Keir Starmer has given up trying to define what a ‘working person’ is after last week’s debacle, announcing at the start of his pre-Budget speech today that working people know who they are. The Prime Minister said:
‘I know some people want to have a debate about this, and I know there will always be an exception that proves the rule. Welcome to the wonders of a diverse country. But I also know that the working people of this country know exactly who they are.’
Even though Starmer is explicitly copying the Tories in 2010, he sounded more like Nick Clegg in that era
It’s a better move than attempting to draw increasingly tight circles around the people Labour isn’t going to raise taxes on. But it does also mean that some voters will be surprised come Wednesday to discover that, regardless of how they describe themselves, it turns out they’re still going to be worse off.
Anticipating a negative reaction from those people and others, Starmer repeatedly told the audience in Birmingham that he would not change course. He peppered his speech with phrases like ‘we won’t be distracted from our task’, and ‘these are my priorities for change, and I won’t change course’. He also claimed that the government was frontloading the difficult decisions, saying it was ‘our intention to take the tough decisions here and now up front, in the hope that we can then build and rebuild the country on that stable foundation’. But notably he refused to rule out further tax rises in subsequent budgets – a promise he was wise to dodge – saying: ‘I can’t give you a cast iron guarantee that never again in any budget will there be any adjustment to tax, because we just don’t know what’s around the corner’.
Much of Starmer’s strategy in the first few months of his government has been to copy the Conservatives in 2010, attacking his predecessors for a disastrous inheritance and blaming all the difficult decisions on that inheritance. That messaging had gone a bit awry in recent weeks, with cabinet ministers failing to lay it on as thick as they should be doing in the run up to the Budget – perhaps because they don’t fully believe it. But today Starmer went back to it, with a stronger line that this was a much tougher inheritance for an incoming government than in 2010 or 1997. He said:
‘Look – nobody wants higher taxes, just like nobody wants public spending cuts. But we have to be realistic about where we are as a country. This is not 1997, when the economy was decent but public services were on their knees. And it’s not 2010, where public services were strong, but the public finances were weak. We have to deal with both sides of that coin.’
Mind you, even though Starmer is explicitly copying the Tories in 2010, he sounded more like Nick Clegg in that era, particularly with his promise in the speech to track the government’s progress on its key priorities. He said:
‘In the coming weeks, on every mission, we will publish clear ambitions for this Parliament and we will also track our progress against them, so that every single person in this country can see exactly how we measure up to things that matter to them.’
Starmer wasn’t even in parliament when the coalition government went through a phase of marking its own homework on how well it was delivering on its own agreement, along with very earnest monthly press conferences from Clegg about what he was up to. It all went a bit to pot in the second half of that government as the two parties tried to differentiate, which might well happen within the Labour party itself given the size of its majority.
The PM also tried to frame the debate for the Tories, arguing that if they wanted to oppose what the Chancellor Rachel Reeves was announcing, they needed to offer an alternative. That’s not going to be possible on Budget Day – it rarely is, but particularly when the man responding to your announcements is just days away from leaving the job. But it may not be possible for a few months, either, if Kemi Badenoch wins the Tory leadership contest and conducts the kind of fundamental review of Conservative principles and policies that she has promised. The Opposition won’t have any alternatives for a long while.
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