Keir Starmer’s conservative vision
In a major speech this morning, Keir Starmer set out what he called his contract with the British people. In both content and style, the speech gave an important insight into the politics of both Labour and its leader.
The first point is that this is not a speech that Starmer should have needed to make. Despite the fact that politics has been overshadowed by the Covid pandemic for nearly two years, Starmer has had ample opportunity to tell the electorate who he is. An eleven-thousand word Fabian Society pamphlet, and a major conference speech last autumn, in addition to innumerable media interviews, should have provided some clue. Yet it remains unclear to many people what Starmer stands for — and we are told, again and again, that we’re about to find out. So does this speech tell us much that we did not already know?
Perhaps not, but in terms of both content and style it revealed much about Starmer’s politics. Both are, on the basis of this performance, deeply conservative — and not necessarily with a small-C; it is a speech of the sort that would have won thoughtful applause at Tory conferences before Thatcher made the Tory Party political.
The most obvious point is the tone — the language is often deeply conservative and backward-looking, expressing a yearning for how things used to be, rather than what they might be. The strapline for the speech — “Security, prosperity, respect” — is almost classically conservative, and comes close to the channeling of Vichy slogans that represents Blue Labour’s stock-in-trade. Tony Blair, even in his most content-free speeches, used a self-consciously radical vocabulary: change, reform, modernisation, young country. There is none of that here.
And the five-point contract — expressed in the vaguest of terms — continues that theme. Standards, security, the NHS is there for you, skills, ambitions, and, above all, patriotism. And job security “for those who work hard” — one of the most abiding (and in my view most contestible) tropes of New Labour, the conditionality of citizen rights, is given new life here.
And, yet again, the canard of “making Brexit work” is repeated — no fewer than three times. I have discussed before why this slogan is nonsense, but I’ll just repeat here that it involves the acceptance of Brexit’s political agenda, which is one of the Right, one of authoritarian nationalism and English exceptionalism. It is at the very least incongruous that acceptance of this agenda should appear alongside a claim that Starmer is a patriot, not a nationalist. And it would be interesting to know how he squares “making Brexit work” with his castigation of Johnson for threatening the Good Friday Agreement.
On which subject, Starmer’s passage about the future of the UK has one notable omission: Wales, the only part of the UK in which Labour is in government, is not mentioned (in contrast to Scotland and Northern Ireland, both of which get a sentence). But then there’s an obvious and huge gap between Starmer’s pessimism and Wales’ radical and electorally-succesful First Minister and Labour government; on this showing it is difficult to see how they are coherently part of the same political movement. And, interestingly, for all its radical political traditions, Wales remains a socially-conservative nation in many respects: but one that expresses itself politically through a far more radical political tradition, with nearly three-quarters of the Senedd’s seats in the hands of progressive parties: Labour, Plaid Cymru and Liberal Democrats. Social conservatism is not the same thing as political conservatism.
And, not for the first time, Starmer’s inability to grasp that the United Kingdom is not one nation, but four, with those outside England developing their own political agendas and identities, represents a crucial intellectual and political failure.
Taken as a whole, there seems little doubt where this speech leads us. Starmer’s pitch is not a radical or optimistic one; it reads instead as an attempt to install himself as the leader of conservative Middle England, faced with a corrupt and ideologically-driven Government, rebellious Scots, and above all undcertainty. Its language is conservative, emollient, deliberately playing down divisions in society of the sort that Labour was founded to challenge and heal.
Those of us who were around in the early 1980s will see the hallmark of the early SDP: and will remember the jokes, too, about taking the politics out of politics, or Ralf Dahrendorf’s stinging comment about “promising a better yesterday”. It’s a comfort blanket of a speech: a big warm snuggly political duvet for people who aren’t really interested in, or concerned about, politics; for whom the idea that there are difficult and deeply-entrenched conflicts to be resolved is deeply uncomfortable. It’s not the speech of someone who wants to lead change.
Most of all, it lacks vision. The speech betrays a desperate lack of intellectual or political confidence. It is, in the literal sense of the word, reactionary — in that it does not seek to set an agenda, but to respond to one being set by a governing party, and expressing its response, not in its own terms, but in those that the ruling party is perceived to have left behind. There is no agenda for change here, no high-level vision of a good society. And you do not need to be beholden to the toxic combination of Leninism and privileged political hobbyism that characterised the Corbyn project to sense that, far more than Blairism in the 1990s, this vision has little in common with the Labour Party grassroots, the people for whom the Labour Party has long been the vehicle of poltical change. Is this really what they sit through meeting after meeting and pound the streets for?
In short, the speech was deeply conservative, pessimistic, lacking in ambition and vision. Light on specifics, it was made up of sentiments and language that stress continuity, not change. If you want a prospectus for political change, you need to look elsewhere.
