Keir Starmer’s plan to tackle the far right? Fill some potholes. (2024)

LONDON — Like other liberal leaders around the world, Britain’s new prime minister is battling the far right.

But while some politicians choose immigration clampdowns or fiery rhetoric to stave off the far right threat, Keir Starmer’s approach is a little more prosaic. The PM’s allies believe the British far right can be defeated by fixing potholes in the nation’s roads, and tackling hospital waiting times.

Starmer was in Belfast on Monday to discuss the local response to one of a series of anti-immigration riots which erupted around Britain earlier this month, a rare outbreak of violent lawlessness which required an urgent response.

In the immediate aftermath of the disorder which spread across multiple British towns and cities, the government’s focus was on a strong and visible law-and-order crackdown targeting those responsible.

Extra police officers were called in, courts laid on additional hearings and the U.K. Home Office put out a call for volunteers as hundreds of arrests were made. By Friday, more than 1,000 people had been arrested and over 600 charges issued over offenses related to the riots, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

How the prime minister deals with the longstanding socio-economic problems which created the conditions for violence is another question, however. And it’s one Starmer doesn’t have long to answer.

The way forward, many of those around him believe, is in demonstrating that politics can solve real-world problems in order to show that it really does matters who Brits vote for. In short, Starmer needs to rebuilding Britain’s battered faith in politicians.

One Labour MP close to Starmer, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said: “There is a deep sense that nobody is listening and that politics doesn’t make any difference. We have to be very pragmatic and clear about why that is not true.”

Broken Britain

Starmer’s swift clampdown on rioters fit neatly with his background as a prosecutor and appeared to chime with the public mood, with polling showing the vast majority of the electorate viewed the violent unrest as unacceptable.

Two thirds of voters characterized those taking part in the unrest as “thugs,” according to research by YouGov, while 71 percent held rioters themselves responsible, as opposed to social media or far-right influencers.

However, while there was only a tiny minority who supported the violence, 16 percent thought those involved had “legitimate concerns” and a much larger number supported the view that immigration policy was one explanation, if not a justification, for the rioting.

Luke Tryl, director of polling firm More in Common, said every focus group it ran during the election campaign reflected the view that “politics isn’t working and it can’t deliver.”

“That spans immigration, but it’s also about the fact people can’t get a GP [doctor] appointment, the fact that waiting lists are so long, the fact that they can’t afford the weekly shop,” he added. “That is something that politicians need to grasp, because it is not sustainable to have a functioning democracy with such high levels of disillusionment.”

Starmer and his team have long been thinking about how to tackle this kind of deep-seated alienation, allies say, and are not planning any deviation from their core plan.

The same Starmer ally quoted above said the central idea was “focusing on a thing that we know we can do, and then doing it over the course of the parliament.”

“It could be mending every single pothole in Britain — just something that gives us a story to tell in lots of places where there were riots which pushes back against the sense that politics is irrelevant,” they added.

Tryl said tackling a huge backlog of treatment in the U.K.’s National Health Service is the issue on which most voters will judge its ability to truly deliver.

Made in Dagenham

That “pothole” strategy has been influenced in part by the experience of local Labour politicians who took on the British National Party in the early 2000s, when the far-right party made significant gains in Barking and Dagenham, a traditionally white, working-class part of east London.

Margaret Hodge, a former Labour MP who represented Barking until this year, told POLITICO there were “real parallels” between the rise of the BNP and the current situation.

Working at the time with pollster Deborah Mattinson — who advised Starmer on the recent election — she said they found people felt “anger, not apathy — that we weren’t listening to them and we didn’t understand the problems they were facing in their day-to-day lives.”

The best response, Hodge said, was “not rocket science, but it was about forgetting the obsessions of Westminster” in order to focus on, for example, littering, graffiti, the location of a bus stop or a shortage of parking spaces.

Later, advisers to the council came up with the idea of cracking down on “eyesore gardens” which had been left to go to ruin by buy-to-let landlords. One of the people behind the initiative was Morgan McSweeney, now Starmer’s righthand man in Downing Street — though other Labour activists point out his arrival in Barking to work for the local council postdated the BNP’s heyday.

McSweeney was instrumental in formulating Labour’s election-winning strategy during the 2024 campaign, and is now focused on following through in order to put Labour in a position to win the next election.

One senior Labour politician close to No. 10, granted anonymity in order to discuss matters beyond their remit, said McSweeney was “thinking a lot about this … How to get these people arrested and banged up. And then more deeply about the politics and about the different strands behind it and what the government has to do to counter it.”

On notice

Whether the principle of clearing dilapidated front gardens can be applied on a far grander scale, and in time for the next election, which must be held within five years, remains to be seen.

A government official, also granted anonymity, pointed out that ministers have also been told more broadly to keep Labour’s “five missions” — a zoomed-out, overarching view of society in 10 years that touches on economic growth, green energy, crime reduction, equality of opportunity and an improved health service — uppermost in what they do.

But some would like to see Starmer move beyond a purely pragmatic response and speak directly to voters.

Parth Patel, senior research fellow at the left-of-center think tank IPPR, said there may be a hesitance on the part of Downing Street right now to “stoke up” conversations about migration.

“But,” he adds, “if the government doesn’t articulate its views on identity and immigration in modern Britain, basically the most contentious issue of the 21st century, those debates will continually be dragged to the far right.”

Hodge agrees. “Now we’re in government, we have a very powerful voice that can start developing a different discourse about integration.” Immigration has, according to pollster Ipsos, rocketed back up to the top of the list issues most concerning Brits — with law and order also leaping up the index.

Successfully articulating a new position for Labour on migration, community and identity may of course prove just as difficult as bringing down NHS waiting times. But Starmer has one advantage at this point in his premiership.

“People might have low expectations of this government,” Tryl says, “but they definitely want him to give it a shot, and they want him to succeed.”

Dan Bloom and Stefan Boscia contributed reporting.