Another week, another “big speech” from Keir Starmer and another Tory immigration row. Just eight days ago, the Labour leader’s thoughts on the economy were overshadowed by James Cleverly’s new “five-point plan” to curb incomers.
On Tuesday, Starmer’s attempt to mark the fourth anniversary of the 2019 general election was similarly blitzed by a frantic focus on the latest Conservative in-fighting over Cleverly’s “Safety of Rwanda Bill”.
This time, at least Starmer could try to point up the contrast between his sober approach and Tory splintering that showed the “circus is back in Westminster again”, the return of the “psychodrama” trapping the nation.
But Starmer was keen to highlight both the factionalism and the unpopularity of his own party in recent years. And most notably, he was critical not just of the 2019 version of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, but also its 2015 version under Ed Miliband.
“Working people up and down our country looked at my party, looked at how we had lost our way – not just under Jeremy Corbyn, but for a while,” he said. “And they said ‘No. You don’t listen to us any more, you’re not in our corner, you don’t fight for our cause.’ And they were right, weren’t they?”
When questioned about this afterwards, Starmer doubled down. While Miliband was “a very good” Shadow Cabinet minister doing valuable things on climate change, “as a party we drifted too far from the core function of serving working people”. It was “a mistake” to think Corbyn’s 2019 party was the “sole cause” of Labour’s failure to connect with the public.
Leadership loyalists often say that whereas Corbyn and Miliband were seen by Middle England as a risky, almost threatening prospect in No 10, Starmer’s big asset is that he is seen as safe and unthreatening. Neither Lib Dems nor liberal Conservatives will cower in fear on polling day.
Just as importantly, hardline Tory voters who don’t like him may simply stay at home in disgust at their own government. Some of this thinking may even infect right-wing Tory MPs pondering whether to bring down Sunak or risk an early election.
One of the most telling features of Starmer’s latest speech was just how much he appealed to Tory voters of all types. He went out of his way to say he understood those who were persuaded by Boris Johnson over Brexit, saying they voted for change, for better public services and lower migration.
Yet he also made a direct pitch to liberal Conservatives dismayed by both the lack of competence but also the hard-right drift of recent years. Declaring that Britain has always been “a practical nation”, he stressed that the Conservatives had “reflected that” pragmatism in the past, “but these aren’t Churchillian Tories anymore”.
Forget claims that he agrees with Margaret Thatcher, this was more a paean of praise for politicians like Harold Macmillan (who incidentally built millions of new homes, another Starmer theme).
Thanks to their backing for the Rwanda bill, Starmer was also subtly pointing out that even the “One Nation” Conservatives in the current Tory party have fallen a long way from their liberalism when they support a policy that deports asylum seekers and seeks to replace the courts in deciding whether it complies with the law.
For me, the most ear-catching phrase was Starmer’s claim that his was “a Labour Party that will conserve as well as reform”. His riff that he wants to “pass on our institutions, our environment, our obligations to one another, in a better shape than we find them” felt aimed squarely at those liberal Tories and Lib Dems.
Of course, the most visible manifestation of Starmer’s conservatism, what he sees as his key weapon in reassuring any worried voters, is his fiscal conservatism.
Today, he said his message to the public was that “every pound of money we collect must be spent wisely, because it’s yours … you can’t have good public services without strong public finances” .
In the same vein, last week’s speech could be boiled down to one line: “Anyone who expects an incoming Labour government to quickly turn on the spending taps is going to be disappointed.”
Crucially, this is where Starmer’s criticism of his party having lost its way “for a while” also seems to stretch back to Gordon Brown’s tenure as well as Miliband and Corbyn’s.
Some Starmer allies certainly believe Brown blundered in the 2010 general election in not having a credible defence against David Cameron’s charges of profligacy. “I’m convinced we would have won that election if Gordon had listened to Alistair [Darling] and given the voters some credible spending restraint,” one former Cabinet minister tells me.
In his own memoirs, Darling made plain that Brown overruled his attempts to show the voters “we were going to spend less”, rather than just go for “apparently pain-free efficiency savings”.
He said Brown kept telling him he didn’t want to be remembered as “another Philip Snowden” (the Labour Chancellor from the 1930s who wanted cuts in the Great Depression). “Nor, I assured him, did I,” Darling pithily recalled, pointing out his spending curbs were of a different order. “Snowden, or at least his ghost, was not even in the room.”
The argument that Darling lost ahead of the 2010 election was one that has resonance today: whereas Tory austerity was reckless, Labour could have balanced protection of key services with the need to show the public reasonable spending restraint, he argued.
After Darling’s tragically untimely death this month, there was a mood at Westminster to “be more Alistair”, a tribute to his lifelong belief in public service and his gentle pragmatism. And it seems that Starmer, another former senior public servant unafraid of being called dull, is taking that to heart in his fiscal conservatism too.
It’s worth recalling that Liam Byrne, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury since ridiculed by the Tories for writing a letter that “there is no money”, used that phrase precisely because that’s what he had told Labour colleagues during spending cuts negotiations.
The Conservatives’ deployment of Byrne’s note has so far failed to cut through with voters more focused on the more recent Tory record of economic chaos. Former Tory chairman Greg Hands carried it everywhere on the campaign trail in local and by-elections, only to see Labour win.
But Labour under Starmer seems to carry that note around in its head – as a reminder of Labour’s reputation on spending and as reminder of the current dire public finances they’ll inherit.
The real difficulty for Starmer is not that his own MPs rebel against a Labour government that oversees spending restraint, it’s that Labour voters may rebel too. Austerity-lite may buy both time and credibility among some of the public, but unless that time is used to signal real change, the patience of many may snap.
Beating the Tories may turn out to be the easy bit of the next election. Meeting the public’s expectations of the cavalry arriving to rescue our broken public services, and of a rise in living standards, will be much trickier. The key for Starmer is that handling even that difficult dilemma in government is infinitely better than talking about it in opposition.
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