common: rejection of neoliberalism and laissez-faire economics in favour of some kind of interventionist platform. Corbynism came about as a response to austerity (which Labour started under Gordon Brown), as well as the perceived failure of the Labour Party to adequately oppose austerity and the other injustices of capitalism, and their humiliating defeat by the Tories in the 2015 election, in which the Tories secured a majority for the first time since 1992.

So where does this leave Keir Starmer? What conditions does Starmerism emerge from? Into what field does the gallant knight Sir Keir stride into on a white horse? Well for one thing, he’s immediately saddled with the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis, which his predecessor handled so poorly that his instinct was to politicise the crisis, proclaiming it to be vindication of his arguments. Like Corbyn before him, Starmer faces a society battered by years of austerity, the consequences of which have been put into focus, only this time we have a global depression on our hands. However a few things are different now. For one thing it’s clear that the Tories will no longer be wedded to neoliberalism, as it lurches leftward economically towards interventionist one-nation conservatism, outdoing Labour in terms of spending during the crisis. These Tories, incidentally, have a commanding lead in the polls comparable to Tony Blair’s lead back in 2001 (just swap the parties and you get the picture), and their combination of economic interventionism and social conservatism will prove challenging for Starmer, a himself a left-liberal, to defeat.

Another important thing to note is that although the Corbynite grip over the party has undoubtedly been weakened, there is still a prominent left wing of the party that, if Starmer wishes to unite the various wings of his party, cannot be ignored, not least because Corbyn’s leadership has managed to drag the party to the left on economics, producing two manifestos that have been hailed by their supporters for championing left-wing ideas, with the 2019 general election manifesto considered by many to be the most left-wing manifesto in decades. On top of that, the 2019 general election saw an increased number of left-wing MPs elected to Parliament, and one of the new MPs, Zarah Sultana, openly denounced capitalism in her maiden speech. In other words, the political makeup of the Labour Party, both in Parliament and in the grassroots membership, is much more left-wing than it was before Corbyn took office as leader of the opposition, and this has predictably forced Keir Starmer to pivot leftward on policy in the run up to his election as leader, as demonstrated in a series of policy pledges in which he promised to scrap the Universal Credit scheme, support the Green New Deal, end illegal wars of occuptation and nationalise rail, mail, energy and water. As a matter of fact, it looks like he’s copied parts of the 2019 election manifesto but watered it down and excluded various parts of it. As if to further demonstrate his credentials to his party’s left wing, he even wrote an article detailing his “moral case for socialism”, but of course by socialism he means when government merely intervenes in a capitalist economy and maintains public services.

The problem with the Corbynite premise that Starmer will steer the party back to Blairism is that there is simply no going back to Blairism. Starmer himself already recognises this, and indeed he has actively distanced himself from the label of Blairism. As if to make a further dent in the Corbynite narrative, he has also made movements towards assembling a shadow cabinet composed of members of various factions of the party. Of course, for obvious reasons, staunch Corbyn allies like John McDonnell, Diane Abbot, Barry Gardiner and Jon Trickett have been excluded, and as of this writing only a handful of shadow cabinet positions have been appointed, but I think it would make sense for Keir Starmer to appoint at least one person from the party’s left, at least if he is serious about unifying the various factions of his party. Even if we accept the idea that Starmer probably wants to go back to Blairism, the cold hard reality is that he can’t. The neoliberal age is as good as dead, its demise effectively brought about by the coronavirus, with the new political consensus being brought about not by Corbyn, but by the Tories if you can believe it. On top of that you have a left contingent within Labour that is prepared for the possibility of a rightward drift by the party and is more than willing to pressure the leadership to adopt a left-wing programme. The climate in which Blairism could survive and flourish no longer exists, and any Labour leader that expects to lead the party to victory inevitably recognises this.

Properly understood, Starmer is neither a Corbynite nor a Blairite, and probably not strictly a Milibandite or Brownite either. Almost certainly he is to the right of Jeremy Corbyn, that much is in no doubt, but it is also clear that he is to the left of Tony Blair, who initiated privatisation of the NHS several years before the current Tory government did. He self-identifies as a socialist in the sense that centre-left liberals typically mean it, but in actual fact he is a member of what is called the “soft left” faction: Labour MPs who are neither Blairites nor members of the hard left. Starmer is in essence a moderate social democrat willing to make compromises where necessary.

Of the many things that stand in the way of Starmer’s chances of getting in power, the biggest will be Brexit. Now I am aware that Brexit is no longer a pressing issue in British politics due to us having already left the EU a few months ago, and because the coronavirus pandemic has superseded it in terms of importance, but before he was leader of the opposition, Starmer served as Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary, and as a matter of fact, he was one of the biggest advocates for the party’s disastrous second referendum policy which cost them the election. Starmer is rightly seen as a loyal Remainer, and thus many expect his party to echo the Europhile calls to rejoin the European Union, an expectation aided by his refusal to rule it out.

Now even though I fully expect a hardened Remainer, allow me to advance a different theory for how he might handle the issue. The great difference between Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer is that Corbyn actually had a certain naivety about him, and I say this in the sense that he had poor political instincts. With Keir Starmer you get the impression that he is a competent careerist, in the sense that he might be willing to do essentially anything that gives him the best shot at winning an election, and I have a sneaking suspicion that this could in theory come to the detriment of the hardcore Remainers. This theory is not without any sort of basis in reality. Shortly after announcing his candidacy in January 2020, he went on the Andrew Marr show and said that he accepts that Britain will leave the EU, and admitted that “this election blew away the argument for a second referendum, rightly or wrongly, and we have to adjust to that situation”. Several weeks afterward he took to The Guardian to call on the Labour Party to set aside the divisions over Brexit, stating that:

Defining people by how they voted in June 2016 merely upholds a divide that we must overcome. There are no leavers or remainers any more. In 2024 there will be no leave or remain constituencies.

Clearly Starmer is at least smart enough to recognise that Labour cannot focus itself on the Brexit culture war is it intends to survive as a party, and since Starmer’s election, other prominent Labour supporters have caught on to that, such as Ash Sarkar when she tweeted that “replaying last year’s culture wars — Lexit vs Remain, inter-factional headbanging — is a surefire way to consign the Labour Party to irrelevance”. Now the irony of all this is that Sarkar herself was a staunch Remainer just like Starmer, and on the same day that Starmer pleaded with Labour supporters to abandon the Brexit culture war, he called on the government to give EU nationals in Britain the right to vote, just as his predecessor did shortly before the election.

Either way, it will be difficult for Starmer to shake off the reputation he garnered during the Brexit process as being one of the people trying to stonewall it, something that his opponent Boris Johnson can easily point to. On top of that, this reputation is consistent with his current policy of defending freedom of movement (which the public at large opposes) and his continued calls to give EU nationals the vote as stated on his policy pledges. This tells us that for all his opportunism, he will likely be unable to adapt to the new political consensus of economic interventionism and cultural conservatism.

Whatever he does, however, I think it is quite clear that the Labour Party has no chance of winning the next election. Starmer will of course try his best to revive the party and secure its chances of winning the next election, but unless he is willing to make the big leap from left-liberalism in adapting to the new political consensus, his efforts will be in vain. Labour will remain an object of disgust for the working class, who will repay the party’s contempt for and ignorance of them by rejecting them at the ballot box. As it stands, the party is doomed to travel the path to Pasokification: it will meet the decline that previously dominant centre-left parties throughout Europe have experienced to the point that it will either die off as a party or remain unable to win an election for the foreseeable future.