One of the most powerful arguments in politics is “time for a change”. It was the Labour pitch back in 1987, but when Margaret Thatcher won a third term, she received a congratulatory letter from Douglas Hurd, who told her she had “defeated it, or rather captured it for your own purpose”.
Rishi Sunak briefly toyed with trying to do the same earlier this autumn, but unless something extraordinary happens, and we’ve hardly had an ordinary few years in politics, the coming year will bring a change in government. The polls suggest voters have bought the argument that it is time for a change. Even many Conservatives seem to think they’d benefit from a change of scene and a break from government. Rather less potent, though, is the sense of what the change actually looks like.
Keir Starmer probably doesn’t want to spend any more time praising Thatcher after the theatrical reaction to him making the entirely factual point that she was one of the politicians who changed Britain. But he does want this election year to end with him having captured the “time for a change” argument for his own purpose. He does also seem to want to change Britain, rather than just change the party in charge. In the next few months, he needs to give voters a clear idea of what kind of change he is selling them. He also needs to make sure it’s clear enough for his own party to have to crack on with some very difficult changes once in power.
Starmer won the Labour leadership in part because he didn’t give too strong a sense of what he was against or for. When I spoke to many MPs who ended up backing him during that contest in 2020, even they repeatedly said “he hasn’t said that much about what he believes yet”. Some of his critics felt this was less of a tactic and more down to Starmer genuinely not knowing what he thought about even quite important issues. His performance in the years since has suggested that the Labour leader has had to work out his position on the job. Of course, that is much better than coming to a brief with an analysis that is 30 years out of date, and anyway, Starmer became the change candidate because he was changing Labour back to being a party that actually thought government was worth aiming for.
The internal change is pretty much complete: the Corbynites are vanquished, Liam Byrne’s “no money” note is archive material that has been superseded by thousands of WhatsApp messages between Conservatives, and Labour has a shadow chancellor who business people are genuinely excited to meet. In the new year, Labour will start the formal access talks that opposition parties have with the civil service before an election.
It has a team at its HQ working on readiness for government that is known by superstitious staff as the “team with no name” because they fear cursing their chances by seeming too presumptive about a victory. Its frontbenchers have already received training on how to be in government so that power is not a total shock. After years of feeling homeless in their own party, they have largely snapped into loyalty mode to the extent that they instinctively clam up when someone is criticising their leader (unlike the Tories, who will join even in front of a hot mic). What might still be a jolt, though, is what some of them end up delivering.
It’s notable that Labour has a more distinct offering in policy areas where frontbenchers have a strong sense of what they stand for. It’s easiest to see how the NHS would look different under a Labour government, and that’s down to the work that Jon Ashworth did as shadow health secretary in shifting the narrative from being about acute services to the importance of community and preventive healthcare, and then to Wes Streeting for starting a mature debate about using the private sector and tackling vested interests within the NHS. Ashworth did a similar job in welfare before moving to the cabinet office brief, where he can consider how the government machinery needs to change so anyone has a chance of getting things done.
However, NHS and welfare reform in themselves could consume the Labour party from within and there are still gaping holes in the pitch to the electorate on these issues. Some insiders argue that New Labour hardly set out its entire programme for government in 1997: indeed, some of its pledge card promises like “treating an extra 100,000 patients” didn’t make any sense, and Tony Blair himself is very clear that he didn’t think that much about the NHS before he came into government.
The counterpoint to that, though, is that Blair also regrets not cracking on with public service reform sooner, and the challenges in all policy areas are arguably far worse than in the late 1990s. Starmer needs his party to know what it is facing so it will support him through major reforms early on. He needs the public to be well aware of that so it buys into what will have to be a long-term project.
Starmer has developed a habit of making big statements that he knows will provoke a reaction in parts of the Labour party so that he can show the public how different he is to his predecessors (including his own frontbencher Ed Miliband). The praise for Thatcher was one moment, another has been him talking about a “partnership” with the private sector, which neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Miliband would have even contemplated. Sometimes his desire for provocation means he says things he hasn’t thought through, or that he probably doesn’t really believe, like his clumsy answer on Israel cutting off food and power to Gaza in the early days of the conflict. In other instances, the row over his slaying of one sacred cow overshadows the threat to another. On the NHS, it’s inflammatory enough to some parts of the left to say that the government should be making more use of private sector capacity and developing a better relationship with private providers.
But what will be much more incendiary is the logical implication of a shift from acute to preventive healthcare, which is closing hospitals. Labour is not turning on the spending taps after the election, and so it will have to move money from one part of the NHS to the other, rather than spending more cash on both. And closing hospitals is the kind of thing that actually winds up the electorate as well as MPs, who would campaign to keep their local hospital even if it was killing people. Would Starmer be able to withstand that kind of reaction?
In other policy areas, the Tory death spiral is so strong that it really is enough to say “we would do this better”, which is what Yvette Cooper has been saying for months on illegal immigration. The Rwanda policy is no more a deterrent now than a scarecrow with birds nesting in its hat, and it is tempting for Labour to feast on the endless mishaps of the Conservatives rather than develop a full immigration policy that it is ready to roll with. Other policy areas, such as justice, have been a basket case under the Conservatives for almost their entire tenure, but it isn’t clear to voters how the creaking courts, sentencing and broken prisons would be different under Labour, other than just “better”.
One of the reasons the Tories are so out of love with being in power is that it is hard, relentless and wearing. It is also easy to fail to deliver on all of your priorities, which is something Sunak is having to contemplate given that he and his predecessors don’t have much evidence of Tory achievements other than on education reform. If and when Labour gets into government on a “time for change” ticket, it won’t have any time to work out what it wants to do, or to change course because the reforms would be too unpopular with certain special interest groups. It barely has much time left to say what the change really needs to be.
That creates a stick or twist dilemma for Starmer in an election year. Sticking with the current cautious approach will probably be enough to get Labour over the line this time, so woeful is the state of the Tories. But it risks leaving the party bereft of the big ideas and momentum that will propel it to start the business of change. Starmer rightly admires Thatcher for being clear about how she would transform Britain, and even more so for the fact she managed it. It’s his turn to harness that for his own purpose.
• Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of the Spectator
