Sir Keir Starmer is facing a backlash from the left after he vowed to imitate Margaret Thatcher’s “driving sense of purpose”.
The Labour leader lavished praise on Thatcher’s “plan for entrepreneurialism” in a pitch to Tory voters that prompted warnings of a backlash from the left.
In a newspaper article and BBC interview on Sunday morning, Starmer singled out Thatcher alongside Tony Blair and Clement Attlee as prime ministers who had changed Britain, as he sought to position himself as their heir.
Starmer also accused Rishi Sunak of “betrayal” on immigration and failing to “realise the possibilities of Brexit” in a direct pitch to socially conservative voters.
Backbenchers on the left of the party have criticised the comments about Thatcher. Ian Byrne, MP for Liverpool West Derby, said that “inequality, hunger, destitution and misery” were “the real legacy left by Thatcher”, while Kim Johnson, another Liverpool MP, said Thatcher had wanted to see her city decline, that she “destroyed industries, attacked trade unionists, privatised our core industries” and that she was “not someone any Labour supporter should look up to”.
Beth Winter, MP for Cynon Valley in south Wales, said Thatcher “devastated working class communities like mine” and that many had never recovered. The Corbynite campaign group Momentum said Starmer’s praise of Thatcher was “a shift to the right, and a failure of Labour values”, saying she had “waste to working-class communities, privatised our public services, and set in train the destruction of the post-war settlement founded by Labour”.
Humza Yousaf, the Scottish first minister, who is battling against a Labour revival north of the border, described Starmer’s comments as “an insult” to Scotland. “What Thatcher did to mining and industrial communities was not ‘entrepreneurialism’, it was vandalism,” he wrote on Twitter/X, saying that communities across the UK “still bear the scars of her disastrous policies”.
Starmer told Broadcasting House on BBC Radio 4: “The point I’m making in the article really is that you can distinguish political leaders, certainly in the postwar period, into those that had a plan and those that drifted essentially.”
Thatcher “did have a plan for entrepreneurialism, had a mission”, he said. “It doesn’t mean I agree with what she did but I don’t think anybody could suggest that she didn’t have a driving sense of purpose.
“The characteristic of an incoming Labour government — if we’re privileged enough to come in to serve — will be this sense of mission, this sense of having a plan that we’re operating to, a driving sense of purpose.”
Starmer said he had “fundamentally changed” Labour after the Jeremy Corbyn era, as he attempted to reassure Tory voters that “the Labour Party is the party for you”.
He said: “I think there are many people in that camp who say, ‘Look, I may have voted for the Tories in the past, but I do believe in my country, I do believe in a sense of purpose and the national mission is for me’. “I do want to persuade those that have voted Tory in the past to vote Labour this time around, look again at Labour.”
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Starmer praised Thatcher as a leader who “sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism” as he insisted that reducing immigration and stopping small boat crossings were “matters of serious public concern and deserve to be treated as such”.
He urged right-leaning voters to “take a look at us again”, arguing: “If you believe that Britain needs stability, order, security, then Labour is the party for you.”
Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, dismissed Starmer’s praise for Thatcher as a stunt, saying “he wasn’t appealing to Margaret Thatcher’s entrepreneurial spirit when he was courting votes from the hard left”.
She told Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips on Sky News: “I suspect the great lady herself would view a man that is trying to ride on the coattails of her success with the following words, ‘No, no, no’.”
Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow business secretary, defended Starmer, saying that while he was not a fan of Thatcher, things had to change after the 1970s.
“I come from a mining town in County Durham, so on a political level her policies are not something I would be sympathetic to, but I would certainly recognise her as a formidable opponent, an opponent you had to respect, who had an agenda, who implemented that agenda — there was big change after 1970,” he said.
“Even though I wouldn’t support her politics, I recognise she was that force for change … There are prime ministers who make a difference, who do change the future of the country.”
