Maybe – just maybe – power will fall into Keir Starmer’s lap. The prime minister who led the Tories to an 80-seat majority less than three years ago has spectacularly self-immolated, tainting his colleagues and party in the process. A cost of living crisis gnaws at the personal finances of millions, topping off 12 years of economic stagnation. A Tory leadership contest promises to have all the dignity of a pack of cornered rats, with prospective candidates drumming up a culture war on trans rights while proposing expensive tax cuts for big business, rather than addressing the bread-and-butter issues of a crisis-stricken nation.
Labour had better hope that it is possible in these favourable circumstances to win an election without offering a vision for the UK, because that remains the party’s strategy. The official opposition’s chosen dividing lines with the government have been about character rather than policy. Given Boris Johnson has the sort of character that would be rejected by most Hollywood scriptwriters for being too cartoonishly disreputable, there was least a logic to this, especially as Starmer’s serial dishonesty in the Labour leadership campaign – here’s a man who stuck his hand up on television when asked if he supported renationalising energy, then stated he did not support nationalisation when safely elected – has been studiously ignored by media outlets.
But betting the house on personality rather than vision has caused increasing discomfort among MPs across Labour’s political spectrum. Until Partygate broke, the Tories enjoyed a consistent polling lead, with Johnson topping rankings for the preferred prime minister. Just over a year ago, Labour lost the Hartlepool byelection – a seat it retained in the 2019 inferno – nearly lost Batley and Spen, and was battered in local elections. The transformation of the party’s fortunes has been solely down to self-inflicted calamity on the part of the government.
The underlying polling bears this out. Among political commentators and Labour bigwigs, the Jeremy Corbyn era is treated as a catastrophic aberration with no lessons to be learned, other than that the left of the party must be permanently crushed. If true, the polling figures are even more alarming than they look. According to recent polling by Ipsos, 33% of Britons think Labour is fit to govern, down five percentage points from November 2017; 50% think it is concerned about people in need, down 16 points; 45% think it understands the problems facing Britain, down nine points; 26% think it has a good team of leaders, down five points; and 35% think it looks after “the interests of people like me”, down 10 points. Meanwhile, 38% of those polled state they like Starmer, eight points lower than Corbyn four months after the 2017 election; and 44% state they like the Labour party – down 13 points from the end of 2018. More than half the population doesn’t know what Starmer stands for, with less than a quarter saying they do.
That Labour leads over the Tories on these questions isn’t a positive endorsement for the opposition; it is symptomatic of how deep a hole Johnson plunged the government into. Indeed, according to YouGov polling conducted before Johnson’s resignation, of the 37% of voters who believe Starmer would be a better prime minister than Johnson – bear in mind 43% said they didn’t know or refused to answer – seven in 10 ascribe their choice to Johnson’s weaknesses, with just 27% opting for the Labour leader’s strengths.
Those hoping Starmer’s speech today would rectify the party’s lack of vision will have been disappointed. That’s not to say there aren’t good Labour policies out there. Starmer has pledged to scrap charitable status for private schools and the VAT exemption on school fees, using the money to support state schools. Other announcements include a national care service and three gigafactories for electric car batteries. All of these policies, it should be said, are borrowed from the Corbyn era, despite Starmer’s repudiation of the 2017 manifesto – underlining that the Labour left still has the monopoly on interesting ideas.
The problem is this scattergun approach isn’t backed up by a clear vision stitching the ideas together, to give the electorate a clear idea of the sort of society Labour would build. In Starmer’s speech, he declared that Labour’s election focus would be “wealth creation” and making “Britain richer” – all fine, but which politician would argue otherwise? The structural problem with the British economy is that the vast amounts of wealth generated end up concentrated in very few hands, while wages are 47% lower than if the trend set between the end of the second world war and the financial crash had continued. He went on to say, “We won’t retreat to a comfort zone on public services and hope the focus of the country shifts”: a mystifying statement given well-funded services are the comfort zone of the electorate, too.
Underlying all of this is an even more unsettling Labour strategy. One of the few positive political developments of the past few years is that the deficit and debt stopped being the focal point of political discussion. The public tired of austerity; Johnson recognised this and committed to spending. This offers Labour rich opportunities, because it is supposed to be the party of investment. Yet the Labour opposition appears obsessed with relitigating the public finances, assailing the Tories’ “magic money tree” and uncosted policy commitments. Why drive political discussion on to terrain that penalises progressive politics?
Complaints about a lack of vision aren’t confined to the left: Tony Blair has spoken of voters being left unclear about where Labour stands, but his suggested remedy – biometric cards to fight illegal immigration – underlines the depressing paucity of ideas on the Labour right. The danger confronting the opposition is that after an inward-looking carnival of rightwingery, a ruthless successor to Johnson will reconstruct the Tories’ 2019 voter coalition, while Labour both fails to win over Tory supporters and disillusions parts of its own support base. Labour has relied on Tory failure and – with Johnson at the helm – that has worked for a time. But will stagnating living standards and potentially lasting damage inflicted on the Tory brand sustain such an approach? What Labour surely needs is a vision – a clear sense of how it would govern the country it seeks to serve, and in whose interests – and it needs it fast.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
