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Progress and change? A provisional assessment of Keir Starmer's Labour government

International conference organized by the Laboratoire d'Études et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone at Aix-Marseille Université in collaboration with the Observatoire de la Société Britannique

19-20 March 2026

Campus Schuman, Aix-en-Provence

The General Election of July 4, 2024 delivered a victory for Labour against a deeply divided and power-weary Conservative party whose reputation for reliability and competence had been substantially damaged. Labour’s return to office after fourteen years in opposition is a sufficiently rare occurrence in British electoral history to warrant the use of the adjective historic in relation to the party’s victory.[1] The coincidence of the formation of the Starmer government with the centenary of the election of the first Labour government ever, albeit a minority and short-lived one, is an invitation to look back on the history of Labour in office and implicitly raises the question of its place in the Labour tradition and of its political inheritance.

The swing of the pendulum of July 2024 brings back memories of Tony Blair’s New Labour whose victory at the polls was at the time described as a landslide. The echoes of 1997 are manifold : the scale of Labour’s victory in terms of parliamentary seats (418 in 1997 and 411 in 2024)[2]; the electoral context, characterized by the sheer drop in popularity of a discredited Conservative Party, much to Labour’s benefit; the internal dynamics of the party, which, in a context of ideological rivalries, renews its leadership and senior members and imposes a sharp break with the orientations favoured by its left-wing and the Momentum movement, while establishing  that a return to the centre is the necessary precondition for electoral success. To read More click here.