CAMERON MILNER: Can Anthony Albanese avoid the colossal errors of Keir Starmer’s UK Labour?

While Anthony Albanese enjoys the sun in Rome he might want to get an English lesson from UK Labour and in particular, Labour’s PM, Sir Keir Starmer.

The two have so much in common. Both crushed their opponents and had huge majorities after their recent elections. Starmer’s is now 10 months old, but still sees him hold 402 out of 650 seats in the Commons, on a par with Albanese’s own 94 from 151 in our own Parliament.

Both had gushing post-election headlines from a few notable national newspaper editors sucking up while playing catch-up. Both Starmer and Albanese were written as having won “two term elections” and both spoke of governing for all and wanting to be the natural party of government.

Well 10 months in, Starmer is in a flat out panic domestically. He is deeply unpopular and Labour lost a by-election in the previous “Red Wall” to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party on May 2.

At the same time, Reform won 677 of 1650 council seats contested nationally. It added eight new mayors to their ranks.

In the days after, Starmer panicked and rolled out a knee-jerk anti-immigrant policy.

British Labour is now saying modern migration is a failed experiment and Starmer echoed the race-baiting former Tory Enoch Powell, when he said today’s Britian was becoming an “island of strangers”.

Labor still has 402 seats out of 650 but many now fear that majority could be liquidated at the next poll in only four years.

It’s a blind panic from Labour that under Starmer is all slogan and no substance. All spin and no electoral mandate. Sound familiar?

The English lesson for Albo is simple. Voters get to change their minds between elections and it doesn’t matter how much the commentariat gush, it is voters who will press the button to flush.

It’s clear voters change support quickly, just ask the Liberal campaign director heading for the exit, Andrew Hirst.

Polls move and once safe seats can now be overturned as voters vent disappointment and anger in equal measures.

The truth is both Starmer and Albanese were elected on small target, do nothing agendas. Both lack any electoral mandate for change and have chosen to lead zombie Labor shows as their price for running around as PMs.

Both Australian Labor and British Labour were elected in landslides but with chronically low national primaries. Starmer scored 33.7 per cent of the national primary, Albo 34.6 per cent.

Their relative landslides were not built on love for their parties, but rather a collapse in their opponents’ vote. In 2019 at the UK General Election, Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn got 1.1 per cent less primary and was smashed to only 203 seats out of 650, such is the fickleness of your strength being built entirely on your opponent’s weakness.

Starmer and Albo also share a common belief that process is a proxy for policy.

Both are administrators rather than reformers. Their political dominance might be a mile wide, but it’s an inch deep.

Starmer finds himself offending the Left of his party all while confirming that Nigel Farage and Reform are leading Labour around by the nose ring on migration.

But it didn’t just start with the by-election loss the weekend before last. In the past 10 months, Starmer has undergone a personal scandal on expenses being paid for by wealthy donors. In this way he should have learnt from Albo who got himself into strife the last term taking freebie concert tickets, Chairman’s Lounge membership for his son and otherwise swanning around the world on Toto One.

British Labour also decided to go to war with pensioners and cruelly remove a heating subsidy all while pushing through signature legislation on voluntary assisted dying to ensure if Nan hasn’t already frozen to death, Labour will still allow her to get it in the neck.

Added to this has been a brutal campaign of backgrounding against Labour’s most high profile alternative leaders that is sheeted home to Starmer’s own chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney as the principal leaker. It’s a poisonous show inside British Labour, and they still have a rousing majority on paper.

Labour, just 10 months into a five year term, is in all-out panic pulling right wing leavers on immigration in a desperate attempt to regain voters’ affections.

The English lesson is that voters don’t care that much for some inner city blow hard saying the current PM is a sun god when their own lived experience of cost of living and quality of life is just so different from what they were promised.

Voters give and voters take away. Yesterday’s win can be today’s blind panic.

There happens to also be an English lesson for Sussan Ley and the Liberals. See, the UK Conservatives and their ongoing collapse in voter support are also contributing to the rise of Reform as a genuine voter alternative to Labour.

The UK Conservatives are still being reactionary and haven’t stated a consistent set of values on which to start their rebuild, all while Reform now threatens to become the alternative party of government in the UK.

So, for all the headlines and what now passes for analysis in some sectors, Albanese and Labor have a salutary lesson 10 months in the rear vision mirror from Keir Starmer and UK Labour.

No mandate wins mean you have no agenda to defend and any “hard decisions” are simply regarded by voters as ‘harsh decisions”.

Albanese is no doubt riding high, back travelling and with nothing to do that actually needs Parliament to return for another 10 weeks, but in the end voters are always right.

And even Labour leaders feted by the media like Starmer, written up as generational change agents when they are little more than style over substance purveyors, their reckoning comes at the hands of the voters.

It’s been an unceremonious soiling of the bed by massive majority UK Labour as voters send them the clearest of messages. It’s an English lesson Australian Labor might want to heed before they enjoy a similar fate.