Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

Starmer’s essay is gold dust for Boris

Keir Starmer’s incredible shrinking pamphlet was initially said to run to 14,000 words, then 13,000, then 12,500 and now 11,000 is even being mentioned.

As someone who has read it from start to finish, let me assure you that whichever of those word counts is accurate, it’s still much too long. But those who are disparaging the document as useless are nevertheless barking up the wrong tree. In fact, it is a tremendously useful document – but useful to the Conservatives rather than Labour.

Because while earnest Sir Keir has failed to come up with anything that will produce the kind of visceral connection with the electorate that could presage political momentum, he has nonetheless telegraphed to the Tories his basic plan of attack. In doing so, he has highlighted his own areas of greatest weakness.

Starmer is far too pedestrian a character for this to be a feint. Were he a D-Day commander he would find himself in the position of just having told the enemy all about his actual plodding and easily beatable strategy for taking them on rather than having convinced them he intended to land on one set of beaches while secretly lining-up another.

So on cultural issues we now have confirmation that Starmer’s approach will be simply to accuse the Tories of deliberately stoking divisions whenever they arise, while himself actively supporting radical left-wing stances only when he feels that the power of his own party’s vested interests means that he has to.

Hence it is that a leader who adopted the BLM gesture of knee-taking, brought from across the Atlantic, lambasts the Tories for ‘ongoing attempts to import American-style divisions on social, cultural and sometimes national lines’. 

Then we come to his areas of most excruciating weakness. Immigration is chief among these

He also pledges to bring in a new Race Equality Act to tackle ‘structural racism’ – the phenomenon blamed by the Left for under-representation of ethnic minority groups in any activity or field of employment.

Will this wash with the electorate – especially the culturally conservative Red Wall voters Labour needs to win back? I highly doubt it and so does Tony Blair who recently wrote: 

‘The cultural message, because he is not clarifying it, is being defined by the ‘Woke’ Left, whose every statement gets cut-through courtesy of the Right.

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