Post Labour conference Victor Anderson posts a message for the prime minister
Keir Starmer at the conference reinforced the impression he has given consistently for many years. I believe he is genuinely committed to public service and delivery, but is not a natural democrat. In that sense, he is more like a senior manager (which of course he was at the Crown Prosecution Service, until fairly recently) than a political leader. This has some benefits, in maintaining focus on what the public want to see happen, but it brings some vulnerability, as we are already seeing. I give five examples of this problem.
Perhaps the clearest was in Starmer’s conference speech, in which he contrasted Labour as a party of protest (under Corbyn), which he rejected, with Labour as a party of government (under himself). But history suggests that Labour is most effective when it is both: protesters bringing issues to the leadership’s attention and a government there to do something about those issues. If there isn’t space for protest within the Labour Party, it’s pretty much inevitable that it will lose support to parties that will provide space, and to independent candidates, as we have already seen in the general election.
Withdrawing the whip from seven Labour MPs for opposition to the two-child benefit cap was an attack not only on those MPs but also on Labour’s tradition of being a “broad church”. Tony Blair didn’t behave in this way. He was content to win votes and out-organise the Left, but he didn’t seek to eliminate from the party a strand of opinion that has been there from the beginning.
In last year’s conference speech, Starmer also threatened disciplinary action against “nimby” Labour MPs objecting to development schemes. Such MPs can in any case be outvoted, and with an appropriate legislative framework in place, defeated in the courts. But was he really threatening MPs speaking up for their constituents’ concerns, amongst the many voices that will be heard on a planning issue? Yes he was. If he goes ahead with that approach, it is bound to raise doubts locally as to whether such MPs are worth having.
We aren’t seeing much sign from the Starmer administration of enthusiasm for democratic reforms, despite numerous surveys showing that the public these days generally feel that the existing system doesn’t work properly. A good start could be made by revitalising local government, with change both to its financing and its unrepresentative first-past-the-post voting system.
A lack of democratic instincts and a lack of political instincts go together when the focus is simply on “delivery”. Means-testing winter fuel payments looks like it might make sense from a delivery point of view if combined with other measures. But from a political point of view, which would understand that it is viewed as an early indication for people of the Government’s approach towards redistribution and fairness, it has been a disaster, a disaster caused by that political viewpoint being missing from the top of government.
The controversy over Sue Gray’s role fits inexactly with my analysis of the problem with Keir Starmer’s managerial approach. Gray should never have been appointed Chief of Staff in the first place, despite it being very useful to have in some other senior role someone with such deep experience of the ways of Whitehall.
The fact that Starmer thought the appointment appropriate illustrates his mistaken idea that the Prime Minister’s job, and therefore that of his most senior staff member, is simply about delivery rather than also being about politics and engaging in democratic argument.
very much on the right track. The fact he does not have a strategy – still less a political sense of danger – is shown by the priority to balance the books, not to keep voters happy. They will then make a long standing problem worse by extending the HS2 to Crewe, a station that few want to go to. But it does not need a reversal of tory cuts since sunak never repealed the stage 2a to crewe legislation. \Having won back some staffordshire seats, he will then lose them
But carrying on with HS2 is an arrow aimed at his own future. Apart from stage 2b to manchester, which Burnham wants, the line into Euston goes through his own constituency and he opposed it in 2015 to get elected.
If they back the line into Euson he loses his own seat, his voters do not want it. For very good reasons which he does not understand. Like much else. But he can make history. No Prime Minister who has won a general election has ever lost his or her own seat. Back Starmer to do just that. TREVOR FISHER