Keir Starmer, in his pre-recorded video speech when he was elected Labour leader last weekend, declared: “They were last and now they should be first.” He was talking about NHS staff, care workers, emergency services, cleaners and porters, and said: “For too long they’ve been taken for granted and poorly paid.”
It was a striking echo of the biblical phrase: “So the last shall be first, and the first last.” Starmer has an MDF speaking style, and indeed his video was recorded in front of what looked like a white self-assembly wardrobe, but at that point he lifted his oratory to the occasion – and offered a glimpse of the promised land after the virus.
It was a surprise, then, that the next politician to pick up on that sentiment was not one of Starmer’s new front-bench team – although what a relief it was to see a return to the idea of appointment by merit in the official opposition.
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Instead it was Dominic Raab, standing in for the prime minister at the daily news conference on Thursday, who said to NHS staff, carers and supermarket workers: “You’ve certainly all made us think long and hard about who the key workers are in our country.”
This is something that seems like the consensus during the Second World War: that things will not be the same after it is over; that out of adversity should come a better society. Although the idea of a coalition government of national unity has failed to catch on, there seems to be cross-party agreement that the value placed on different groups of workers has been out of kilter and should be put right.
Peter Kellner has written about the echo of the 1941 special edition of Picture Post, which declared: “Our plan for a new Britain is not something outside the war, or something after the war. It is an essential part of our war aims. It is, indeed, our most positive war aim. The new Britain is the country we are fighting for.”
What Starmer proposes for Britain after the coronavirus may not seem as ambitious as founding the universal welfare state, although trying to reverse the income distribution between the high-paid and the low is an immense undertaking. And I think it is right that the Labour Party should be setting out a frankly idealistic vision of the good that could come out of the suffering.
There are, however, two problems with thinking that Starmer is a modern-day Clement Attlee, and that the people will turn gratefully to Labour after the pandemic is over to supervise the building of the New Jerusalem.
One is that recovering from the coronavirus recession could be long and hard. For all the achievements of the Attlee government, for many people life was harder after the war than it was during it. Two years after the war, in the extreme winter of 1947, with bread rationed and fuel scarce, twice as many people told Gallup that they would rather be living in the “situation just before the war” than in the present.
The dream of a “new Britain”, in which key workers are rewarded for their contribution to the essentials of life, will come up against the reality of hard economic times. The original period of “austerity” was under the Attlee government, after all.
Much the same might happen to idealism about global cooperation to tackle problems such as climate change that “know no borders”. If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it is that when global problems become critical, they are met with national solutions.
The other obstacle to Labour’s new leader winning the trust of the British people to hear their plea of “Never again”, is that the Conservative Party is changing. It was Dominic Raab, often caricatured as on the hard right of the Tories, who spoke of thinking long and hard about who the real key workers are. It was Rishi Sunak, a Conservative chancellor, who consulted the Trades Union Congress about using public money to pay 80 per cent of the wages of workers kept on private-sector payrolls.
And Boris Johnson is no Churchill, however much he may imagine himself to be. However revered Churchill was as a war leader, he was distrusted, because of his pre-war reputation as a right-wing maverick, as an architect of the peace.
Johnson, on the other hand, has shown he can fight Labour on its own ground. The struggle between him and Starmer over who should build the post-corona new Britain is already under way.
