Labour’s comfortable victory in this week’s Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection, beating the Scottish National party on a swing of more than 20%, gives reasonable cause to expect that Sir Keir Starmer will next year replace Rishi Sunak in Downing Street. Labour has never controlled the Commons without a significant haul of Scottish seats.
The prospect of recovering terrain lost to the SNP in recent years makes winning a Westminster majority look less daunting. But the road is still steep after the crushing defeat of 2019, which is why Labour cannot afford to be complacent. Byelections don’t lend themselves to simple extrapolation of national trends. In Scotland as in England, polling trends express more irritation with an exhausted and discredited incumbent government than enthusiasm for the opposition. The Labour leader deserves credit for capitalising on the Tories’ unpopularity and not falling into the traps his opponent has laid.
But this process has prioritised reassurance over inspiration, caution over radicalism. That has meant vagueness about what the Labour leader’s priorities would be in government – an uncertainty exacerbated by the rate at which commitments he made to win a ballot of party members have been jettisoned as he increasingly looks to court swing voters in target seats.
A pattern of U-turns has encouraged Conservatives to attack Sir Keir as a typical politician who will say anything to get elected. The charge is hypocritical and unfair on a man who came to politics with a solid record of principled public service. That doesn’t mean the barbs aren’t wounding.
Sir Keir needs to use this week’s conference in Liverpool to pivot from defensive avoidance of controversy to confident assertion of values, ideas and policy. The Tory conference last week made that task easier. Rishi Sunak said nothing meaningful about the NHS, or any other public services. He ignored the cost of living crisis. He has no housing plan. He has surrendered moral leadership on the climate emergency.
But Labour has struggled to narrate an alternative path that doesn’t involve spending more money than is provided by implausibly austere Tory budgets. This position cannot hold for long. At some stage the opposition will have to spell out the real choice ahead: public investment to get Britain functioning again or continuing decay and decline. This is not a particularly militant position. Key Blairites told the Guardian that Labour should not shy away from promising bold economic policies.
The Green New Deal plan that Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, trumpeted at last year’s conference is a powerful idea, subsequently diluted. The party should be less squeamish about an economic strategy that indicates genuine and necessary repudiation of Mr Sunak’s tired and reheated Thatcherite prospectus.
With election victory in sight, it would be a mistake for Labour to double down on caution. Voters are now starting to pay attention to the opposition as a government in waiting. Sir Keir has the opportunity to change the terms of debate, and not simply operate within hostile parameters dictated by the Tories. Changing those terms is essential if he is to win a mandate for policies that will make a difference. His job in Liverpool is to describe a vision for Britain that gives people reason to vote for Labour because they have hope – rather than fear – for the future.
