Keir Starmer’s people don’t like the word “relaunch”, but that’s what it is. On Thursday, the prime minister will give a set-piece speech about a “Plan for Change” that really should have materialised back in July. It will seemingly be based on “tangible outcomes” and the insistence that the government machine is newly focused on issues such as early years education and NHS waiting lists, briefed to the media in a blizzard of official statistics. What has triggered all this is not exactly mysterious: amid dire approval ratings and a general sense of malaise and mishap – the latest hiccup is the somewhat farcical departure of the transport secretary, Louise Haigh – his administration is palpably unpopular.
The truth, of course, is that the prime minister and his colleagues hardly attracted much acclaim and affection in the first place. In July, only one in five of the electorate voted Labour. Our electoral system might maintain the appearance of politics-as-usual, but a lot of us know what is really afoot: the UK’s increasing resemblance to any number of European countries, with two supposedly main parties competing for a declining share of the vote, while everything fragments and hard-right populists seize on people’s continuing resentments. As evidenced by Starmer’s recent acknowledgment that “very many people didn’t vote Labour at the last election”, the tension between his government’s parliamentary majority and its dearth of support in the real world remains its defining feature.
It also has glaring issues to do with tone and political style. Just under a fortnight ago, I spent a cold Tuesday reporting on the farmers’ protests that took place opposite Downing Street. Amid endless Barbour jackets and wellies and the hyped-up presence of Nigel Farage and Jeremy Clarkson, what hit me most of all was the contrast between the language used on either side of the argument: an object lesson in the fact that politics now takes place in two separate realities, and why the government is so accident prone.
The farmers on the podium talked about family, history and the emotional pull of the British landscape. I heard evocations of people working so hard that their hands bled and the trials of bereavement. In response, the government mostly stuck to dry numbers – “Couples can pass on £3m tax-free, and those above the thresholds will pay only half the normal rate, and can pay over 10 years interest-free,” said Angela Rayner – and its usual abstract language. “The economic situation the government inherited has required us to make tough choices,” said a Downing Street spokesperson, the kind of insistence that suggests No 10 has its own magnetic poetry set.
These are familiar shortcomings among politicians on the centre left, and they have been for a very long time. Back in 2007, the US psychologist and political strategist Drew Westen published his brilliant book The Political Brain, an analysis of why the Republican party had become much better at connecting with voters than the Democrats, with lessons for progressive parties just about everywhere. In politics, he advised, “when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins”. The right was much more skilled on this terrain, weaving compelling human stories while its opponents tended to take refuge “in reciting their best facts and figures, as if they were trying to prevail in a high school debate tournament”.
So it remains. On both sides of the Atlantic – and across Europe – the main centre-left parties are locked into the same old desiccated political style, based on a belief in what Westen called “the moral superiority of the cerebral”. The new right, by contrast, is the complete opposite. However monstrous they might look, Farage and Donald Trump are overwhelmingly human: brazen, instinctive, and completely uninterested not only in facts, but etiquette and politesse. Both, moreover, trade in vivid stories: Reform UK’s latest slogan is “family, community, country”, which may have very sinister echoes (Vichy France, let us not forget, boiled its philosophy down to “family, work and fatherland”), but threatens to fill exactly the kind of emotional space that the government has left so open.
This is a perilous moment. The winter will be cruel and tempestuous. The consequences of hacking back the pensioners’ fuel allowance will soon start to bite: only one or two human tragedies, and the idea that older people had to do their bit to fill the fabled fiscal black hole will look even more mistaken. The depths of the cold season will probably see yet another NHS crisis, and more floods. Business leaders will carry on decrying Rachel Reeves’s budget, and what it has meant for a flatlining economy still manifested in hollowed-out high streets.
Meanwhile, it feels as if a deep political change that began a decade or so ago is now rapidly unfolding. While the government flounders, Kemi Badenoch and her party look like even more hapless victims of a sea change that may first consume them, and then grip Labour. Beyond Westminster, the kind of views embodied by Farage and Trump continue to make the weather. People are increasingly open to the idea that orthodox politics is really a huge mess of lies, conspiracies and fixes. If our political discourse seems increasingly weird - witness the recent hoo-ha about the online petition demanding another election, and rumours that Elon Musk is about to make a huge donation to Reform UK – this is a big part of the reason why.
But so is the centre left’s absence of any convincing account of who it is, and what it wants. On paper, the government probably does have the raw material for a half-decent narrative – about reviving schools and hospitals, making the wealthy pay their way, and avenging years of Tory misrule. The problem, partly bound up with Reeves and Starmer’s stilted and bloodless personalities, is that it either cannot or will not combine those things into any kind of stirring story, and offer answers to some screamingly obvious questions: what is Britain and where is it going? How do Labour’s visions – of a better public sector, net zero, the push for growth and all the rest – knot together, relate to all the sacrifices and suffering people endured thanks to the pandemic and the cost of living crisis? And why are the prime minister and his colleagues the people to see their country through a terrifying period of global danger?
Ten days ago, there was a sobering augury of where we might be heading. According to a poll commissioned by More in Common, if they could, 50% of men aged between 18 and 35 in the UK would vote for Trump. Starmer, meanwhile, has reportedly abandoned plans for a “public dashboard” that would somehow allow anyone interested to follow the government’s progress on its new targets, but is more wedded than ever to an approach based on “metrics” by which “voters can measure progress towards ‘delivery milestones’”. The battle to come, it seems, may be between one set of people equipped with stories, myths and low cunning, and another convinced that all will be well once the relevant numbers align correctly. That would be funny, were the stakes not so terrifyingly high.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
