Dan Poulter Jumping Ship Shows Labour Safe Harbour for Right Wing Tories

Tories Jumping Ship Shows Labour to be a Safeplace for the Right-Wing

The Labour Party has shifted so far to the right under Sir Keir Starmer that it has become a veritable safe Harbour for disaffected Tories to jump ship. The latest defector is former Conservative minister and MP Dan Poulter, dealing a blow to Rishi Sunak’s government just days before the local elections.

Dr Poulter, the MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich since 2010, announced his decision to cross the floor to Labour, accusing his former party of becoming a “nationalist party of the Right.” The former health minister stated he does not intend to seek re-election but envisions a future role advising Labour on mental health policies while focusing on his NHS doctor job.

In a piece for The Observer, Poulter cited the “life-changing experience” of working as a frontline mental health physician during the junior doctors’ strikes as prompting his defection. He lamented that the Conservatives he was originally elected to represent have strayed far from being a party that “valued public services” with “a compassionate view about supporting the more disadvantaged in society.”

“I think the Conservative Party today is in a very different place,” Poulter remarked, suggesting the Tories have abandoned their former principles in favour of a rightward nationalist lurch. Though expressing “no animus” towards PM Sunak personally, he stated the UK urgently needs a general election, praising Starmer’s Labour as trustworthy stewards of the NHS and the nation.

Starmer was unsurprisingly “pleased” by the defection, framing it as repudiation of “Conservative chaos” and an opportunity to “get Britain’s future back” under Labour’s centre-right leadership.

“I am resigning from the Tory party and crossing the floor. Only Labour wants to restore our NHS” says Dan Poulter.

However, what this rosy narrative conveniently omits is Poulter’s own complicity over 14 years in enabling many of the same Tory policies he now denounces. As a former health minister during the austerity-imposing coalition years, it was Labour’s new acquisition, Dr Poulter who set key policy directions that arguably undermined the very public services he claims to champion.

How ironic that Dr Poulter had a taste of his own medicine. Poulter prescribed austerity cuts while a Tory health minister. No amount of sugarcoating will ever remedy that bitter pill.

When asked if he feared backlash from constituents who elected him as a Conservative, Poulter offered the familiar deflection of prioritizing his constituency services until the upcoming general election. Yet his insistence that the Tories have drifted to become a “nationalist party of the Right” belies Labour’s own unapologetic embrace of patriotic populism and pro-business centrism under Starmer’s stewardship.

Poulter represents only the third high-profile Tory defection from the Tories and second to Labour since Starmer took the reins in 2020 – the previous being Christian Wakeford’s dramatic floor-crossing in 2022.

While the departures sting an embattled Sunak in the short term, they solidify Labour’s repositioning as a Home Counties-friendly vehicle for disaffected One Nation Conservatives disgruntled by the party’s lurches to ideological extremes.

For socialists and those pining for a genuinely progressive labour movement, Poulter’s defection is yet another signpost of Starmer’s embrace of Blairism 2.0. As the opposition rebrands itself as a reassuringly centre-right governance option palatable to soft Tories, leftist policy ambitions grow increasingly ephemeral. Reversing austerity, bolstering the public sector, tackling inequality – such core Labour tenets all bushelled under an impetus to appease capital, consolidate power, and preclude charges of fiscal immoderation.

Ultimately, Poulter’s defection may prove more Faustian admission of the hollow, cynical “pragmatism” undergirding Starmer’s stewardship than the progressive realignment its optics suggest. The so-called pragmatism of Starmer’s Labour is simply a metaphor for the party becoming a rebranded vehicle for disaffected Tories – abandoning any substantive left-wing policies or ideology in a naked play for power by remaking itself as an anodyne, Centre-Right governing option palatable to business interests and the affluent Home Counties set.

In rebranding as this milquetoast big-tent centrism, Labour has left its traditional working-class base and socialist remnant out in the cold once more – We are just another cohort of dispossessed voters forced to pound rain-soaked pavements while the party marches ever-rightward into the mythical lands of electability. For those unwilling or unable to stomach such profound ideological compromises, the lonely catacombs of the fringe undoubtedly await, faced with a supposed Labour government hostile to any transformative left agendas from its allegedly pragmatic throne.

Paul Knaggs