The battle of the New Year launch speeches enters its second day, with Labour leader Keir Starmer giving his own address in East London. Rishi Sunak said yesterday he had five ‘immediate priorities’ for fixing Britain. The Labour leader is offering a similar repair job this morning, while also trying to reassure voters this won’t involve his party spending vast sums of money. Starmer will say that, while his party will ‘give people a sense of possibility again’, this is not ‘code for Labour getting its big government chequebook out again’.
Starmer hasn’t been that bothered by complaints he’s a bit boring
Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves have made a virtue out of refusing shadow cabinet requests for spending commitments over the past few months to enable the leader to make this kind of promise. The Labour leader has spent that same period trying to challenge his party’s own sacred cows on Brexit and other issues, and today he will say that government is ‘no substitute for a robust private sector, creating wealth in every community’.
Starmer hasn’t been that bothered by complaints he’s a bit boring, surmising that the British public would probably find that a desirable quality after years of Tory psychodrama. His speech today is expected to go heavy on the optimism because being a boring moaner is rather less attractive. But we may well find that the Labour leader still offers a limited vision of a fixed Britain, as he did in his party conference speech.
Is his plan to return public services to an acceptable level that existed a few years ago, or is he keen for major reform of the NHS, education and so on? Some of his senior frontbenchers, such as Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, are most effective when they are pointing out how something could have been done better, rather than how very different Labour’s overall approach would be.
Starmer is expected to deride the short-termism of Westminster, which is a pretty standard thing for an opposition leader to complain about. But some Labour figures who are nonetheless happy with the way Starmer has taken on the hard left of the party think his caution makes Labour look like a plausible one-term government, not a party offering a long-term plan. Some Tories agree, incidentally, privately hoping they’ll only be out of power for five years before returning to government. Even if Starmer doesn’t care about being boring and restrained, he won’t want to give the impression he’s limiting Labour’s ambitions to this extent.
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