Albanese joins PMs against populist right

The British PM began gently in a speech before the panel discussion. He wondered aloud whether audience members had managed to enjoy a breakfast in London, or had a pint at a pub, or gone for a walk in the sun before the summit began.

“You may have noticed that this city isn’t the wasteland of anarchy that some would have you believe,” he said. That drew laughter because the British media is full of warnings from conservatives about the end times for their country from crime, taxes, migration and other failures of the progressive government.

“That, in a sense, captures what we’re up against, doesn’t it?” Starmer said.

“But there are versions in all of your countries where places, institutions, communities are portrayed in a way that is a million miles from reality – a sort of industrialised infrastructure of grievance.”

He said this worldview was “created through our devices” and was both miserable and untrue. But he also warned that it could not be dismissed.

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“It preys on real problems in the real world, identifies clear enemies,” he said. “That’s us, by the way. At its heart, it’s the most poisonous belief.”

Starmer pointed to a march in London two weeks ago that drew more than 110,000 people and was organised by a far-right activist, Tommy Robinson, and featured a video address from billionaire Elon Musk. In his address, Musk warned of uncontrolled migration and said Britain needed a “revolutionary” change of government.

While the prime minister did not repeat Musk’s words, the Labour supporters in the audience would have known the words he meant. Musk told the march: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”

Starmer heightened his warning about this dire language.

“You don’t have to be a great historian to know where that kind of poison ends up,” he said. “And you can just feel it, in a language that is naked in its attempt to intimidate. Because it’s not careless or accidental: it’s part of a strategy.

“They want politics to be a choice between globalists and nationalists, to draw a dividing line between the elites and the people.”

Status quo ‘hasn’t worked’

Starmer has a good personal relationship with Trump, but this did not blind him to the movement behind the president. He was especially scornful of the way the right denied the “patriotism and pride” of the Labour side of politics, with its common cause with working people and its roots in the union movement. But he did not pretend that workers had nothing to complain about.

The median weekly pay for full-time employees in the UK was £728 in April 2024. That is about $1500. After adjusting for inflation, it was 2 per cent lower than the pay received in 2010, according to the House of Commons Library. These were years of rule by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.

“We must show our politics are resolutely opposed to a status quo that doesn’t deliver for working people,” Starmer said in his speech.

“The worst thing we could do is to defend the status quo. It hasn’t worked for working people. We must be determined to deliver change.” He called for a “patriotic renewal” that was rooted in values such as decency, tolerance and respect.

This was grand language – or grandiose, a critic might say. But there was a common theme with the other prime ministers. Frostadottir said success meant delivering practical benefits in areas like housing, rather than engaging in identity politics. Albanese said it was not possible to stop change, although a government could try to shape it. “You’ve got to bring people with you on that journey of change,” he said.

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Starmer was the most frank about where progressive politics had let people down. “We thought that redistribution was the only thing that mattered,” he said when the panel discussion began. The focus should be on growth, he added. And he admitted the left had stumbled on migration.

“For too many years, it’s been too easy for people to come here, slip into the shadow economy and remain here illegally,” he said. “Because, frankly, we’ve been squeamish about saying things that are clearly true.”

He rejected the idea that “compassionate left-wing politics” meant relying on labour that exploited foreign workers and undercut fair wages. The simple fact, he said, was that every nation needed to have control of its borders. He could have been quoting an Australian Liberal leader, John Howard, from two decades ago.

Starmer came to the event with a policy announcement: a proposal for a digital ID for every worker so that those who came to the country illegally would lose a big incentive for their journey. Breaking with his habit of rarely naming his opponent, he was direct about seeing Farage as his main opponent at the next election – and he said he wanted an “open fight” with Reform.

Albanese said his approach to migration was “strong on borders without being weak on humanity”, but he avoided being specific in an audience of progressives. He did not mention Nauru, Manus Island or boat turn-backs.

A common message was that all four wanted to reclaim nationalism and patriotism from the right.

Albanese reprised the concept of “progressive patriotism” that he outlined in a podcast with this masthead in May. Carney spoke about his “Canada Strong” policy theme. Frostadottir spoke about patriotism as bringing people together around practical policies, and she criticised the way left-wing parties had engaged with voters in the past. “They were talking at people, not with them,” she said.

This was a screenplay for the progressive faithful in their search for a new direction. Call it Four Prime Ministers and a Funeral – because all of them were delivering the last rites for some of the old ways of the left. The question is whether this will be enough to stop the new appeal of the right.