UK Politics: Why Labour’s plans are so vague
Isabel Hardman
Credit: Getty Images
Keir Starmer has deliberately pursued a strategy of revealing as little as possible, boasting today that his manifesto didn’t contain any surprises. In between his verbal tic about his father being a toolmaker, Starmer has been least at ease in the TV debates, and it was in the first of these that he said more than he probably intended to. Asked by ITV’s Julie Etchingham whether he had any advice for ‘Gareth on his way to Berlin [for the Euros]’ about leadership, Starmer replied:
‘You need a strategy for winning. So it depends on your opponent and what the issue is.’
It isn’t telling us what it is going to do in detail because that would scare the horses
The Labour leader is of course right. You need to win first. He seemed to be thinking about the Jeremy Corbyn years, when plenty of thought was given to the ends and none to the means. Corbyn even made an analogy at his party conference about a football team which had lots of supporters, without mentioning whether or not they actually won any games. Starmer’s whole election strategy has been formed in response to that experience.
The remark probably didn’t make much sense to voters, who are still going to be wondering after today’s manifesto launch what Labour would do after it won an election. Politics is, despite the total obsession of people like Starmer, not all that much like football: winning the game is the start, rather than the ultimate objective.
And yet in this election we are getting no more details about what exactly is going to happen once Labour is in power. Much of the stuff of real consequence will be announced after everyone is in position and has had a chance to ‘look at the books’. This phrase, repeated almost as often as the toolmaker line, is the pitch-rolling for some pretty tough decisions about tax and spend. It will also form the basis for policymaking across government, even if those decisions have already been made.
That’s not to say that Starmer hasn’t thought at all about what he wants to do once he is in government: he spent a considerable amount of time before this election ensuring his shadow ministers were getting training and mentorship from outside organisations. He has been far better-prepared than Tony Blair was in 1997, when the newly-elected Prime Minister was a bit baffled by what a private office would do for him. Blair also had not put the thought into public service reform, for instance, that Starmer already has done. When I interviewed him for my book on the NHS, Blair was very clear that he had not done very much thinking at all about the health service. He had made a pledge that made no sense on the number of people waiting, rather than the amount of time they were waiting. He had also appointed a health secretary in Frank Dobson who had very different political instincts to him, and whose main preoccupation in the early years was not reform as such but trying – unsuccessfully – to dismantle the internal market and stopping the reorganisation of London hospitals. Starmer’s frontbench team have spent years thinking and writing about what they want to do with the NHS.
Labour has already largely looked at the books. It’s just that it isn’t telling us what it is going to do in detail because that would scare the horses. That does make sense as an election strategy, even if it does bore the rest of us a little bit.
A bigger question than what Labour wants to do, though, is how Starmer intends to do it, and whether he has the mettle to see it through. We have learned from the way he has transformed the Labour party internally that he is prepared to be ruthless. We have learned that he will drop a policy when it no longer suits him, which is either opportunism or a valuable ability to respond to reality rather than – as so often happens in governments of all stripes – pursuing a policy that manifestly won’t work for the simple reason you once said you’d do it and you don’t want to lose face.
But we also know that Starmer likes to mollify factions within the party by announcing one policy they’ll hate and then backing something else – often totally unrelated – that they’ll love. Hence the manifesto commitment on Palestinian statehood, which some think is meant to keep activists from getting too worked up about the party not promising to scrap the two-child benefit limit.
The biggest question that we just do not know the answer to is whether Starmer would use his supermajority – if he gets it – to answer some of the big questions in British politics today. If he does win a big majority, then he could ram through reforms to the NHS and social care, for instance, early on. He might, though, worry that this would burn up too much political capital too soon – though in my view, this would be a mistake as your political capital always depreciates as time goes on, even in a big majority. In fact, especially in a big majority, because a supermajority does not guarantee hundreds of MPs marching mutely through the lobbies. It could precipitate the balkanisation of the party. Tory leaders have learned that a majority can end up being quite hollow quite quickly. So does Starmer have a strategy for having won? We don’t know yet.
The Spectator