Keir Starmer and Future Political Visions

Subscribe to The Spectator and get twelve weeks of Britain's most incisive politics coverage, unrivalled books and arts reviews, and so much more. All for just twelve pounds. Not only that, but we'll also send you a twenty pounds Amazon gift card absolutely free. Go to www. spect ator.com forward slash voucher to claim this offer now Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Oskradmanson and I'm joined today by James Heal and Rachel Wolfe, founding partner at Public First and the author of the twenty nineteen Conservative Manifesto. So she knows a thing or two about constructing and communicating a political vision, uh which has been one of the big topics in Westminster this week. Tony Blair's five thousand-word essay on what's wrong with Labour has prompted West Streeting, Andy Burnham, and now Keir Star mer to set out their visions for the country. So we thought we'd take them each in turn. But James, can you just start by giving us the broad strokes of Blair's intervention this week? Who's welcomed it and who it's rubbed up the wrong way? Sure. So Teddy Blair has written a five thousand word essay published on his institute's website and this is very much him reprising his role as the Cassandra of the Labour Party, earnestly desperately trying to tell his party truths that they do not want to hear and will not listen to. It's the first time he's intervened in a Labour leadership race in eleven years. The last time of course was Jeremy Corbyn, which uh the immediate poll after that showed that it had led to more people in the Labour Party voting for Corbyn than before. Uh so we wait to see how his result does. But basically his attempt to try and influence the direction of the party. He is saying that there's a number of different challenges the Labour Party is just not fundamentally addressing here. He talks, for instance, about the need for an agenda to encourage the animal spirits of business. He also talks about migration, which is something we hear remarkably little from Labour figures as we enter the summer with its usual expected um sight of more small boats arriving here. And so effectively what he does he says that the lot of Labour's problems started going from when he left office, surprise, surprise, surprise 2007, and that Labour basically pivoted left after that and hasn't fundamentally tried to grapple with the issues actually face the economy and actually retreated very much to its kind of safe space. He's very much an AI optimist, suggesting A thatI will solve some of these problems, and he ends with a sort of policy checklist at the end of his essay talking about how they need to come up with a plan for the NHS, stop the small boats and sort of embrace a sort of any means necessary approach to that specific issue. But really it's a it's a plea to try and say that Labor shouldn't um retreat to what he would consider to be a sort of left wing safe space and actually should engage with these issues in a way in which that does encourage business and deals with the truths rather than try and pretend that the world is something it can't be. So AI is a fact of life, it's going to be here today, and never can't wish away problems like that. Yeah, Rachel, just before we go on to the other essays that have been prompted as a result of this, I did want to ask firstly what jumped out at you. And secondly what, you think of the people who are suggesting that Tony Blair is effectively a Tory now? Uh I'm afraid I was one of those people. I f I'll let me qualify that. I think Tony Blair was basically always a Tory. And I think his great genius was to be the Tory who managed to take over Labour, which is the reason he won three elections . And he was just a Tory overseeing significant enough growth that he could make some public spending while trying quite hard to turn public services into something more choice and market-oriented, which we would all recognize uh as something the right agrees with. So I think it was something of a radical Tory manifesto. I suppose what do I really mean by that? He he's trying to reclaim the term radical centrism, I think. I loathe the term centrism with a passion because it's it's one of those terms a bit like one nationism that can mean whatever anybody wants it to mean, except it's always a little bit soggy. And I think that what he was actually proposing was the non-highly left wing mandate that was both popular and could result in significantly better delivery for a government and therefore sustained popularity over time. And it is the left's tragedy that they have found it so hard to deliver those kinds of mandates, which is why they have generally over the last century failed to win elections or as we're seeing now maintain their popularity once they get in. So I'm I'm one of that crew. Sorry. Okay, you you're you're forgiven. But James, let's let's move on to West Streeting. He was the first to come out of the blocks with his his big op head. Big focus on the things that Blair missed out. He thinks that one of the main issues that he did leave out was uh living standards. Do you think he communicated that particularly successfully? Well I think one of the interesting things that does unite all the subsequent essays in response to Blair is obviously the agreement on that two thousand eight was the main pivot point at which things started to go wrong, and that's the financial crash rather than uh a few months earlier when Tony Blair left office as the great tragedy that befell the Western world. But I think that in terms of streetings I say, I was surprised by how vacuous it was. I mean you could have swapped the byline of West Streeting for that of Louise Haig and it would have read much the same. Essentially he's saying that uh oh inequality is a big thing that Blair missed. Well actually of course if you look at equality you know in standards we've become in some ways more more equal society. The tragedy is we're equally poor. I think that that mista kes what has actually happened here, which is stagnation. When he talks about people's l living standards, it's more the sort of decline on what they had in two thousand eight, rather than a sense of necessarily oh, everyone else is doing great in the South rather than the North in a kind of nineteen eighties Thatcher way. It was striking to me when he talked about economic growth that it was only of it in the context of social justice. He talked about economic growth and social justice. And for me it very much suggests an essay that was focusing on social justice rather than the economic economic growth agenda, which I think will be a disappointment to the fans of West Streeting outside the Labour Party who have always thought he m might be a more pro-business person in number ten and have an engagement with these arguments. But for me, I mean it just shows I think that he is laid-focused on the Labour membership. It is entirely addressed to and there's nothing necessarily ignoble about that in this sense, but entirely address to the whims and prejudices of the Labour Party, which is that it's about equality, but I would argue that that is not going to be enough. And a similar bro might have been offered before and they were similarly found wanting then. Do you think that comes from the fact that you know he struggled to get his 821 MPs because he didn't have the support in the party? He's much less popular than he was six months ago. Well I think that two things. One of which is I mean, yes, of course that's the case and he's thinking about the low membership where I think he's beaten by something by some sort of pyongyang-esque margin of eight to one by Andy Burnham. But the second point, I mean, this is a chance. If you're genuinely serious about setting up your arguments, a chance to engage with people and there's a sense where the Western Team could have handled this and set out a compelling manifesto that actually people across the spectrum say, Yeah, I I agree with that or acknowledge that point. And that's why I think Tony Blair's essay of the four we're going to be discussing today is probably the best because it at least makes some acknowledgement of things which are outside the labour comfort zone, talking about migration, talking about animal spirits. And I just found that Wes's argument was I mean it was almost like a sort of column I write sometimes slightly dashed off at the last minute. Uh and I wouldn't say there's as much interesting there as uh I thought there might be. Um well, Rachel, I uh firstly want your your opinion on West Streetings, but uh Andy Burnham's essay did did read to me the sort of preaching along similar lines. He was talking a lot about cost of living. But Andy Burnham's did seem significantly more politically astute. Yeah, I totally agree. I I was really surprised by how poor Streeting's essay was. One for an understandable reason, but one I I think more more problematic. He is obviously going to be very worried that he is seen as the Blair Eye candidate. And therefore partly the way in which he responded, I'm sure, and why he chose the Guardian, when Andy Burnham chose the Times. That was that was interesting. Was to say, no, guys, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not really Blair I and he's obviously with Labour members polling vastly below, not only Burnham, but also Stom . But if I take your editor as an example of another scene as in my view, genuinely, a very, very clever reforming person in a political party who perhaps doesn't quite appeal to the electorate in the same way, but is sort of trying to make his point. I think Michael would have done that in a much more in clever and intelligent and interesting way, even if it wasn't wholly authentic. And I thought that the way maybe because he didn't have time, but he's been preparing for this for a while. I thought it came across as ang ry and uninteresting. And that suggests that he is a less astute politician than actually I had had expected. I was very surprised on the downside by Streeting's essay. Burnham, on the other hand, seemed to me to lean into what his strengths are, which is he came across just as a fundamentally nice guy, right? It was it was warm and generous and empathetic and beautifully rooted in what he is hearing on the doorstep. He had this paragraph at the end, which I will misquote, you've probably got it in front of you, which is like, Isn't it marvellous that we're having this debate now? Because it allows the people of Makerfield who've been ignored for so long to be part of this debate. It was a beautifully authentic expression of his politics and what makes him successful as a politician. Of course I think it's nuts personally, like I think everything he said was nuts, but that that's not really the point we're talking about. That's not the debate. So it was it was to me a reminder of why is raw political talent. You you can see why Burnham is the person that the Labour Party feels hope in. And I think also it's quite telling politicians try to frame the arguments around those cases which are most favourable to them. When he talks, for instance, about Thatcher and he blames the housing crisis on Thatcher. Thatcher gets three mentions And neoliberalism and neoliberalism but neoliberalism of course. And and but the housing stock issue, you know, there's no agency given to the subsequent forty years uh in which you know you talked about council house sell off, uh a piece of legislation I believe that was passed in nineteen eighty. Yeah. Forty six years on, you might think for, instance, if you were on the right, you'd say, Hey, perhaps the arrival of two million people under Boris Johnson's uh reforms, maybe that was an issue to do with the housing. But of course what Burnham's trying to do is say to and we'll see if this succeeds, but he's trying to say to a group of people largely in the north and the Midlands who hated That cher and who were historically core Labour voters and have been voting for much of their lives or their parents' lives for exactly this narrative. They thought that what she had done is destroyed them. And then sort of being persuaded by the Tories for a while because of Brexit and immigration and were now persuaded by reform. What we try to say is reform are the same Thatcherite guys you always hated. Rem remember, I'm back. Now you have an authentic Labour person to vote for again. And that's not insane. It makes way more sense to go after reform on Thatcher and deindustrialization than it does to say, oh , actually these guys are racist and you're wrong to worry about immigration, which is where a lot of Labour people instinctively go. And it's obviously going to lead. Well moving on finally then to the underdog in the Labour leadership race, Keir Starmer. Keirstarmer. He um he was the last to uh submit his essay. And he did so on Substack, which I thought was funny. But James, a lot lot of people reading this is like we've been crying out for a written down version of what Keir Starmer stands for. Hooray, we finally got it. Do you think it actually is all that? Well, look, I think it was so Kirst Armor in multiple ways. Uh it was the last out the blocks. It featured the door closing on him, like a sinister version of the Godfather ending scene. Oh, the photo, yeah. And it had very little traction and I had a someone from number ten send it to me and I texted back and said, Oh, maybe if you'd written it for us, someone would have read it. Left on blue ticks, uh, which maybe says a lot. But I I I I mean I think that it was in some ways a sort of attempt to kind of triangulate between the various answers we've discussed thus far. The one thing I thought was uh interesting in the piece when he talks about the demands of the premiership being different than they were thirty years ago, and I think there certainly is something in that. Talking to members of the SUNAC trust and Johnson governments and and and sterile governments as well. They talk the the the pace of issues at which they come at you is very different from what the delivery units in an economy that was growing sort of two point four percent in the m late nineties that that was that was different. And I think it would have been interesting to have Kirstama talk about more of that personal touch. But overall, I I I did think it was a largely reiteration with her before. It was quite telling to me when he did mistakes that it was Rachel Reeves' mistakes he pointed the finger at the three I think he does talk about are winter fuel payments, national insurance, and the general sense of d doom and decline which began and characterised that early stage of the premiershi p. But I think overall it was just emblematic of why he will probably not be Prime Minister in twelve months' time. It was too little too late and didn't tell us enough new. I mean, Rachel, this whole sort of political vision showing off fest has come as a result of Keir Starmer not really presenting a coherent vision for the country and power abors a vacuum. Do you think then that you know that the the real issue that we're contending with here is the inability of our political class to properly communicate really what they stand for? Do you think that perhaps 2019 and the manifesto that you were involved in was that was the last time that we we really had that? I actually think you could reasonably argue that 2019 was also a bit of a cop out. So I think that well, what 2019 absolutely did, and it probably was the last time this happened, was create a genuine dividing line choice between the two then main parties, uh, Corbyn and Boris. And since then, and this may this will change if Burnham becomes Prime Minister, Labour has been beyond fuzzy in what change it is really promising while giving the impression that it thinks there's going to be incredible sunlit up plans for everybody. 2015 set out a really big dividing line. It was the continuation of the long-term economic plan, carry on with austerity, like back us or don't, won a majority, gave the Cameron Osbund government a genuine mandate to do some pretty tough and divisive things. 2017 attempted to do the same and failed because the social care and the other things that landed from the manifesto were seen, whether you agree with that or not, to have been part of what led to Theresa May losing the election. I think that , plus the continu ing mental confusion about the realignment of what electorate people are going after has meant that in the succeeding elections, political parties have been very frightened about offering very big choices and big divisions. And that has meant the other side of the election, it's been very difficult to drag your own party through difficult decisions and to make the sorts of policies that are likely to lead to positive change over the course of a parliament. So this was most extreme in 2024, when Labour really did say, we will change nothing, but everything will be better. And everyone was deeply disappointed the other side, and they weren't able to get their own political party to vote for difficult and unpopular things because they had they had no political mandate for it. They had no popular mandate for it. But I think that what Blair said, which is absolutely true, is that we need to return to a time where people are actually willing to prosecute an argument that is policy and persuasion, but it is policy and persuasion, and which accepts that there will be people who are very for what you are proposing and there will be people very against. And that's something that he was willing to do, that Cameron was willing to do, that actually Boris was willing to do in 2019. And I'm not sure that any of the responses to Blair