Starmer mixes it up

Global Progress Action was in London at the end of last month, filling Methodist Central Hall with politicians and think tankers of broadly defined ‘progressive’ politics from around the world. The event, established by the Centre for American Progress in 2009, was this year organised by the British think tanks IPPR and Labour Together alongside CAP. Last year it was in Montreal, a co-production CAP and Canada 2020.

British politics is famously cheap, especially compared to the US (the Labour Party spent a little over £30 million on last year’s general election; Amy McGrath’s failed bid for the US Senate in 2020 cost $94 million). So when American think tanks come to London, everything feels a little plusher than usual. There is none of the awkward or misaligned sponsorship that characterises so many of these events in the UK, where political newsletters may arrive courtesy of Shell or Palantir. Instead, import from America allows Labour’s policy world the rare impression that its conversations are self-justifying.

On the day, there was airport-style security, and everyone you didn’t recognise was the former prime minister of Sweden. In 1940 Charles de Gaulle used Methodist Central Hall to organise the Free French Forces; the first UN General Assembly was held in the building in January 1946 (it also saw the first public performance of Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat in 1968). Last month, Morgan McSweeney floated about on a protective cloud of staff as Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ played softly through the speakers and spads, psephologists and think tank heads chattered in corners. If you were there as co-editor of a little known political quarterly (not the Political Quarterly), people’s eyes would skip over your shoulder, in pursuit of someone more important to talk to – a former Swedish prime minister perhaps; it didn’t have to be McSweeney.

The main events took place upstairs, in the Great Hall (the organ was mostly blocked from view by the stage set-up). The timetable was brisk, with panels and conversations tightly packed throughout the day (proceedings had begun the day before with a closed-door affair for a more select audience). There was a mid-morning keynote speech from Keir Starmer, on notably poor form. It was the formal launch of his proposal for digital ID cards, on the grounds that they would made it harder for people to work illegally and therefore stop wage depression (he was seemingly contradicted by his own chancellor a few hours later, when Rachel Reeves said the idea that foreign workers depress wages is simplistic and wrong).

After the speech, Starmer mixed it up on stage with Anthony Albanese, Mark Carney and Kristrún Frostadóttir (who was introduced by CAP’s president, Neera Tanden, as the prime minister of Finland, but is, in fact, the prime minister of Iceland). Starmer is not really a man who can mix it up. A different kind of politician might view this sort of event as a perk of the job, a chance to be in the top club and preaching to the choir, but Starmer looked like someone struggling through an uncomfortable meeting. ‘You can have your own view on tariffs,’ he said. ‘You may think they’re good, bad or indifferent, but the fact is they’re here. President Trump believes in them, uses them.’

Political differences between leaders were evident not from what they said to one another so much as from who was – or rather wasn’t – put on stage together. While Carney, Albanese, Frostadóttir and Starmer had a fairly anodyne chat about delivering for working people, a later panel featured the former prime minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern and the current Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. On stage, Ardern used the word ‘genocide’ in reference to Gaza (as Sánchez has done) and said climate change was the biggest threat to her region ‘before the last US election’.

Further down the food chain there was more direct conflict. Lasse Ryberg, the party secretary of the Danish Social Democrats (in power under Mette Frederiksen since 2019), outlined the pivot the party has taken on immigration since 2018, guided by a desire for ‘secure borders’, the ‘need to protect our young girls in Denmark from social control within their families’ and to ‘increase and secure social coherency’. Denmark’s hardline immigration policies have increasingly been seen as a model for certain parts of Labour (the Red Wall and Blue Labour groups of MPs particularly).

The next speaker was one of Sánchez’s advisers, Diego Rubio. ‘We have a moral and legal duty towards migrants,’ he said, before noting that people moving is a fact of life and ‘every single pound you invest in trying to stop migrants’ is wasted. He predicted that closed countries will be ‘stagnant’ and struggle to keep their welfare states alive, while countries with more open immigration policies – like Spain – will grow and thrive.

Personally, I’d rather live in Spain. What Ryberg and Rubio have in common, however, which the Labour leadership lacks, is confidence. They appear to believe that their idea of the world is good, popular and effective. ‘You have to mean it,’ Ryberg said; the public can sense if you’re saying something ‘while crossing your fingers behind your back’.

The British government seems to lack faith in its own solutions. This stems in part from the failure of Bidenomics, which Labour’s ‘securonomics’ agenda cleaved to (and which provided the party with a rare patch of coherence and ideological drive, very little of which made it out of opposition). In the main, however, it’s a top-down, self-generated failure of direction and confidence; it’s Starmer despondently paddling his hands while Carney and Albanese seem at least vaguely happy to be there.

There is, however, a broadly positive lesson to take from the ‘global’ sweep of Global Progress Action, which is that to be callow and unconfident in power (and even out of it) is not the rule for the centre left. There are other approaches than to grit one’s teeth and accept the world as it is (‘I am chancellor in the world that we are in,’ Reeves said). Spain is managing both enviable economic growth and conversations about migration that foreground words such as ‘solidarity’ and ‘dignity’. There can be vitality in what social democrats offer, a sense that through governing you can shape that world and not simply surrender to it.