Keir Starmer: the new Joe Biden?

The consensus view was that Keir Starmer's speech was his best yet. I think it was born of deep frailty.

“I ran for President because I believed we were in a battle for the soul of this nation. I still believe that to be true.”
— Joe Biden, Independence Hall, Philadelphia, September 1st 2022.

Labour goes to Liverpool so often for its party conferences these days that the city seems to groan with the weight of recent Labour history: the Corbyn battles, the Brexit wars, the Starmer resurrection all played out in the halls, the bars and the cavernous hangers of the dockside along the Mersey. Where this week’s latest outing will rank self-evidently depends on what is to come: Starmer’s last stand? Or the beginning of a fight-back for an often underestimated leader? For what it was worth, the view of much of the commentariat was that Starmer’s speech was one of, if not his best- that he showed a rare élan, that he “took on Farage” and drew political battle lines in a way in which his Downing Street has rarely seemed able to do. Indeed it is true that Starmer left Liverpool somewhat stronger than when he arrived. He bought himself sometime, cheered the movement and saw off, humiliated really, the could-have-been-king. But don’t be fooled, relative strength is not absolute strength and this was a conference week baked in frailty.

This was a leader forced to look inwards, rather than outwards. This was a leader who spent the week telling the Labour Party little it did not wish to hear. And this was a leader who was forced to spend the Labour Party conference, in the second year of a parliament with one of the biggest majorities in history, talking about an opponent with fewer MPs than Labour has factions, through the prism of an election which won’t take place til near the end of this decade. And this was a leader made to define himself against an opponent, on comfortable, milquetoast progressive grounds of decency and political character, because he has relatively little else to say about himself, the country’s recent history or the future of his own project.

In that sense, Farage has saved Starmer. With the apparition of such a dangerous opponent and the redrawing of British politics which goes with it, it has saved him from the knottier task of having to talk about his own ideas, something he roundly dislikes. Ask yourself to imagine what the speech would have looked like without the spectre of Farage. It would have forced Starmer and his party to confront the difficult realities of the first 15 months and the reasons as to why it has proven so tortuous. Those seeds were sown long ago. Labour has had little to say about why things aren’t getting better because its analysis of how it became so bad (developed in opposition) was thin, to the point of facile. It essentially amounted to the idea that Britain was broken because the Tories were too: that they were feckless, useless and riven. All of those things were true, but did not come close to conceptualising the extent of Britain’s ills, much less provide a framework as to what to do about them. Starmer’s political project rested on the idea that once the Toreis were removed, things would start to fall into place, to almost magically improve. It obviated the need for him or those around him to have a deeper analysis of power, or more profound theory of change. They still don’t. That deficit was never felt more acutely than in Liverpool this week. In its absence, Farage has taken the place in Starmer’s politics that the Tories once did: the catch all problem which must be smote.

But even with a new bogie man against which to rail, it does not alter his political weakness at this moment. He is weak, because he lacks any new analysis or governing project, or end point, which makes every minor crisis seem more important than it is. A leader who was strong would barely have mentioned Farage at all, or would have done so obliquely. He or she would have spoken only about their own ideas or project, about where they wanted to go. Instead Starmer was forced to root himself in the banalities of everyday British life, as if that were a form of politics in itself. It was weak because he was unable to provide answers to his own questions. He himself said that growth remained the central mission of his government. But with the economy anaemic (and if anything slowing) neither he nor his chancellor provided any new ideas or imperatives as to how to achieve it- he said Britain had to be renewed, but provided no new sense as to how it might happen.

More than anything, as ever with Starmer and those around him, it felt like a week of tactical wins and strategic blindspots, in three key respects. Firstly, Starmer and Reeves did almost nothing to roll the pitch for the defining political battle of the autumn: the pain of the November budget. Given their insistence on sticking to the Chancellor’s fiscal rules and the OBR’s forecast downgrades to Britain’s long term productivity (coming Friday), the Budget might look prove fiscal and political carnage. But you wouldn’t have known it from the conference speeches, save for some oblique references to the apparently limitless “tough decisions” to come. Given Reeves (unwisely) promised last year, that she wouldn’t need to do a significant tax raising budget again, this was an opportunity to start providing an analysis and story as to why that would be necessary after all- both to the public and deeply restive Labour MPs. Starmer and Reeves demurred and consequently, the fight will be all the harder when it comes.

Secondly, Starmer has now said that the preeminent battle of this parliament is a political one between himself and Nigel Farage. He has said that it is the “fight of our lives”. He has not made the battle about a policy, or an initiative, or even a general end goal, it is all about defeating Farage. The unfortunate thing about this is that he has set up a test which he is likely to fail almost immediately: in the Holyrood (and most importantly) Senedd elections next May. If Labour is routed by Farage in these contests (and in the clutch of English council elections to go with them) then Starmer has invited the party to consider him a failure by his own standards- and worse than that, a failure in a set of stakes which by his own admission “could not be higher.” This is a key factor which undermines the lazy “Labour doesn’t get rid of its leader” takes: in a parliament with scores of tiny Labour majorities, Farage changes the calculus. He terrifies Labour MPs in a way that the Tories do not, because it’s not just a pendulum they face, but the duopoly itself being swept away, with consequences entirely unknown.

Thirdly, Starmer set himself up, as the latest in a long line of progressive leaders who have come to believe that voters will chose their version of “decency” over their opponents’ supposed indecency. The danger is that more often than not, those leaders are disappointed- that the voters, even if disapproving of a populist politician’s mores, hold their noses and vote with according to other priorities, not least because, they think all politicians are venal or indecent to some extent anyway. Hearing Starmer talk about the fight “for the soul of the nation”, it was impossible not to hear the reedy tones of Joe Biden, who word for word spent years saying the same thing, only to lose the battle when it came. Time and again democratic electorates are lectured by lofty progressives that “we are better than this” only to be disabused of the notion by their own voters, who effectively tell them that they’re not. Overall, the risk is that Starmer has cemented himself as the epitome of the stodgy status quo- half time oranges, and all.

There is no risk free political move here. I have long written about the need for Starmer to evince a more muscular version of his own politics. If this is it, then all to the good. He is a decent man, who in so many ways embodies the median British voter better than Farage and his eccentric clan of oddballs and weirdos. There are examples of where this sort of approach has worked in overcoming populist insurgents: in Canada, in Australia and in Norway. The strategy of trying to make the majority of voters who dislike Farage coalesce behind you is one which could work. And with the Overton window not moving, but galloping in the direction of the radical right, a more solid counter-pole is required. But I fear that it won’t last because it’ll become yet another casualty of the message schizophrenia of No 10 in recent months. Remember that only a few months ago, we had the Island of Strangers speech, entirely at variance with this shift. Only two weeks ago the government was reluctant to condemn a rally organised by Tommy Robinson. Only last week they refused to condemn Farage’s ILR proposals in moral terms, only in terms of workability. The turn came with Keir Starmer’s apparently unscripted condemnation of the policy as “racist” on the Sunday of conference. It all feels very ad hoc and contingent. Even within the speech, Starmer condemned the use of flags to intimidate, whilst legions of the Labour faithful brandished their own party issued flags of the nations with abandon as he did so. If you want to frame a politics of decency, you have to be crystal clear as to why the other side is indecent and frame that indecency consistently and without rest. If the past history of this government is anything to go by, this all might be as quickly forgotten as the push for Digital IDs.

Some politicians almost feel as if they’re born with political definition. Some achieve political definition. Some have political definition thrust upon them. For Keir Starmer’s sake, and the country’s, he must hope contingency and circumstances have leant him the right one.