Every time I go to my supermarket I see a big container asking for food to be donated. Food banks are now a common thing in this country. Everywhere I go I see people sleeping on the pavement. Outside one of the supermarkets I go to shop a man is regularly sleeping and begging for some money. On the tubes young men approach the passengers telling pitiful stories in the hope of getting them to give some money. You expect this in developing countries trying to lift themselves out of poverty, not in a country that is the sixth largest economy in the world … writes Mihir Bose
You would not expect Sir Keir Starmer to be in a casino in Monte Carlo putting down chips in order to win the jackpot. Nor would you expect him to spend his afternoons in a High Street bookie’s shop trying to find the winner of the 2:15 in Carlisle. Yet, his announcement this week that Britain faces severe financial and societal problems and that this will take time, perhaps even 10 years, to solve shows that he is a gambler. His gamble is that by warning the people of the perils we face when the good times come they will feel very grateful to him and to the Labour Party.
Normally politicians when they come to power, particularly after such a resounding victory as Keir Starmer has, raising Labour from the ashes of bitter defeat under Jeremy Corbyn, would not be bearing such messages of doom. They would be talking of the sunny lands that can already be glimpsed and of the wonderful times that are coming. They would be promising people, like Harold Macmillan did in 1957, that you have never had it so good on the back of which he won the 1959 election. The message from Starmer is you never had it so bad, and the good times will take a long time to come.
So, what is Starmer playing at?
Obviously, this country faces major problems both in economics and in societal terms. It is true recent unemployment and economic figures are better than expected. Unemployment fell in three months to June and the UK has grown more rapidly than any other member of the G7 in the six months of this year. Aso the inflation rate is now 2.2% having reached a peak of 11 %. But the fundamental issues of growth remain. Among the G7 countries this country’s productivity is by far the worst and while there was a £39 billion surplus in services there was a £52 million deficit in goods. This country will never recover its manufacturing dominance of old but it’s not even doing anything to match some of its competitors.
The riots we have seen clearly indicate social problems which are deep rooted with the whole question of immigration once again an issue as it has been for the last half a century except back in the 60s it was a question of sending back legal migrants because of their colour. Now it’s a question of asylum seekers and those who come illegally on boats.
But despite all that to give such a dire warning within weeks of coming to office is very unusual.
It is understandable that Starmer should try to dampen down expectations. But the real strategy is to pin the problems firmly on the Conservatives and here the Labour Party have learnt from the Conservative play book as played by David Cameron. When he came to power he and his close friend George Osborne, the Chancellor, pinned austerity firmly on Labour. A departing Labour minister had left a note for his incoming Conservative successor saying there is no money left. It was meant to be a joke and the sort of bonhomie that goes on between politicians of different parties despite the strident notes they strike when in public and when discussing policies in an effort to get people to vote for them. But far from treating it as a joke the minister and his colleagues used it as a serious document and has never let Labour forget it.
Labour, after nursing this wound for 14 years, has decided that the problems this country faces will always be associated with the departing Tories. This serves one major aim. It is to make sure that the Tories are painted as a party that cannot govern this country. This is basically a right of centre country which almost invariably votes the Tories into power, only very occasionally it turns to Labour. Harold Wilson tried to reverse it. Tony Blair came the closest with three election victories and had he not ventured into Iraq might have managed it. Gordon Brown, despite claiming to be the cleverest politician of his generation, failed his lines and Labour lost power for 14 years. Now, having come back in such a dramatic fashion, Keir Starmer wants to make Labour the party that is always in power not occasionally tasting power after decades of Conservative rule. To brand the Conservatives as unable to govern, unable to manage the economy, unable to deal with societal problems would be the ideal way to do it.
The problem with this approach is that given the conditions the country is in people are looking for some hope and for some relief. You do not have to even walk much around the country to see that there are problems. Every time I go to my supermarket I see a big container asking for food to be donated. Food banks are now a common thing in this country. Everywhere I go I see people sleeping on the pavement. Outside one of the supermarkets I go to shop a man is regularly sleeping and begging for some money. On the tubes young men approach the passengers telling pitiful stories in the hope of getting them to give some money. You expect this in developing countries trying to lift themselves out of poverty, not in a country that is the sixth largest economy in the world.
Also, in doing this Starmer is breaking with the way previous Labour Prime Ministers had behaved. Starmer is the fourth Labour Prime Minister to win a huge majority after Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair. But in 1945, despite the war and all the devastations it had brought, Attlee promised a New Britain and in many ways delivered with the National Health Service and nationalisation of industries that needed to be government controlled. Harold Wilson promised the white heat of technology and while that didn’t quite work out there were many innovations such as the Open University which are now part of society. Tony Blair promised that the sunlit world was coming and while many of his policies were opposed by the Conservatives they are now part of the fabric of society. Just as the Conservatives have long accepted the National Health Service they do not oppose the minimum wage or having directly elected mayors. Those Labour governments while they told people that the Conservatives had left behind a mess offered hope and showed the path ahead.
Starmer is not doing that. Starmer is laying it down as starkly and bleakly as possible.
Politics can work in different ways. You only have to see that by the reaction to Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, deciding that the winter fuel allowance will not be paid to everybody over 60. This was a measure introduced by Gordon Brown when Labour came to power in 1997. It was not means tested. That the well off and rich receive it was always curious and what Rachel Reeves has done can be justified but it also means that people will miss out. The means testing has raised a storm of protest even from Labour. This shows political decisions have to be well packaged and the Rachel Reeves announcement was very clearly not.
I agree with Starmer’s message that the politics of performance is not what we need. The politics of performance is a recent phenomenon in British politics and will always be associated with Boris Johnson who reduced politics to a musical act or a performance in the West End theatre. Tony Blair did like his sound bites. But Johnson took it to a new level that has never been matched. The politics of performance also means always seeking the next day’s, even the next hour’s headline on X , TikTok 24-hour news, the following morning’s paper. Politics needs to be much more than a song and a dance routine at the end of which there is nothing to cherish.
Starmer is right to move away from that. But his problem is that he comes over as a technocrat, he may prove a good technocrat but on that the jury is out. Great politicians always have a memorable phrase you associate with them. In my youth it was John Kennedy in his inaugural speech in 1961 declaring, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country’, a phrase I heard as a young boy in India but which resonated with me even though he had delivered it on a very cold, bitter, winter day in Washington very far removed from the India I was growing up in.
Tony Blair’s memorable words have also long resonated ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. I remember the first time I was made aware that Tony Blair was exceptional was when a nephew of mine, who could not be more right wing, told me he had heard this phrase uttered by Tony Blair when appearing in a House of Commons committee and here was a man who would become the next Prime Minister. My nephew was right, and he might have left a different legacy but for his Iraq misadventure.
It is hard to imagine Keir Starmer coming up with a phrase that we will remember. He didn’t come up with one when the riots took place a few weeks ago. He hasn’t come up with one about the economic situation we face.
He gives me the impression of being a football manager who’s taken over a struggling club. He comes in and he tells the fans the club faces many problems and there will have to be changes in the squad if he is to deliver the success the fans so eagerly want. He dampens expectations and then should the club win honours, like a League title, he can present himself as the messiah. Starmer is a very devoted football man and passionate about his favourite team Arsenal who in the last two seasons have come close to winning the Premiership. Arsenal winning it and beating Manchester City, who look invincible, would the equivalent of Tories branded as the party that can’t be trusted in Downing Street and Labour taking over that position.
Starmer has gambled but whether he emerges from the casino with the chips, or the bookies with a lot of cash, is a very open question.
(Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie, Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British)
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