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Unpopular measures: UK chancellor Rachel Reeves, health secretary Wes Streeting and prime minister Keir Starmer launch Labour’s 10-year health plan, Sir Ludwig Guttman Health and Wellbeing Centre, London, 3 July 2025
Jack Hill · WPA pool · Getty
For prime minister Keir Starmer and his team of advisors, Tony Blair’s leadership of the British Labour Party has always provided the model they sought to emulate. At first glance, Starmer’s election victory last July appeared to be a political achievement to set alongside those of Blair himself. With 411 seats, Starmer had the biggest parliamentary majority for any party since the early years of Blairism.
However, on closer inspection, Starmer’s governmental project rested on much weaker foundations. His party received less than 34% of the vote in last year’s election. Labour’s vote share in 1997 was nearly 10% higher. Since the 2019 election Labour had improved its vote share by less than 2% yet its seat share doubled, thanks to the peculiarities of the British electoral system. In absolute terms, Starmer won fewer votes for Labour than his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn had managed in 2019. He benefited from the collapse in support for the Conservative Party, which was also squeezed by competition from the centrist Liberal Democrats and a new rightwing party, Reform UK (the former Brexit Party).
Since then, it has all been downhill for Starmer. By the end of 2024, the Financial Times was asking why the Labour leader ‘fumbled his first months in power’ after taking office with such a commanding majority: ‘No prime minister in recent times has seen such a calamitous fall in public support in such a short space of time’ (24 December 2024).
During Blair’s first term as prime minister, it was more than three years before Labour fell behind the Conservative Party in the opinion polls, and that was a temporary blip. Yet it had already happened to Starmer several times before Christmas of last year. Since the beginning of 2025, Labour has regularly trailed behind its opponents in the polls; the Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage, overtook both Labour and the Conservatives to become the most popular party in Britain during the summer of 2025. (…)
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Vicken Cheterian is a journalist based in Geneva
(3) The general election on 2 November 2003 unleashed a protest movement, but President Shevardnadze gave up power without a struggle.
(4) Interview with Saakashvili by Galia Ackerman in Politique Internationale, no 114, winter 2007.
(6) Only the rightwing opposition consisting of the New Rights and Industry Will Save Georgia parties qualified for seats in parliament, polling 7.6% of the vote. Since then the Republican party has broken with the ruling party and joined the opposition.
(9) See National Bank of Georgia, Annual Report 2005.
(10) Malkhaz Alkhazashvili, “Poverty up in Georgia”, The Messenger, 24 April 2007. In 2001 54% of the population was estimated to be living below the poverty line.
(11) Associated Press, 17 April 2007.
(12) See Moshe Levin, The Making of the Soviet System (Methuen, London, 1985) and The Soviet Century (Verso, London, 2005).
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