Keir Starmer has welcomed last week’s Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman. Although he once proclaimed the existence of the male cervix, he now admits that a “woman is an adult female”.

The Prime Minister’s newfound clarity on the matter does reveal something that’s not quite so obvious, which is that he doesn’t fear the Left. Rather, once again, we see him adopting a defensive position out of fear of the populist Right — and specifically Reform UK.

In theory, Starmer could lean so far in that direction that he alienates Labour’s middle-class, anti-populist supporters. But what could be a tricky balancing act is made much easier by one of the most underrated features of British politics: the sheer weakness of the Left-wing opposition to Labour.

Take a look at the Greens. As the mirror image to Reform UK, they ought to be picking up alienated Left-wing voters. But there’s not much sign of that. Green support is up by two or three points from its 6.7% share at the general election. However, that’s only enough to win the party two or three more seats. It came second to Labour in 39 constituencies last year, but mostly a distant second.

So if not the Greens, who else? Around 20 years ago, in the wake of the Iraq War, the Liberal Democrats had some success outflanking Labour on the Left. Today, by imitating Charles Kennedy’s man-of-the-people liberalism, Ed Davey is also making progress in the polls. But there’s a catch: in recent decades, the Labour/Lib Dem marginal has very nearly disappeared from the electoral map. Nick Clegg’s old seat of Sheffield Hallam is a rare example and will remain so without a major shift in the polls.

Remarkably, a bigger threat to Labour now comes from Muslim independents — some of them associated with Jeremy Corbyn’s Independent Alliance, others with George Galloway’s Workers Party. Health Secretary Wes Streeting came within a few hundred votes of losing his Ilford North seat to Leanne Mohamed last year, and is now on track to lose next time. Jess Phillips and Shabana Mahmood face a similar fate. But as worrying a development as this is for Labour, it is restricted to areas with an electorally dominant Muslim population, which, for the time being, means no more than 20 to 30 constituencies. It’s yet another structural limit to the threat to Labour’s Left flank.

And thus we come to the cold, hard mathematics of Starmer’s strategy. In England and Wales the number of Lab/Ref and Lab/Con marginals massively outnumber the number of seats at risk from the Greens, Lib Dems or Muslim independents. Therefore, while losing a vote to a Left-of-centre opponent is bad for Labour, it’s usually only half as bad as losing it to the leading Right-of-centre candidate.

What’s more, compared to the anti-Labour Left, the anti-Labour Right (i.e. Reform and the Tories) has a much greater incentive to form an electoral pact because the potential gains are so much greater.

In short, Labour’s defensive posture makes total sense. That said, it isn’t cost-free — not least because it makes it much harder for Starmer to mollify his angry backbenchers with virtue-signalling. Crowd-pleasing stunts like bashing private schools might work for him, but not allying with the trans lobby and other damaged progressive causes.

Unless the anti-Labour Left can find a way of breaking through, the arc of British politics now appears to bend towards Right-wing populism.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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