It wasn’t quite John Major’s vision of old maids cycling through the mist to church. But the sepia-tinted memories Keir Starmer recounted in his first big campaign speech of growing up in Oxted, the Surrey town he called “about as English as you can get”, weren’t a million miles away. He talked about growing up in a house where the phone was sometimes cut off because his parents couldn’t afford to pay the bill; about how he identifies now with young couples realising they can’t afford a longed-for second child because of rocketing mortgages.
But he also talked nostalgically about the ramshackle football pitch he played on, and shared with grazing cows, and what he called the British air of “quiet uncomplaining resilience” in an era when there was sadly a lot to be resilient about. Shades of those “do you remember … ?” pages on Facebook, where the middle aged reminisce about pork scratchings and playing on a ZX Spectrum.
And if you’re rolling your eyes at all this stuff – well, it’s not meant for you, but for the Daily Mail readers who are so very clearly Labour’s target in this campaign and for whom the past is much less threatening than the present. Less financially secure than most people imagine, always afraid of slipping backwards, exasperated with Rishi Sunak but innately conservative (with a small or big C), they’re still uncertain about how they will vote in eminently flippable Tory seats such as East Worthing and Shoreham, where Starmer was making this pitch.
Talking to the people who can actually deliver him a majority, instead of lifelong Labour supporters, embodies the brutal realism that has got him to the brink of government. Yet realism goes only so far, judging by Labour’s reluctance to explain exactly how it intends to fix utterly broken public services without raising income tax and national insurance – as Rachel Reeves swears they wouldn’t – or busting self-imposed rules on borrowing. (If you are thinking that a big fat wealth tax would cover it, Reeves has previously rejected that too.) For a contest between two sober and pragmatic leaders, so far this election feels weirdly detached from economic reality.
Paul Johnson, the veteran head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has repeatedly urged all the parties to level with people about the tough choices facing whoever forms the next government, pointing out that existing spending plans rely on real-terms spending cuts after the election that few believe could ever be realistically delivered. But who wants to be a harbinger of doom this close to an election, when people are already complaining that Starmer doesn’t sound hopeful enough?
The Tories are already hinting at a big manifesto offer of tax cuts, despite calling this snap election largely because they have realised they can’t afford more tax cuts: getting re-elected wouldn’t change that maths, but then they don’t really expect to be re-elected, which is tremendously freeing. Labour by contrast is acutely aware of, and constrained by, having to deliver what it promises. Yet it is still playing fantasy politics in some respects, vowing to throw everything at boosting economic growth while running away from the subject of how Brexit has strangled growth.
Meanwhile, nobody wants to acknowledge that this is at root an ageing country attempting to fund soaring healthcare and pension bills from a relatively shrunken pool of younger workers’ taxes, meaning this was likely to be an era of high taxes or low expectations even before Britain voted in 2016 to punch itself in the face. Reeves said at the weekend that she would like taxes to be lower. I’d like the sun to shine every day, but the forecast still says rain.
To be fair, these are early days. This speech wasn’t a full-blown economic manifesto launch but a chance for Starmer gently to introduce himself to voters who don’t really notice politics between elections and remain suspicious of Labour’s intentions. Expectations are, in some cases, also unfairly high. Though we associate Tony Blair’s governments now with record spending on hospitals and in schools, back in 1997 he was vowing to stick to Tory spending plans and his five-point pledge card offered mainly the same kind of small, detailed fixes that Starmer’s six-point version does. These are downpayments, no more, on things Starmer is quite open about needing two terms to save up for.
It’s possible, too, to see how small things could quite quickly start to make ordinary life feel different. Settle the doctors’ strike and a new government could make much faster progress on waiting lists; reform Ofsted and ease teachers’ workloads, and you could at least reduce pressure inside schools. Gordon Brown has, meanwhile, offered ideas for tackling child poverty even in an era of tight spending constraints.
Yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that some difficult conversations are being shunted to the other side of polling day, when Labour finally discovers all the horrors stuffed down the back of an outgoing government’s filing cabinets. If England was ever “quietly uncomplaining”, in Starmer’s words, those days are long gone. But we may be needing that resilience.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
