Transcript : Britain Floundering Labor Party Is a Warning to U . S Dems

newrepublic.com · Feb 20, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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This is a lightly edited transcript of the February 19 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: This is The New Republic show Right Now I’m the host, Perry Bacon, and I’m honored to be joined this morning by Toby Buckle. He’s a writer for, among other outlets, Liberal Currents, and of course The New Republic. He’s based in Scotland, and he’s published a lot of pieces both about American politics but also about British politics and connections between those two entities. We’re going to talk about some parallels between what the Labour Party in Britain is doing and what is happening in the Democratic Party in the U.S. and some comparisons and some analogies and so on. So, Toby, thanks for joining me. Welcome.Toby Buckle: Cheers, Perry. I should say I was a pretty devout listener to FiveThirtyEight back in the day. I used to do every podcast every week for a bit. So it’s a pleasure to actually meet you.Bacon: Great to meet you too. Those were good times. And those guys, just for a plug, I think Galen Druke is now doing a podcast of his own, and Nate Silver comes over from time to time. They’re doing a great job there.I assume our audience is not experts in British politics, but I think a lot of things happening in British politics are worth thinking about in terms of America, comparing it to. So I want to talk about the current prime minister of Britain, named Keir Starmer, and he’s sort of governing in a center-left direction. I want to talk about that a little bit, but talk about first how he got there, the person he replaced. How did he become the head of the Labour Party?Buckle: Yeah. Cool. So we’re coming out of a very long period of Conservative rule, about 14 years, starting with David Cameron, and all through…Bacon: So Tony Blair loses, and then I guess his successor lost, right? Gordon Brown.Buckle: Yeah. Gordon Brown lost. Gordon Brown was in office not for a full term. And then he was replaced by David Cameron. And then we had five Conservative prime ministers. Towards the tail end of that, the leader of the Labour Party was someone called Jeremy Corbyn. He was a sort of left socialist, even by British socialist terms. Pretty left leader. As a very rough analog, maybe like a British Bernie Sanders, but much more left than Bernie, and I would say worse than Bernie.Corbyn lost two elections. One closely, one disastrously, in 2017 and 2019, respectively. The first one he lost, he lost, but it was close. The second one he lost was like a blowout. It was the worst result for us in a hundred years or so. And after that, he was replaced by Keir, who had not, I think interestingly for Keir, had not had a long history in politics before this. He was a lawyer before this, head of the Crown Prosecution Service. He ran on a sort of left, but not as left platform as Corbyn. He ran as like, I’ll still be left-wing, but not as completely out there, unelectable as Corbyn was. And since then he’s gone right and right. He won the last British general election quite convincingly, 18 months ago.Perry Bacon: In 2024, like a few months before the U.S. election. Right?Buckle: Yeah, only about, I want to say only about four or five months before. Don’t quite remember that.Bacon: And my understanding is while he positioned himself as not being that different than Corbyn when he took over, by the election, it was becoming more clear he was doing a moderation thing more broadly. Was it obvious before the election that he was moving the party, moving the Labour Party more to the right than maybe he had previewed at the beginning, or is that wrong?Buckle: Yes. He definitely moderated by the election. Both substantively and symbolically, there was a lot of policies that were toned down, but also just the presentation. This is when the Labour Party really started everything they did, they had a big British flag behind them. And Starmer just sort of looks, not to be too personal about it, but he just sort of looks like a middle manager. And so he has very like centrist vibes to him. What I would say though is yes, they moderated before the election, but actually in a lot of ways, the big policy changes have come since the election.Bacon: Let me focus on the election first. So what did he change before the election? What were some of the policy switches between Corbyn and Starmer pre-election?Buckle: So one of the things that they’ve been, I think, really concerned about: the messaging and positioning on Israel and on antisemitism, because one of the things that took Corbyn down is, this is controversial, but he was widely felt to have not done enough to address antisemitism within the party. Corbyn is, as many lefties are, a very strong critic of Israel. He was widely felt to not have done enough on antisemitism within the party. Whether the man himself is an antisemite, I don’t know. But that was a big thing. And so a lot of it was really repositioning away from that.There was an evolution along culture war issues, so principally trans rights and immigration, where you could tell the Starmer team was very, very uncomfortable taking progressive positions in those spaces. Right? And so both of those had evolved somewhat prior to the election. But the real radical swings came post-election.Perry Bacon: On the economy, I guess since he was trying to present as more pro-growth and less redistributive, I felt he was giving Tony Blair, Bill Clinton 1990s vibes to me, even pre-election on the economy: “we want to be pro-growth.” Is that the way to think about it?Toby Buckle: Pro-growth, but without a plan to achieve growth. One thing we have that sort of hangs over all British politics that has no American equivalent is Brexit. Now, Corbyn had a complicated relationship with Brexit. He opposed it, but in a sort of complicated way. Starmer had a complicated relationship with Brexit but by the time he had essentially decided the basic [deal] that we hammered out for Brexit is going to remain in place. Right. And two, the Tory—the Tories are Conservatives—the Conservative framework on tax and spending is also going to remain in place.And so you were committed to a reasonably low-tax regime, but also to balanced budgets. And those three together essentially meant there was no way really to invest more money to fix public services. You were kind of locked into this basically Conservative approach to the economy where you nickel and dime all the public sector stuff in order to keep taxes low and to keep the Brexit project intact. And I think they assumed that just being a bit more sensible than the previous Conservative government, which to be fair is not hard, but being a bit more sensible than the past Conservative government would kind of fix the economy by itself without addressing any of these underlying structural issues that were slowing our growth. And it hasn’t worked. The economy was cack beforehand, it’s cack now, and now it’s their economy and they’re being blamed for it.Bacon: So the run-up to this 2024 election, I remember this was covered in the British press very much, when in the American press there was certainly some consultants from this group called Third Way, a famous centrist group in the U.S., who were, according to Politico—again, American reporters—advising Starmer. Was it clear to you at that point that Starmer was getting advice from these sort of American consultants who in the U.S. are always pushing a sort of Bill Clintonism? Because that was reported in the American press, that there was collaboration between Kamala Harris’s staff and Starmer’s staff about centrism being useful in both places.Buckle: Yeah. I mean, there was certainly talks between them, I’d almost be hesitant to overplay that. Because the centrism that Starmer has ended up going for is well in advance of anything that Kamala Harris did. He’s gone much, much further down that road. I think there was definitely talks.Bacon: You don’t see Third Way as imposing something on Starmer. You don’t think that’s the case at all?Buckle: I mean, I think they found their way to it fairly organically. I’m sure there was talks and people met. What I would say is it’s a similar philosophy. I think the philosophy is, in both countries, we’re dealing with a rising far right, and one way of understanding what that is, is it’s a backlash to social liberalism. It’s “woke went too far,” and then people got sick of it and then they voted for fascists. That’s sort of the story that they have in their head.Bacon: We’ll come back to why that’s wrong in a little bit.Buckle: So then if that’s the story that you have in your head, then the solution becomes, well, we’ve got to moderate, particularly around these culture war issues. I think that was a feeling for many in the Labour Party well predating that election. There was a very, very active opposition to Corbyn, both I think for legitimate and illegitimate reasons, through his entire tenure. So to these elections that Corbyn lost. There were always people saying, this is not what we need to be doing. We need to be doing this moderation thing.Bacon: But Corbyn, my position, his politics were much more economic left than social left. Is that wrong? Was he both left? Because Bernie Sanders is known for being more economic left than social left, but was Corbyn saying trans kids should play basketball in 12th grade? Was he doing social liberalism in a way?Buckle: It’s a good question. And you’re quite right, Corbyn is not socially illiberal at all. But was certainly much more known for the economic stuff. I think the thing about this idea of like, it’s “woke gone too far,” is it doesn’t track to anything real, and it’s not really based on anything. So there’s a lot of people in the sort of most right-wing element of the Labour Party, it gets called Blue Labour, who are very, very anti-woke and does that come from Corbyn? Does it come from a