For Keir Starmer, honesty is the best policy. But can he cut through?
“There are two things to dislike about Harold Wilson”, it used to be said: “his face.” Whatever you may think about him, the same line cannot be directed at Sir Keir Starmer. If anything has been revealed about the Labour leader over the past year, it is that he is a man of an honesty certainly not seen either in his main opponent or his predecessor; indeed, it may well be his most characteristic trait. He is a figure whose true character most of the electorate is still struggling to decipher. Which brings us quickly to Starmer’s main weakness: that he is neither an ideologue nor a political personality. Boris Johnson is certainly the latter and on occasion strives to be the former, and it is in this contrast that the Labour leader’s current electoral failings lie. Attempting to assume a populist persona like Johnson seems a feat beyond him; his chances lie in the field of ideology, an area where his party has been without success for so many years.
Labour’s challenge is simple: to “cut through” to the electorate, and to do it on policy, not personality. Jeremy Corbyn cut through on personality; on his nefarious dealings and antiquated beliefs. It never helped him. The party’s policies have long been shadowed by its unfavourable reputation, something only Tony Blair truly managed to brush aside. Starmer has attempted to do the same, with limited results. Like Blair, he will need to offer the public something which goes beyond the usual brand of Leftism that Labour in opposition have been offering them for far too long. Like Blair, he needs to recognise that his only real chance of such a break lies in tangible policies around a clear theme of some kind of national renewal. And to realise that many of those lie, unavoidably, to the Right of him.
Starmer recently set out the nearest he has come to a clear policy programme to raise himself out of such an electoral morass, focusing on education, the economy and “dignity in old age”. It showed signs of a substance lacking in last year’s promises of “vision”, a “better future”, or the “mountain to climb” — phrases as vague as they are clichéd. The rhetoric on education harked back to some of Tony Blair’s most effective campaigning (perhaps a sign of Peter Mandelson’s continued lobbying for the leadership to take up the recycled mantras of old), as Starmer spoke vigorously of a “first-class education for every child”. (In 1997 Blair led his campaign on the pledge that “Education will be our number one priority”. Starmer would do well to make it his.
Debate on education has become increasingly polarised over eleven years of Tory rule; it can be said to be the one policy area where moderate Labour forces have a distinct upper hand in public opinion. In the same way that Margaret Thatcher and Kenneth Baker tried to take on the educational establishment in the Eighties in creating the National Curriculum, so Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings tried to transform the system in the last decade. The result is that the gulf between teachers’ unions and the Government, born of mistrust and ideology, has widened further. Labour stands a chance of breaching such discord, and reaping the dividends, if only it is prepared to tell parents it places their childrens’ futures over that of their teachers. As Blair did before him, Starmer faces the choice of hanging onto small branches of union loyalty, or the as yet untaken leap of reaching out to the voters.
Yet progress, ignored by the headlines, has unmistakably been made. Starmer lambasted the Government for its supposed lack of funds in the recovery plan for education, and issued his own. It amounts to one of the most substantial policy plans yet to come out of the Labour machine. For his supporters, it offers hope not only in the welcome detail but the emphasis on childrens’ futures and parents’ desires. Something, it must be said, almost unimaginable under Corbyn’s reign; pandering to the unions is a folly Labour continually find it hard to resist.
Starmer’s new education plan does evoke some of Blair’s inclusively banal messaging: “Improving the quality of teaching,” we are told, “can significantly improve outcomes for pupils.” Wittgenstein this is not; but neither is it to be ignored merely as the platitudes of a crowd-pleasing Opposition. Plans to further the “National Tutoring programme” and a “teacher development fund” may be taken from existing government policy, but the scale of the project differs hugely; coming in at around £15 billion, compared to Rishi Sunak’s promise of less than a tenth of that. Faced with a much derided Education Secretary in Gavin Williamson, Labour’s education policy may be the first to project not only a contrast to government incompetence, but actual initiative, indeed vision, as well. If he can do that, then the voters in Middle England Blair so assiduously courted may eventually be wading through the mist into Labour’s sights.
Less fruitful ideas are revealed in Starmer’s plan for the economy, blighted by the lockdowns. Equally dire are Labour’s prospects of shifting national focus onto their own monetary policy. Faced with an unusually popular Chancellor and a series of gargantuan hand-outs at odds with the Tories’ reputation for fiscal parsimony, promises to “make sure our economy deals with insecurity and inequality”, as Starmer has it, seem as irrelevant as they do hackneyed. Indeed, practically no members of the public could name the Shadow Chancellor, following the demotion of Anneliese Dodds. She made way for the Blairite Rachel Reeves in Starmer’s botched attempt at a reshuffle of contrition after the loss in Hartlepool. Sunak’s willingness to open up the coffers is countered only by more extreme proposals, or the promise of yet more cash from largely undesignated stashes of riches. On the issue of the economy, Starmer’s difference from Blair is striking. Once again, if he is interested in gaining that credibility so far lacking, more original ideas will be called for. Starmer can learn as much from Biden as he can from Blair.
What seems most remarkable about Starmer’s palpable lack of ideas is his willingness to accede to the Government’s will. Not only did he refuse to criticise the lockdowns at each point, while also encouraging even more of them, he has yet to offer a substantial policy to counter the Tories’ plans to escape the self-induced crises of the last year. A swift glance across the Atlantic could provide succour; Biden has released trillions of his own funds into an American Rescue Fund to provide direct relief and tax breaks to millions. Never mind the huge sums: Starmer isn’t going to be in government any time soon to pick up the bill. The motive lies in the message, but such radical policies are so far missing from any of his plans, supposedly to be saved up for an election manifesto. Until then, we are merely told by loyal have-beens, such as Ed Miliband, that Labour will “go big” and offer “genuine and transformational change”. This shrieks of the tired old phrasing of the party press release generator (how can “change” not be “transformational”?). Such dreck speaks to the moribund state of the party’s ideology. It also shows us the centre-left’s crucial indecisiveness on the economy: although self-proclaimed socialists, many like Starmer are afraid to decry the free market, while assuring us that they will never be tethered to its leash. At least, some voters will be minded to say, we knew what Corbyn thought of capitalism.
Starmer’s ambiguity, unsurprisingly, clashes vividly with Blair’s. The 1997 idea of “dynamic and competitive business and industry” would be a surprise addition to any Labour policy now, which focuses on the virtues of government hand-outs or the evils of multinational corporations and the like. Peter Mandelson’s famously relaxed attitude to the “filthy rich”, as long as they paid their taxes, may have stretched the bounds of vulgarity, but it made Labour’s affluent voters in the south very happy indeed. With the chances of a revival in the “Red Wall” seats seemingly scuppered, such muddled rhetoric as comes out from the party today pleases neither side of the economic divide. Rolling out Corbynite pledges, from higher rate tax rises to removing tax breaks from private schools, won’t win back the disgruntled Northern seats, whatever John McDonnell says. That will be done by absolving the party of all traces of Corbyn’s leadership which led to such losses.
Keir Starmer will not make his “covenant” with the public as Tony Blair did because he is not the same kind of politician. A simple history of the party tells us why: only personalities get Labour elected, not just ideology. Of the last ten Labour leaders, only two have ever been elected to Downing Street; both Wilson and Blair made their own pacts with the people through a desertion of the radical Left, and were, to different extents, populists of the kind Johnson now is. That Starmer certainly is not, and so the only path open to him is an ideological one. To pursue it may save his party, but it will not put him in power. Labour’s rapprochement with the electorate will take many more years, of which Starmer’s moderation can be but the foundation.
The most alarming fact in British politics is that a grisly pandemic has only increased the standing of a brazen populist in the shape of Boris Johnson, leaving the studiously reassuring blandness of the Leader of the Opposition to wonder at his luck. Such a mysterious consensus Labour can do little about, no matter how many policy pledges they roll out or how far they travel round the country to hear voters’ concerns. Internecine warfare with the Left will only serve to illustrate this for the years ahead, entertaining though it all is for the casual spectator. Only after all that, and with a fresher face at the front, might something else save Labour from itself. That something resembling credibility may one day even translate into power.
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