The Labour leader started writing his long essay, now published as a Fabian Society pamphlet, when he was travelling the country this year, talking to people whose votes the party had lost.
He claims to have sensed that Boris Johnson’s appeal was beginning to wear thin, and that people were prepared to look again at Labour, so he tried to set out the kind of argument that might win them back.
The pamphlet begins by declaring: “People in this country are crying out for change.” He sets out where the country went wrong in the “lost decade” of the 2010s; what it learnt about “the power of people working together” during the pandemic; and the choice for the future.
He tries to tie Boris Johnson to 11 years of Conservative rule, including the attempt by David Cameron and George Osborne to “roll back the state”. More ambitiously, however, he tries to lay claim to the slogan Take Back Control. “The desire of people across the country to have real power and control – expressed most forcibly in the Brexit vote – remains unmet,” Starmer argues. He promises that the next Labour government will “give people the means to take back control”.
Although Johnson presents himself as different from his Tory predecessors and points to the huge public spending on furlough and business support as evidence, Starmer argues that this conversion is not real, and that the Conservatives’ true colours are starting to show. “This current government might talk a different talk,” he says, “but when it came down to it, they used the pandemic to hand billions of pounds of taxpayer money to their mates and to flout the rules they expected everyone else to live by.”
That is the argument running through the pamphlet: that the country now has the chance to build on the solidarity shown during the pandemic, or to go back to the selfishness and individualism of Conservative business as usual. With a secondary argument that, although Johnson presents himself as the change, his party hasn’t really changed and he cannot be trusted.
The essay contains a number of side-arguments. It accuses the Conservatives of having veered from patriotism to nationalism – the symptoms of which include “a botched exit from the European Union, the erosion of our defence and military capabilities and an unfolding foreign policy disaster in Afghanistan”. It distinguishes between nationalism, which divides, using the flag as a threat, and patriotism, which unites, using the flag as a celebration. And it attacks Johnson for trying to import “American-style divisions on cultural lines”.
It includes some surprisingly pro-business lines: “Business is a force for good in society.” But also some rather airy rhetoric about fundamental change to the economy: “That means a new settlement between the government, business and working people. It means completely rethinking where power lies in our country – driving it out of the sclerotic and wasteful parts of a centralised system and into the hands of people and communities across the land.”
The pamphlet concludes with 10 “principles to form a new agreement between Labour and the British people”. The cynic might say that these are designed to overwrite the 10 Corbynite pledges on which Starmer was elected leader, as none of them bears any resemblance to his leadership manifesto.
These are described as 10 principles for a “contribution society”, which Starmer defines as: “One where people who work hard and play by the rules can expect to get something back, where you can expect fair pay for fair work, where we capture the spirit that saw us through the worst ravages of the pandemic and celebrate the idea of community and society; where we understand that we are stronger together.”
The principles begin with: “We will always put hard-working families and their priorities first.” Only two of them are remotely specific. The fourth is: “Your chances in life should not be defined by the circumstances of your birth.” That is the end of the royal family, then. And the eighth: “The government should treat taxpayer money as if it were its own. The current levels of waste are unacceptable.” That could be a popular theme if ministers become complacent.
Overall, the pamphlet sets out an ambitious but mostly platitudinous argument for Labour to lay claim to one of the oldest political slogans, namely “change vs more of the same”. Its test will be in whether those lost Labour voters to whom Starmer spoke in Ipswich, Wolverhampton and Blackpool decide that Johnson can offer them the change they say they want.
