Keir Starmer has everything going for him. A decisive opinion poll lead – which his party has held since December 2021. A party that has unions, members and MPs working together for victory, as was shown at the national policy forum where Starmer got his way on every issue. A talented frontbench – who politician for politician outclass the current tired Tory cabinet.
Or nearly everything. Labour currently lacks one vital quality: confidence. While heading for a victory bigger than Tony Blair’s landslide of 1997, the party appears to be too frightened to fight. Whenever the Tories do something profoundly amoral or un-British – such as telling refugees to “fuck off”, as their vice-chair, Lee Anderson, recently did – Labour seems scared of going on the attack. (And what Anderson said should be stated in its full unbowdlerised form.) But, like showbiz, successful electoral politics requires swagger, plus a desire to run towards the sound of gunfire, not away from it.
Labour’s caution is understandable. Not only was the 2019 general election Labour’s worst result in terms of seats since 1935, it was also its third election defeat in just four years. Keir Starmer has never stood in a parliamentary election that Labour has won. That is scarring because defeat eats the soul.
But excessive caution kills hope. And the next general election has to be about hope for two reasons. First, it is a change election. The polls tell us one big thing: voters want to see the back of the current government. Despite Rishi Sunak’s earnest technocratic endeavours to focus on moving the needle on his five carefully chosen pledges, he is personally as unpopular as Liz Truss was as prime minister. It’s just that her delivery of 30-point leads to Labour flatters Sunak by comparison.
But change has to be to something, not merely away from the present. Which leads to the second point: progressive parties win when they own the future and fairness. This is why Labour’s focus on “getting rid of the barnacles”, the Australian strategist Lynton Crosby’s term for ditching unpopular policies and positions, is becoming a drag on it. It’s just a tactic – however important, it doesn’t build up to anything more than a proposition that Labour isn’t a risk any more. Changing yourself is a hygiene factor – it gets you the right to be heard. But changing the country is a mission that gets you a mandate along with your majority.
The change the nation wants is tackling the climate crisis. As Luke Tryl, director of More in Common, says: “Our polling and focus groups are clear. If the Conservative party were to deliberately tarnish its green credentials, it would risk further damaging the party’s prospects with the two voting blocs they most need to win back: voters in the blue and red wall.”
The climate crisis is proximate and pressing and it is an appropriately big mission for the strategic, interventionist state Starmer and Rachel Reeves are modelling on Bidenomics. The £28bn green prosperity fund is also Labour’s biggest investment bet, which is best understood as Ed Miliband explains it, as a 21st-century industrial strategy that cuts prices for cars, heating and energy and delivers jobs.
Not only that. The Tories are now making a historic strategic error. They act as though they want the next election to be a referendum on net zero. Normally, Napoleon’s advice is sound: “Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.” This time, Labour should seize the moment and run with it. It will define Starmer in terms of what he stands for and it will allow the Labour party to frame the politics of the coming decades as Margaret Thatcher did in 1979.
There is always a Labour fear that the Conservatives are playing five-dimensional chess and that their apparent errors are actually a stroke of genius. But we know that the Tories are only playing checkers – and losing badly. We have seen this movie before, in the 2022 Australian general election. Scott Morrison, then the Liberal prime minister of Australia, declared a war on woke and created a clear dividing line between his government and the Australian Labor party (ALP) on fossil fuels, climate crisis and coalmining. The strategy was a disaster. The country wanted change and voters gave the ALP a majority, while conservative voters, many of them women, were alienated by the Liberals’ reactionary politics and voted for independent candidates, nicknamed the Teals, who wanted to clean up politics and the climate.
Starmer should take confidence from that result, but should also learn the other lessons of Australian Labor. The party adopted a “small target” strategy and kept policy promises to an absolute minimum. Because voters wanted a change election they sent a message to both main parties. The Liberals were humiliated, but Labor lost seats to the Greens. There is a cost to crouching too low.
This is a crucial moment for Labour. Starmer needs to define his leadership as a crusade to protect the future. And he needs to hammer the Tories for their errors on climate breakdown and make them pay for years to come. The climate crisis should be for the Conservative party what the winter of discontent was for Labour: a decades long sign that the party is unfit to govern.
• This article was amended on 18 August. An earlier version called the Teals a “start-up party”. To clarify, they are independent politicians who ran on a strong climate platform.
John McTernan was political secretary to PM Tony Blair and is now a political strategist for BCW. He also worked for the Australian Labor party during the 2007 general election
