Starmer has no vision. Is that a bad thing?

Keir Starmer seems to be most comfortable when he’s pointing out how badly the Tories are doing, rather than when he is setting out his own plans. This afternoon he talked about the importance of long-term decision-making, skills and supply side reform: none of which would sound out of place in a speech by Jeremy Hunt or Rishi Sunak.

The question-and-answer session afterwards was more enlightening than his speech. Starmer distanced himself not just from the Conservatives on public spending, but the Labour party too. There would be no opening of the spending taps, he said in his speech, and he further articulated this in answers afterwards, saying that having run a public service, he knew that ‘if you put more money in the top, you tend to get a better product out, but if you want a really better product, you’ve got to reform it’. Labour had been in a ‘habit’ for a long time of ‘thinking that the lever that is spend, investment, is the only lever that can ever be pulled’. He didn’t accept that. Planning reform would mean businesses could grow at the rate they wanted, and NHS reform would bring healthcare ‘closer to people in their communities’. 

But he dodged questions on whether public services would end up getting less money. Starmer insisted that ‘we are a party that always invests in our public services’, which wasn’t the same as the question of whether services would remain at the level they are at the moment or whether there was a new age of austerity. He complained that some Conservatives had briefed that ‘the King’s Speech was all about making my life difficult’, adding: ‘I don’t care which political party you support: government should never be reduced to that.’

He also all but rejected the Labour principle of redistribution when asked about it, saying that ‘of course’ he hadn’t given up on redistribution, but ‘I think it’s very important to recast the way redistribution should work’, and that it should not be the ‘one word answer for the rest of country’ outside London and the South East. He said Labour had made that ‘mistake’ in the past ‘and that lacks the basic dignity and respect that working people want, they want their economy to grow where they are, they want their place to be part of the wealth creation’. The £28 billion green investment would only happen if Labour got the growth it wanted and the money was within the fiscal rules. He emphasised the importance of the ‘three to one ratio’ whereby every £1 of public money triggered £3 of private investment. 

Oh, and he rejected Margaret Thatcher’s politics, for those Labourites who’ve spent the weekend down a weird rabbit hole in which they’ve wondered if their leader actually secretly wants to roll back the frontiers of the state since he pointed out that the late Conservative prime minister had achieved a lot. He clarified the point he had been making in the Sunday Telegraph, saying: ‘Thatcher, now of course it doesn’t mean I agree with what she did, but you don’t have to agree with someone to recognise they had a vision and a plan, in her particular case about entrepreneurship.’ But even though he has been studying Thatcher (and Attlee and Blair, who he also named), he hasn’t quite got into the habit of setting out his particular purpose for himself.