It is three years since Sir Keir Starmer was elected leader of a Labour party despondent after a heavy election defeat. Sir Keir can claim to have come a long way in a short space of time. It is to his credit that Labour is riding high in the polls, with a 20-point lead over the Tories. His purge of party opponents has silenced many of his internal critics and he has ruthlessly excluded potential parliamentary candidates for sometimes “spurious reasons”. In the battle for hearts and minds, he is right to think that lucky generals are better than good ones. Labour looks set to gain 700 seats in May’s local elections, a result that would disrupt the Conservatives’ narrative of an electoral recovery under Rishi Sunak. In Scotland, if the SNP continues to flounder, then its problems could usher in a Labour government.
And yet Labour is not seen as the wave of the future. This is not for want of trying. Sir Keir has repeatedly attempted to capture the mood of the country. He has had 12 slogans since becoming leader, each one more meaningless than the last. None of Sir Keir’s phrases have so far created public excitement about the idea of change. Instead of building the party to fill a gap in politics and give Labour a distinctive electoral appeal, Sir Keir gambled that the Tories would implode. That bet has not paid off. The Conservative party is getting itself out of the mess it was in at the beginning of the year. The next election could well be fought between a candidate whom voters see as competent, smart and rich, and a rival whom voters see as competent, smart and dull. It is still eminently possible that the former could triumph over the latter.
The mistake has been a lack of what Americans call “the vision thing”. No one knows what Sir Keir or his party clearly stand for – apart from attacking its left flank. Labour’s strongest cards are on the NHS, public services and inequality. Yet there is no coherent strategy that plays to those strengths. Unfortunately, Labour presently appears uninterested in transforming the country. This has allowed the Conservatives to steal Labour’s thunder, most notably with a big childcare offer. This was a key policy area that Sir Keir had largely chosen to stay silent on. Even when the party has an eye-catching policy, such as its £28bn green investment plan, this is being undermined by floating the idea that it would be delivered through public-private partnerships. If the Labour party wants to stick to fiscal orthodoxy, then why won’t it tax capital gains effectively to pay for decent public services? The question is met with silence from the leadership.
Some politicians manipulate circumstances to their advantage, waiting for the right moment to confront institutions that need to be changed. Others say they will break with the past no matter what the risk. Both approaches require a motivating programme, one that is argued for in public. Sir Keir has followed neither path. His policies are distinguished by their lack of ambition and are dwarfed by the problems they seek to solve. There is time to change tack and build a winning coalition capable of reorganising itself around new problems. Sir Keir ought to be bolder in his prescriptions to fix Britain. For that he will need a diagnosis of what ails the country. Such an insight would act as a signpost for the public, mapping out the ground on which Labour would stand. Sir Keir should realise that without a focal point at which a new consensus can gather, an election-winning politics cannot form.