Time for a change is the most potent slogan in politics. It can, as Jim Callaghan observed in 1979, be irresistible: “There are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.”
We are in such a moment in the UK. It is now more than 780 days since Labour took the lead in UK opinion polls – and more than 500 since it polled below 40%.
Change is the settled will of the voters – but change to what? That is the question that dogs the Labour party. In focus group after focus group, voters say they don’t know what Keir Starmer stands for. There are good and straightforward answers. There are more than 200 published policies. There’s the 116-page national policy forum document. There are speeches by all the members of the shadow cabinet.
But rule one of politics is that the voters are never wrong. And rule two is, when you think they’re wrong you should refer back to rule one.
Voters need a change proposition in a change election. And tragically, over the past few months Labour’s leadership has been flirting with abandoning their one clear concrete plan for transformational change – the green prosperity fund. The latest and most serious briefings arise from a fear of what Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt might do in the budget and how they would then frame Labour’s spending plans.
Who, precisely, is the scary Sunak? The tech bro sitting at Elon Musk’s feet? The guy who cancelled HS2? The PM who condemned David Cameron as a failure, then put him in the cabinet? The Brexiter who originally lost the leadership to a remainer? To be frank, if you are a senior Labour politician who’s afraid of Sunak and Hunt then you have chosen the wrong profession.
Progressive parties win elections when they own the future and they own fairness. And there is no longer a debate about the broad shape of the future – there will be a transition to a decarbonised economy. Everything about the Tories’ record shows they cannot be trusted to handle such a project competently, swiftly, or fairly.
The field is open for Labour – and it’s where Labour’s industrial strategy comes in. For that is what the £28bn green prosperity fund is. The arguments for it are straightforward. Britain needs rebuilding. Britain needs more – not less – investment. Britain needs higher productivity. Who is against an industrial strategy?
The charge from the Tories always comes back to fiscal rules. (And we know how seriously the current government takes its own rules.) This is a political strategy, not an economic one – as the IMF warning this week against tax cuts clearly shows.
Labour should fight back politically. It has to win the hearts of the voters as well as their minds. You do that by standing for something and showing voters you will stick to it. Not by running from everything. Great parties have great purposes and hewing to Tory spending rules isn’t a great purpose.
Starmer knows this. The moment that he consolidated Labour’s lead was at conference last year. He not only told the country who he was, but what he would do. He committed to planning reform, housebuilding and building on the “grey belt”. Being brave and specific boosted Labour.
There are problems with the green prosperity fund, but they are easily dealt with. Social democrats shouldn’t brand a core policy “green”. Labour should call it what it is – an industrial strategy.
And the focus on the money was the most old-fashioned politics imaginable – voters care about impacts, not inputs. They want to know what the spending will actually deliver. The shadow cabinet should be able to show what the policy does. Retrofitting insulation on social housing cuts energy bills permanently and creates a lot of new skilled jobs. Properly told, there are stories for every community across the country.
A couple of years ago, Starmer echoed Harold Wilson’s famous line: “The Labour party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.” Today, he needs to reflect that if Labour doesn’t stand for change what does it stand for?
John McTernan was political secretary to prime minister Tony Blair and is now a political strategist for BCW
