How rare it is to be able to pinpoint the day you witnessed the winds of change sweeping away the old political landscape. As I wrote just before the local elections, I felt that great doorstep surge in Lightwater, in Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath constituency. Sure enough, those angry Tory voters did desert his party in droves, turning three forever blue seats Lib Dem yellow and giving the Liberal Democrats control of the council.
What’s Gove’s response to his constituents’ rebellion? He ignores it, heading off to the wilder shores of rightwingery that has just been rejected, to speak at the National Conservatism three-day jamboree in Westminster. This low-tax, small-state religio-populism, which has much in common with the Tea Party movement, Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump, is on another planet from Gove’s voters. With other senior colleagues who also attended – some fresh from another Tory rightist rebel conference at the weekend – they reveal how little they have absorbed of views expressed through the ballot box at the local elections.
The home secretary, Suella Braverman, might pause to ask how the Tories lost symbolic Dover, given that she thinks the small boats issue is so hot it can outweigh the cost of living crisis, the NHS and broken public services to save her party’s political skin. Instead of heading for east Kent to rethink, she took to the NatCon platform to complain about British people forgetting how to work, leaving it to migrants she calls criminals lacking “our values”.
Facing an electoral abyss brings out bizarre behaviour in political parties, with ideologues retreating into realms of fantasy unshared by voters. Tory revolutionaries provide Labour with a smug reminder of themselves when they turned unelectable under Michael Foot or Jeremy Corbyn. Then, Labour convinced itself that the voters only rejected its recipes because they weren’t pungent enough.
Only cognitive dissonance lets these Tories ignore last week’s triumph of progressive parties. This usually conservative country rejected their rightwing austerity government, the English vote going 60% progressive against 29% Tory. Polls show a quarter of Lib Dem voters saying they will tactically turn Labour in a general election – that’s outright victory territory. Alas, Keir Starmer said at the weekend that electoral reform was “not one of [his] priorities”: but at least he didn’t absolutely rule it out, for tactical voting on this scale reflects high public support for a proportional system.
Although he was demolished at the polls, Rishi Sunak is probably not in peril, a sixth prime minister in seven years is a stretch too far even for his party. But he’s lost control, with his five pledges already failing. As Starmer mocked, in an aside to a questioner this weekend: “You don’t have Suella Braverman in your cabinet on merit, but because you’ve lost control of your party.”
That brutal quip signalled how success gives an opposition leader new buoyancy. Starmer’s aides say he is “emboldened”, and so he was in his speech to Progressive Britain. A stronger note of radicalism saw him shed some of the over-caution that has weighed him down. Of course he warned as a distance runner that “the hardest yards always come at the end”, but “make no mistake – we are on track. We are on a path towards power.” And so they are.
That path was mapped out in stolid Starmer steps from day one. After 2019’s worst defeat in living memory ripped out Labour heartlands, he has made his party virtually unbeatable in a journey that took Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair aeons longer. Ruthlessly scotching internal turmoil and leftist antisemitism, he has remade a party in his own image, with candidates and party officials sometimes bruisingly sealed with his own stamp. To borrow from George W Bush, too many have “misunderestimated” him, both his strategic nous and his radical intent: these results should stop that.
True, he faces a Tory party taken leave of its senses, driving the country to near-perdition, but he warns it’s “not enough that we’re better than the Tories”. Describing the barren landscape he’ll inherit, he promised as great a transformation as Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Blair’s Labour governments. Momentum’s remnants grumble that he offers no more than “New Labour re-runs”, but they should hope he can cut child and pensioner poverty by a million people; revive benefits, Sure Start programmes for tots and further education colleges; and renew local museums and grassroots sport to outdo New Labour’s 13 abundant years from 1997 to 2010. It will be harder this time.
“Where’s the beef?” Nick Ferrari kept asking Starmer on LBC on Monday morning, echoing people impatient for more policy announcements. Yet that £28bn a year on green growth and insulation is big, and his mission to raise UK growth from the bottom to the top of the G7 in one term is frighteningly enormous. So too are pledges to achieve 100% clean energy by 2030, fix the broken NHS, create a National Social Care service and provide quality childcare. The Labour revolution in working rights, fair pay deals, zero hours and unions allowed into every workplace will change the balance of power at work.
Branding Labour the “party of the common good” in his speech to Progressive Britain is a reminder that it will take back each rail contract and create a Great British Energy, with Rachel Reeves promising “radical insourcing” of services. Starmer will keep hammering away at “security” for all – in jobs, housing and income in hard times – as he parks on vacated Tory turf. The Tories “conserve nothing of value – not our rivers and seas, not our NHS or BBC, not our families, not our nation”, he said in his speech. VAT on private schools to be diverted to stricken state schools; the funds raised by ending non-dom tax avoidance to be used for the NHS; a windfall tax on oil giants’ profits – these are all just tasters of Starmer’s radical vision.
Bored with them already? That’s a good reason for Labour not to announce plans too early, timing policy to breast the tape at the election. Expect more detailed announcements shortly on health, opportunity and the environment, quickening the pace at the party conference in October. But don’t expect tax and spend details until next year’s March budget shows the Tories’ hand.
Glum Tory newspaper leaders warn, “Only a bold vision can save the Tories now”, though they can only produce very old ideas for the very rich: “A commitment to axe inheritance tax. An end to stamp duty. A renewed bonfire of EU red tape.”
Starmer gets the same “bold vision” moan, but hoary old ideological totems don’t win against practical policies – hope comes from concrete change for better lives and public services. Too dull? No “Oh, Keir Starmer!” Glastonbury chants? He just brings home the boring old votes, votes and more votes from Blackpool to Middlesbrough, Medway to Brighton.
There is something beseeching about Sunak’s “morale-boosting” garden party on Monday night at No 10 for his MPs, with pies from his Yorkshire constituency. It won’t appease rightwing Tory fanatics, nor ease the panic of all who saw their seats vanish before their eyes last week. Deluded and dispirited, as the Tories are now, so once was Labour.
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
