Keir Starmer is no longer a leader under pressure – at least for now. When he set out his ‘Five Missions for a Better Britain’ yesterday during a speech in Manchester he did so from the vantage point of a huge Labour lead in the opinion polls and an election victory seemingly in the bag. A few days ago, he consigned his troublesome predecessor Jeremy Corbyn to history by confirming he would not be allowed to stand at the next election. Starmer dominates his party like no Labour leader since Tony Blair in his pomp. But when Blair became prime minister, everybody thought they were clear what Blairism was about. However less than eighteen months from a general election there are still big questions about what Starmerism represents. When voters are asked what they associate with Starmer many simply reply he is boring and that they just don’t know what his party stands for.
The Labour leader’s speech was meant to address those problems, by firing up voters about his ultimate ambitions for government. All five missions, covering the economy, the NHS, crime, the climate crisis and education, are certainly bold; indeed he conceded some will take a decade to fulfil. These grand aims inevitably raise questions about how exactly they will be achieved. It’s all very well wanting the highest sustained growth rate in the G7 but, sceptics will ask, is that not putting the cart before the horse? They also leave pressing matters like the current cost of living crisis unaddressed.
There are big questions about what Starmerism represents
Even so, the speech confirms what some students of Starmerism have known for some time. Neither Corbynite nor Blairite, Starmer is – and perhaps this means he is boring for those who pant for a politics of permanent excitement – a mainstream, centrist social democrat. A youthful Bennite during the 1980s, by the time Starmer became an MP in 2015 he was closely aligned with then-leader Ed Miliband – who now sits in his shadow cabinet – and the party’s soft left. This was confirmed when in 2016 like most other Labour MPs Starmer called on Corbyn to step down as leader and voted for Owen Smith as his replacement.
That Starmer decided to serve in the re-elected leader’s shadow cabinet and so sought to make Corbyn prime minister in 2019 shows his, let us say, pragmatism; as did his courting of Corbyn supporters by making ten pretty radical pledges so he could succeed him as leader, many of which he has now set aside. This has led to the charge, from Momentum to the Conservative party, that Starmer will say anything for votes, that whatever he says now cannot be trusted. This is an accusation he still has trouble refuting and may come back to bite him at the general election.
Yet now safely ensconced as leader of a transformed party on the verge of power, Starmer’s speech represents something close to his own moderate social democratic outlook. Without his plan being enacted, Starmer fears that Britain will continue to flounder under a Tory government that lacks the ability to prepare for the future. Indeed, ever since becoming Labour leader, it is the desperate need for planning which has often been at the centre of many of Starmer’s rhetorical attacks on the government.
‘Government can prevent problems, as well as fix them’, he asserted, and it can even ‘shape markets rather than serve them’. That is the speech’s most crucial statement: the private sector under Starmer will find itself subservient to public authority, be it local or national. However, like all moderate social democrats, Starmer still sees the market, reshaped or otherwise by government, as important. He argued there ‘is a massive role for the private sector’ in achieving his five missions. But, Starmer warned, ‘if the aspiration is merely to replace the public sector while extracting a rent to privatise the profits, while socialising the risk, that takes us nowhere.’
Whatever Starmer said in his speech, we will not know the final shape of Starmerism until he becomes prime minister. Starmer once said his favourite Labour leader was Harold Wilson and because of that Wilson is now often evoked in Labour circles: his shadow secretary of state for trade Nick Thomas-Symonds even recently published a biography. Wilson had a talent for a telling phrase (something Starmer still lacks), his most famous and inspirational being, when he said in 1963, that his government would unleash ‘the white heat of technological change’ and super-charge an economy in the doldrums. His declared ambition for growth was as great as the one Starmer outlined in his speech. But in office Wilson’s economic policy was timid, at odds with itself and soon knocked off course by his determination to defend the value of sterling, from which his grand National Plan never recovered. His government was a huge disappointment and despite winning a landslide in 1966 Wilson lost the next general election, with Wilsonism in tatters. In politics, words and speeches matter: but actions usually speak louder.
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