Starmer’s fresh start

Social democracy is rooted in the simple idea that, where humanly possible, every citizen should be treated fairly. If this idea interests you, it’s time to get off the fence. The centre-Left is on the up again and not just in Britain: in the US, Brazil, Germany, Australia, Spain and others. The question is whether it’s got the will and the nous to win.

The British Conservative Party has collapsed into a rabble of competing factions. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, sits in Downing Street desperately hoping to convey a sense of competence and purpose. He repeats with all the bravura he can summon his five priorities, trying to drown out increasingly loud noises off.

His two predecessors wander the world cashing in on their broken reputations. Boris Johnson has been quietly encouraging – or at any rate not discouraging — his admirers to prepare for his restoration in 2028. But this phoenix will not rise again.

Liz Truss is repeating the mantra to anyone who will listen that “I wuz robbed” after her eye-catching time in office. It’s a somewhat sad spectacle, but in a vacuum all manner of things rush to fill it.

Others, notably the Home Secretary Suella Braverman, are running for the next leadership contest. She is brazenly pitching herself as the standard-bearer of the disciplinarian Right. It’s not the next election she’s interested in. It’s the one after.

The Tories – at least those that have been paying attention — have all but conceded the next election. The list of Conservatives who have said they will not stand is conspicuously long and includes a number of former ministers.

The hammering the party took at the recent local elections — they lost more than 1000 councillors — may not necessarily point to an outright Labour victory. But it certainly doesn’t point to a Tory one.

Sunak is left pretending that the wheels are still attached to the Tory war machine while the freshly-minted National Conservatives pursue the bizarre idea, against all the available evidence, that the key to retaining power lies in moving further to the Right.

After 13 years at the helm, a once-proud election-winning movement is adrift, not knowing which way to turn without a political, let alone a moral, compass. There are hardly any wise old heads left to steer the party back on course. Most were sacrificed on the altar of Brexit.

Winning elections is partly about context but largely about messaging and organisation. The present context favours change. The politics of austerity — in the aftermath of the 2008 financial calamity and the 2020 Covid pandemic — has left people feeling poorer, in some cases to the point of destitution.

No amount of massaging by Tory spin doctors can disguise the reality which is rooted in four big themes: prolonged stagnant real incomes; the effects of the pandemic; the sharp deterioration in Britain’s terms of trade (imports costing more than we earn in exports); and the spike in energy prices caused by the war in Ukraine and, last but by no means least, Brexit.

The fall in real GDP per head between 2019 and 2022 has been the biggest among the G7. The surge in prices continues to take a huge bite out of real earnings, relentlessly penalising the less well-off.

Finally, to quote Nigel Farage, a man whose legacy is as consequential as it is damaging, “Brexit has failed”. Of course, like armchair communists of yore who excused Stalinism, he blames everyone else. But even he cannot disguise the fact that, as we come up to its seventh anniversary, far from freeing the spirit and creating boundless new opportunities, Brexit has left Britain less well-off, with no obvious way of clawing back its losses.

Britain desperately needs to find a way out of this economic and political cul-de-sac. It needs growth, higher productivity (which continues to languish well below its peers), higher rates of savings and investment, more houses, reform of our pensions system and proper incentives to encourage risk-taking. Without these it cannot afford to finance better public services, which have been slashed to the bone.

I would go further. Without a sober, balanced plan for growth that balances incentives with fairness Britain risks a prolonged period of instability and economic stagnation.

So it’s time for Britain’s progressive parties to take themselves seriously and to build on what seems to be yet another reshaping of the political map, now that Johnson’s Red Wall/Blue South coalition lies in tatters. At the heart of such an approach lies that most uncomfortable yet most obvious of political strategies: cooperative politics to make the most of the Tories’ disarray and leading, in due course, to electoral reform. This is crucial.

More than twice as many people voted for the three main opposition parties in the local elections as voted for the Conservatives. This is a gift horse courtesy of 13 years of Conservative politics which the Opposition would be mad to ignore.

The Tories have imploded. Ideology, a particularly un-Tory idea, has led them down a rabbit hole from which they will take a long time to re-emerge as a serious, mature political force. Small boats, woke culture, family values may wind up the base. But they are deeply divisive and no substitute for the kind of real change Britain needs if it is to recover its composure and its mojo.

Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, is key to such a fresh approach. Even if he wins an outright majority he needs to adopt a big tent approach to governing. This does not imply a coalition government, just a coalition of national interests.

The next government’s urgent task is to improve people’s lives by prioritising social and economic reform. It needs to lay the foundations of a fairer, more widely prosperous and fulfilled Britain where human rights and individual freedom are respected.

It needs to re-inject decency into governing, come down hard on corruption and the notion — deeply embedded in this recent iteration of the Conservative Party — that there’s one rule for them and one rule for the rest of us.

Downing Street needs to stop being a source of antagonism, patronage and divisiveness. Prime Ministers invariably claim to govern for all the people, but end up pleasing their base. Starmer must be bold enough to buck this trend, if not for the sake of his party then for Britain.

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