Keir Starmer and the Labour party today launched a manifesto that’s good enough to win this election and presented it in a commensurate manner. If that comes across as damning with faint praise then this is what your author intended. After all, there was – as Beth Rigby of Sky News noted in her question to Starmer – no new policy and no discernible retail offer for voters in the entire manifesto.
Starmer made a virtue of that, stressing that all Labour’s ambitions to provide better public services and build a fairer society depended on economic growth picking up to provide the funds to make them happen. He even had his no doubt carefully chosen audience dashing to don the hair shirts, winning strong applause from it as he told Rigby: ‘It’s not about pulling rabbits out of the hat. I am a candidate to be prime minister, not a candidate to run the circus.’
For now Labour is well in the ascendancy
And Starmer – very much performing at the ceiling of his abilities – even managed a competent ad lib when responding to a heckler by declaring ‘we gave up being a party of protest five years ago, we want to be a party of power’.
As the event wore on, so the flaws and niggles started to show. For example, ITV’s Robert Peston pointed out that Starmer could not guarantee sufficient growth in his first year in power to avoid having to impose some public spending cuts and even potentially across-the-board austerity.
The Labour leader replied: ‘We are not going to return to austerity. I am never going to allow a Labour government to do that to public services. Never.’ But that carte blanche assurance totally cut across his earlier message that the old-style Labour obsession with how the national cake gets shared out was over and that growth was a pre-condition for funding adequate public spending.
Starmer also name checked Labour’s wrong-headed plan for a new Race Equality Act that will define any disproportionate outcomes by ethnicity, whether over-achievement or under-achievement, as being the result of unconscionable ‘structural racism’. This further racialising of basically everything is going to be a divisive disaster should it actually get implemented.
The outrageous gerrymander of giving 16-year-olds the vote also made the manifesto, without any accompanying plan to allow that age group to drive, serve on juries, buy alcohol in pubs or get married. Hopefully Nigel Farage will be proven correct in his assessment that those now entering their mid-teens, especially boys, are turning rightwards politically at a rate of knots. Were Labour’s cynical manipulation of the franchise to rebound on it in 2029 then it would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
But for now Labour is well in the ascendancy. The central messages that it can be trusted with the public finances, will not throw around taxpayers’ money like confetti at a wedding and will not increase the rate of income tax, national insurance or VAT were all satisfactorily communicated by Starmer.
Labour’s event managers also got some members of the public in at the start to do the human stuff that Starmer struggles with, including a man whose NHS cancer treatment delays had left him terminally ill. That packed a far more impressive emotional punch than did Rishi Sunak wheeling on Gillian Keegan at the Tory launch to talk about growing up working class.
So we can award a six out of ten to Starmer. There was no trouble at mill, no hue and cry and horses were left grazing unfrightened in the fields. Any Tory spin doctors looking for material with which to set off a stampede of nervous voters back to the flagging blue team are liable to be disappointed.
Labour’s habitual vote will turn out in force for it on 4 July, along with sufficient floating voters to require a Tory team operating at peak capacity to stop it in its tracks. And we all know that’s not where the Tories are right now.
Join Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Kate Andrews for a post-election live recording of Coffee House Shots in Westminster, Thu 11 July. Bar opens 6.30pm, recording starts 7pm
Comments