Keir Starmer, the Rightwing Media Hates You. Get Used to It

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It’s almost a year since Keir Starmer’s Labour party won an electoral landslide by promising very little in a bid to appear sensible to swing voters. Its uninspiring approach was apparently worth it to beat the Tories. Change can come later, but first you have to win.

Except now there’s another battle to be waged. Despite securing a strong majority, Labour is now panicking about the rise of Reform, and seems to have spent much of its time in office mimicking its rhetoric and stealing its policies to try to neutralise the threat. Change has once again been sacrificed on the altar of hard-nosed political strategy.

Progressive voters who are unhappy with this worming around won’t be comforted to know that they aren’t Starmer’s target audience. But how is that audience taking it? While we’ll have to wait another four years to find out, we can stick a finger in the air by looking at how the rightwing media has responded to the government’s recent attempts to win the right’s approval. 

In April, under pressure from the press, Starmer broke his silence on the UK supreme court’s ruling on the meaning of words used in the Equality Act, telling ITV West Country: “A woman is an adult female, and the court has made that absolutely clear.” In fact, the ruling said: “It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word ‘woman’.” 

Starmer’s statement seemed to be an attempt to placate the ‘gender critical’ movement and media by straining the ruling’s meaning while also hiding behind it. In doing so, he U-turned on his 2022 statement that “trans women are women” and sided against his own LGBT+ MPs, whose concern over the public reaction to the ruling was exposed as a “plot” by the Mail on Sunday.

Still, it was worth it to take the sting out of a toxic political issue and bask in the warm glow of some positive media coverage in the run up to the local elections, right?

Perhaps not. Trans exclusionary columnists now seem to hate Starmer more than ever, not unreasonably questioning his sincerity. The famously feminist Sun commissioned Julie Bindel, who called Starmer a coward and demanded an apology to “all women”. “No guts, no backbone and no integrity … he must not be let off the hook”, she said.

The Sun wasn’t the only outlet that was less than impressed. In the Telegraph, columnist Allison Pearson fumed: “If he had any shame, the prime minister would have resigned last Wednesday”. Colleague Madeline Grant said the “shameless revisionism is hair-raising in itself” and that Labour “still cannot be trusted on women’s rights”, while an editorial declared it “too late to switch sides in the culture war” for Starmer, and that “Labour’s shamelessness on women’s rights is breathtaking”. The Mail Online framed his statement as a “humiliating U-turn”. Columnist Sarah Vine accused Starmer of “gaslightling” women. Meanwhile, in slightly more restrained criticism, a Times editorial declared Starmer’s response to the court’s ruling “slow and weak”.

All going well, then.

Migration is another issue Labour has identified as needing to “deliver” on in order to stem the flow of votes to Reform. 

In late April, home secretary Yvette Cooper overruled dissenting civil servants to demand that they publish data on the nationalities of foreign criminals for the first time. The decision followed campaigning by failed Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick. Within minutes, he was claiming victory on X/Twitter, saying: “The cover up is finally coming to an end. We’ll finally see the hard reality that mass migration is fuelling crime across our country.” He was also given an opportunity to gloat in the Telegraph’s opinion pages.

Still, with Jenrick’s victory lap over, the issue could be put to bed and another knotty political issue had been neutralised. 

Except it hadn’t, because over on GB News, Jenrick described the government’s move as “just the end of the beginning”, while shadow policing minister Matt Vickers said, “We’ve got to take it beyond what these stats are going to tell us and what we’re actually going to do about it.” “Is Labour trying to cover up the truth about the migrant crime league table in a bid to not stoke racial tensions?” was how presenter Patrick Christys framed the announcement, before a discussion in which he asked why we don’t get Sudan to “take back their rapists” in exchange for aid. We can all look forward to sober coverage when the Home Office releases the data.

Sadly for Starmer, all this pandering didn’t have the desired effect. Reform surged in May’s local elections, winning nearly 700 seats. 

The government’s solution? Yet more pandering to Reform. Last week came Starmer’s big announcement on immigration. While the left and liberal media focused on comparisons between the language Starmer used and Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech, the right were, once again, unimpressed.

The Sun could smell the desperation. “It could be that the government has had a remarkable conversion and now accepts that people’s concerns about the impact of mass migration on public services and our way of life are valid,” read its lead article. “Yet the facts suggest otherwise… isn’t it much more likely that it’s Reform’s surge in the polls that has changed his mind?”

The Daily Mail’s report began: “Labour’s plan to tackle spiralling immigration was last night dismissed as ‘laughable’ for not containing a cap on numbers.” The Telegraph produced a neat little rundown of “how Starmer has changed his tune on migration”.

Over on GB News, political editor Chris Hope spoke to ex-home secretary Suella Braverman who said “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, while a GB News article zeroed in on a small clause in the white paper which stated the government “will explore reforms to allow a limited pool” of refugees to look for work “where they have the skills to do so”, claiming that this means Labour is “openly inviting millions” of immigrants in.

It’s difficult to imagine that any level of pandering would placate the right’s rent-a-gobs, who, of course, are motivated by something altogether more sinister than ‘reasonable concerns’. An obvious but scary thought – and one Labour’s oh-so-smart strategists seem never to have had.