Political positions of Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer is a British politician and barrister serving as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since July 2024 and as Leader of the Labour Party since 2020. A lifelong member and supporter of the Labour Party, he previously served as Leader of the Opposition from 2020 to 2024, has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Holborn and St Pancras since 2015, and was Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. During the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, he belonged to the party's soft left, and had also agreed with his politics being "red-green". During the 1980s and 1990s, Starmer also wrote for Socialist Alternatives and Socialist Lawyer; by the 2020s, he at times upheld and at other times rejected the socialist label.

Starmer succeeded Jeremy Corbyn by winning the 2020 leadership election on a left-wing platform, pledging to uphold many of his predecessor's economic policies whilst working to end the issue of antisemitism within the party. As opposition leader, Starmer eventually moved Labour toward the political centre, and his party made significant gains in the 2023 and 2024 local elections, and won a landslide victory in the 2024 general election. Some commentators described Starmer as exhibiting an authoritarian approach, and critics on the Labour left lamented of being purged.

Despite the lack of any consensus about the character and even existence of Starmer's ideology, it has acquired a neologism, Starmerism, and his supporters have been called Starmerites. Prior to his general election win, Starmer had been widely compared to Tony Blair's leadership and New Labour, having taken the party rightward and closer to the centre for electoral reasons; observes also noted differences from Blair and New Labour. Starmer had cited the many issues affecting the country as for why he had to abandon many of the more left-wing pledges that he had made in 2020.