Good morning. It was, indeed, a long coronation weekend. Among the most alarming side plots: the arrests of 64 protesters, often on disputed grounds, and despite months of discussion in which the protesters believed they had been given assurances by the police that there were no concerns about their plans.
You might think that those arrests, which were underpinned by the controversial new Public Order Act, create a clear political dividing line – and that you know which side of it Keir Starmer and the Labour opposition would fall on. You would be wrong.
While some backbenchers and local councillors condemned the arrests, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said that police accountability was important but that “I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to provide a running commentary without all of the facts”. Andrew Gwynne, the shadow public health minister, also refused to say Labour would scrap the act. David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, said that there would be no change to the law if Labour came to power. “We can’t come into office picking through all the Conservative legislation and repealing it,” he said. “It would take up so much parliamentary time.” All this even as the police apologised for six of the arrests.
This was not a one-off. Set that stance alongside recent moves under Starmer on policies from tuition fees to broader public spending, and a pattern emerges: a strategy aimed squarely at soothing swing voters who might view anything more distinctive as too radical, and in defiance of the pledges Starmer made when he won the leadership. Today’s newsletter looks at how those changes have emerged, and what they might mean for Labour as a campaigning force – and, maybe, in government. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Health | Patients in England will be able to get prescriptions for seven common conditions, plus more blood pressure checks and the contraceptive pill, directly from pharmacies under proposals to tackle the crisis in GP surgeries. The conditions are earache, a sore throat, sinusitis, impetigo, shingles, infected insect bites and uncomplicated urinary tract infections (UTIs) in women.
Gaza | Israeli warplanes have bombed the Gaza Strip, killing nine people including three senior Islamic Jihad commanders, according to Palestinian officials. There has been increasing violence in the occupied West Bank, where Israel has been conducting near-daily raids for several months.
Brexit | EU leaders have signalled their desire to reset relations with the UK, seven turbulent years on from the seismic Brexit vote. Representatives from all 27 member states said on Monday that they wanted to “develop further ties between the EU and the UK” after a deal was sealed on Brexit trade arrangements for Northern Ireland.
Ukraine | Russia has launched a fresh wave of drone, missile and airstrikes on cities across Ukraine, as Moscow stepped up attacks on the eve of its Victory Day celebrations. The barrage came as both sides appeared to be preparing for a widely expected Ukrainian offensive Kyiv hopes will help recapture territory lost since the start of the war.
Monarchy | Boris Johnson confronted King Charles, “essentially squaring up” to him for describing the Rwanda asylum policy as “appalling”, according to No 10’s former director of communications Guto Harri. Harri said Johnson told him that he “went in quite hard” against Charles in June 2022.
In depth: ‘We don’t often see the real Keir and probably never will’
The 10 pledges that Keir Starmer made to Labour supporters when running for the leadership in 2020 are still visible on his personal website, and set out a policy agenda which even the most fervent Corbynite could make peace with. Starmer promised to abolish tuition fees, bring public utilities into public ownership, and increase income tax for the top 5%. He vowed to “unite the party”. The list seemed like a principled embrace of the Corbyn inheritance – and a promise that the left would be part of the future. It hasn’t panned out that way.
Last week, Starmer said that Labour was “likely to move on from that commitment” on tuition fees. Last year, he said that the way forward on most privatised utilities “is going to lie in regulating the market, changing the market, rather than simply taking things into public ownership”. On universal credit, Labour now says that despite a 2020 pledge to scrap it, nobody “thinks it is sensible to go back to those six different benefits today”. And whereas Starmer said in 2021 that “the old argument that you just need to balance the books as quickly as possible just isn’t right any more”, last week shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said that “as a fiscally responsible party … we have to look again”.
While his shift from firmly leftwing positions may seem unsurprising, liberals might recently have been unnerved by the shift in position on protest, proportional representation, and migration. So why has Starmer made those changes, and what could the consequences be?
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Changing circumstances – and a changing audience
When asked about why he’s “moved on” from so many of his pledges, Starmer points to vastly changed circumstances since the leadership campaign. “What I’ve had to do is obviously adapt some of them to the circumstances we find ourselves in,” he told the BBC in February – citing the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the damage done to the economy by Liz Truss’s brief premiership.
Polly Toynbee summarised the case in a column the same day: “When the facts change, then policies must change too … Talking firmly now about long-term plans and not instant fixes lowers immediate expectations, but raises future ones to a better horizon.” But Owen Jones wrote last week that the worsening circumstances underline the case for Starmer’s original vision: “Greater levels of crisis demand more radicalism, not less.”
What’s unarguable is that Starmer’s audience has changed: a Corbyn era party membership during the campaign, and the wider electorate now. That leads many to question whether he ever meant what he originally said.
With a dozen slogans since he won the leadership contest, one critique of his attempt to broaden his appeal is that he lacks a consistent, clarion diagnosis of what the country’s problems are. “No one knows what Sir Keir or his party clearly stand for – apart from attacking its left flank,” a Guardian leader said last month.
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The criticisms he now faces
One problem with Starmer’s recent approach is that it bolsters a well-worn critique from left and right: that he shifts with the political weather. A shadow minister recently told the Times (£) that Starmer has retained the lawyerly cast of mind that compels him to simply defend the brief that happens to be in front of him: “We don’t often see the real Keir and probably never will.”
There are ways that this trait continues to pull him leftwards: the dire consequences of austerity over the last 13 years mean that some of the trappings of a socialist agenda are essential to a Starmer pitch in a way they never were to Tony Blair, Andy Beckett wrote in March. “In a typically cautious, half-disguised way, class and anti-elitism have become important in Starmer’s plan for the country.”
But the same tendency can also serve the argument from the right that he doesn’t know what he stands for. In an editorial last month after Starmer distanced himself from a previous promise to introduce “self-declaration” for trans people, the Daily Mail said: “Long experience tells us that he follows whatever is the political flavour of the month to boost his chances of power.” In other words, even when Starmer heads in his enemies’ direction, he gives them ammunition to attack.
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The consequences within Labour
The left has voted with its feet, with party membership reportedly falling from 570,000 soon after Starmer replaced Corbyn to 382,000 paid-up members in July last year. To those who have stayed but criticise his approach, Starmer says: “The door is open – you can leave.”
But even if that is deemed a useful bit of signalling, it may come with consequences during the general election campaign. The enthusiasm of Momentum supporters was a huge boon to Corbyn’s Labour: this 2017 piece is typical in relating how the number of activists working for the party in one constituency increased tenfold compared with 2015.
The sources of the party’s money have also changed – and thus, you might think, its policy incentives have too. Union donations dropped from £6.8m in 2020 to £5.3m in 2022. Over the same period, donations from individuals and companies went from 22% to 51%.
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The consequences with voters
Four days on, Friday’s local election results look good for Labour, but seem more like a repudiation of the Conservatives than an endorsement of Starmer. The debate that will dominate discussions of Starmer’s strategy until the general election is whether the best way to improve that position is to target socially conservative swing voters in key seats – or to present a more sweeping vision for Britain’s future that can capture the broader electorate’s imaginations.
In another recent column, Andy Beckett argued that the tendency to defer to socially conservative voters on everything from immigration to transgender rights is the result of a collective obsession with those swing voters – but misses that poll after poll finds that the country is actually much more liberal than the media environment would suggest. He warns: “Authoritarian British voters have a history of ultimately preferring Tory toughness to the Labour version, as Keir Starmer may discover in Downing Street – if not earlier.”
The other risk for Starmer is that socially liberal voters will feel more free to vote for a party other than Labour if doing so looks like the best tactical option to unseat a Conservative. If it is true that the national mood is more anti-Conservative than pro-Labour, that may seem like the most efficient way to assemble a majority, even if it involved support from minor parties. But critics on the left would argue that the lack of a fervent pro-Labour mood is not a given circumstance, but something that Starmer himself has created.
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How Labour would govern
After 13 years in opposition, the return of a Labour government has become such a holy grail as to undermine any analysis of what its leader’s policy positions are likely to actually mean if they are enacted. Thus Reeves’ argument in 2021: “A tweet and an impassioned speech has never changed lives. You change lives by winning elections and forming governments.”
But if Labour is in with a serious chance of taking power in 2024, it’s reasonable to ask whether its current policy platform will make the kinds of changes to the way Britain works that many of those who will vote for it are hoping for. Many might be prepared to accept some of Starmer’s policy changes if they could see that there was a political vision behind them.
The political economist Michael Jacobs argued in January that from an annual £28bn climate action fund to the prospect of the abolition of the House of Lords, Labour’s platform is “considerably more radical than Starmer’s critics might have expected”.
But Nesrine Malik wrote in December that by triangulating its way to positions that will spook the smallest possible number of undecided voters in so many other areas, Labour may be passing up on a mandate it might otherwise have won. “The bloodless calculus of a centrist ruling class is that acceptable collateral damage is the best we can hope for,” she wrote. “There will be no passion or pledges, only grownup acceptance of structures we cannot change.”
What else we’ve been reading
Whatever your view of the coronation, this picture essay by the Guardian’s photographer (including Sarah Lee, whose photo is above) is a remarkable document of the occasion – and of the public’s varying degrees of tolerance for the rain. Archie
Face blindness, or prosopagnosia, can make social interactions incredibly difficult. Emine Saner spoke to people who live with this frustrating condition, and examines a potential link with long Covid. Nimo
When Vladimir Putin first came to power and sought to present a new face to the world, Russian artists enjoyed a greater degree of freedom than they had had in years. In this piece, William Fear explains how the war in Ukraine meant an end to “the era of pragmatic tolerance” and brought a new homogeneity to the country’s culture. Archie
If you have faffed around with ChatGPT or any other generative AI tool you might notice that sometimes it will just make things up. Instead of calling these mistakes lies or errors, tech executives have decided to call them “hallucinations”. Naomi Klein unpacks why this kind of language obfuscates the underlying problems with the technology. Nimo
Planned Parenthood has been under fire lately not just by the Republican party and a hostile supreme court – but by the people who work for them. For the New Yorker (£), Eyal Press visited a number of abortion providers who feel that Planned Parenthood is too cautious and restrained, effectively abdicating responsibility and forcing clinics to take all the risk when providing medical abortions. Nimo
Sport
Premier league | Everton moved out of the relegation zone with an unlikely 5-1 victory against Brighton thanks to two goals each from Dwight McNeil (above right) and Abdoulaye Doucouré (above left) and an own goal from Jason Steele. Meanwhile, Nottingham Forest boosted their survival hopes by beating bottom club Southampton 4-3 and Fulham beat Leicester 5-3.
Football | After Napoli sealed their march to the Serie A title last week, the club celebrated at the weekend with “a party so vast that the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona could never hope to contain it”, Nicky Bandini writes. “Their game against Fiorentina was sold out, and tens of thousands more fans gathered outside the gates, knowing that, even without a ticket, there was no place they’d rather be.”
Tennis | Tumaini Carayol writes that the Madrid Open was a tournament of triumph for the young men’s world No 1 Carlos Alcaraz – but again raised questions over the treatment of women players, with no trophy ceremony in the women’s doubles. One sharp image summarised the situation: “The contrast in size of the cakes presented to Alcaraz and [Aryna] Sabalenka, who share a birthday … was simply a metaphor of the treatment they receive,” Carayol wrote.
The front pages
“Pharmacies to prescribe drugs to patients in bid to tackle GP crisis,” says the Guardian this morning. The Daily Mail splashes with “Boris and Charles’ Rwanda bust-up”. It has a portrait of King Charles on the front, which is reproduced by the Sun with the headline “Our noble King – ‘Thank you each and every one’”. The same picture and message of thanks are on page one of the Times, Daily Express and the Metro.
A similar treatment in the Daily Mirror, though not the full front page, and its lead story is “Bills agony – two million households unable to pay at least one last month”. That portrait again, captioned only, is on the front of the Daily Telegraph, while below it the page one splash is “PM: skip the GP for common illnesses”. “Pass on higher interest rates to savers, big banks told” – that’s the i, and the top story in the Financial Times is “Water company dividend doubles to £1.4bn despite sewage outflows anger”.
Today in Focus
Why ‘godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton thinks humanity is at a crossroads
His work is at heart of AI revolution, but in an interview with the Guardian’s Alex Hern, Hinton says he now fears the advances he helped usher in could pose an existential threat to humankind
Cartoon of the day | Steve Bell
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Growing up in a town in New Jersey that she says “didn’t value art at all”, Qualeasha Wood didn’t even think a career in the arts was a possibility. Wood worked at her craft, though, gaining a place at the coveted Rhode Island School of Design and gaining significant traction in her field. It was not all career highs – in 2017 Wood was doxed by right wing trolls who disseminated a series of semi-nude photos she had been accumulating for a forthcoming project. She was terrified and traumatised by the experience – but her friends pointed out that she has never been one to walk away from a challenge.
Wood kept working on her art and her project, The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex, a large tapestry inspired in equal measure by Freud and Kanye, graced the cover of an Art in America issue edited by esteemed young curator Antwaun Sargent. Then Wood got a phone call that most artists wait their whole lives for: New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art contacted her, asking to feature her self-portrait in an upcoming show. “I had to think – what’s important to me? To live the life I want to live, the life I advocate for in my work, and to continue to do that boldly,” Wood says.
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