It must be great fun being Keir Starmer at the moment.
Eighteen months ago he was asking aides ‘why does everybody hate us?’ in the wake of Labour’s disastrous defeat at the Hartlepool by-election. Now scoring points off the Tories is like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel.
The Conservatives have ceded so much political territory that the Labour leader doesn’t even properly have to upset his base among soft-left progressives in order to woo back traditionalist Red Wall voters or even to resonate with diehard Tories.
Hence was he able to exploit for his own political ends the tax-raising, growth-killing Budget delivered by Jeremy Hunt last week when he appeared on a special edition of Chopper’s Politics, the podcast run by the Telegraph’s Christopher Hope.
‘We have got to grow our economy because that’s the only way we can actually make the progress that we need to make. On taxes, the highest tax since the second world war, this really is anti-Conservative stuff’ said Starmer.
‘I want taxes to come down for working people. They’ve been really clobbered time and time again, whether that’s on income tax, whether it’s national insurance or council tax,’ he added.
In normal times such vague aspirations wouldn’t butter many parsnips, as John Major might have put it. Especially coming from the leader of a party thought to have over-taxing and over-spending written into its DNA.
But these are not normal times. The test Starmer is having to pass with key groups of target voters right now is not ‘do we really believe him?’ but the much more forgiving question: ‘could he really be any worse than what we’ve got?’
So it is sufficient for Sunak just to show that he feels the pain of the Tory electoral coalition by using the buzz phrases of its most disenchanted elements (‘We have got to grow our economy’, ‘the highest tax since the second world war’).
There is nothing much in this that can upset existing Labour supporters, other than those of a hardened Corbynite persuasion who already hate him anyway.
Yet the sympathetic vibe picked up by Tories makes it more likely they will sit on their hands come election day or even tacitly will a Labour victory, so infuriated are they with the leaders of their own team.
It is not only on tax policy that Starmer is scooping up at the moment. His speech on immigration policy to the CBI was similarly couched. There was no substantial shift to a lower immigration approach. But there were plenty of phrases about the need to commit to training more home-grown workers and get out of the mindset of always relying on more immigration.
‘Any movement in our points-based migration system – whether via the skilled worker route, or the shortage occupations list – will come alongside new conditions for business. We will expect you to bring forward a clear plan to boost skills and more training, for better pay and conditions, for investment in new technology,’ he said.
That in fact amounted to a nod and a wink that Labour will be ready to consider yet further easing of immigration conditions, albeit with strings attached.
Had the Conservatives delivered the lower immigration they’ve been promising for 12 years, Starmer’s speech would have been laughed out of the court of public opinion, especially in marginal Red Wall seats. But in fact all the Tories have delivered is the highest immigration and the most liberal migration regime on record.
So Starmer was able to signal to the pro-mass immigration part of his voter coalition that high migration will continue while simultaneously courting those who have seen their wages undercut and want to know that someone feels their pain. And the reason he was able to do this was the lack of a credible competing offer from the governing party.
On issue after issue – healthcare, criminal justice, housing to name just a few others – there is now lots of scope for Starmer to tickle the tummies of groups of target voters without much risk of losing his base.
One could gripe that he doesn’t deserve to have it this easy. But on the other hand he plodded stolidly on when the going was very tough during his first 18 months in charge. He’s clearly no Tony Blair but in the face of the Tory clown show, becoming a poor man’s John Smith may well be plenty good enough for him to win.
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