By Stefan Boscia
It’s been a good 12 months for Labour. Sir Keir Starmer’s party began 2022 with a small polling lead over the Tories and will finish it looking like a government-in-waiting, thanks largely to the risible collapse of two Prime Ministers and economically crippling stagflation.
Pressure will now come onto the opposition leader to give away more of himself and to show the public how he will govern if he wins the 2024 election. Anyone wanting a preview need only look at his speech at the CBI’s annual conference this week.
Starmer slaughtered another of the party’s sacred cows on Tuesday, something he is increasingly comfortable with, as he decried the UK’s “dependence on immigration” for economic growth. He said the UK has been “more comfortable hiring people to work in low paid … contracts than we are investing in the new technology that delivers for workers” in a message perfectly curated toward ex-Labour voters in working class towns.
He spoke about how Britain needed “growth from the grassroots” and to be “a nation where working people succeed and where aspiration is rewarded”, while also touting Labour’s newly earned pro-business credentials. It was the latest iteration of a blue collar centre-leftist economic vision, which sees Starmer adopt Tony Blair-like triangulations in policy and rhetoric.
It’s a vision built on embracing Brexit, promoting British manufacturing, committing to fiscal responsibility, boosting public services, talking tough on crime and railing against untapped low-skilled immigration. All this is buttressed by a pro-business, pro-aspiration promise that closely mirrors Joe Biden’s economic strategy in the 2020 Presidential election.
The perfect embodiment of Labour’s new blue collar progressivism is its plan, a copy of Biden’s, to spend £28bn a year on reindustrialising the UK through green manufacturing subsidies. The policy aims to help usher the UK’s transition away from fossil fuels, while also appealing to a working class section of the electorate that has abandoned Labour by creating new manufacturing jobs.
Labour’s political obituary was written by many pundits after the 2019 election as long-term voting trends among the suburban working class deepened. Labour had lost touch with this demographic over the preceding 20 years as it abandoned its beer and sandwiches aesthetic of old and instead became a party of metropolitan university graduates.
The oft-heard phrase in towns like Bassetlaw and Bolsover during the 2019 Christmas election was that “we haven’t left the Labour party – the Labour party left us”.
Starmer’s politically shrewd efforts to remedy this decline may just work, with the party now holding large polling leads over the Tories in the party’s traditional northern heartlands. Who would have thought the man to win back the northern working class for Labour could be Holborn and St Pancras MP Sir Keir Starmer KCB KC?
Starmer has been painted as a Blairite by the left, the worst possible pejorative for many Labour members, and they’re right in one crucial sense. While the policies Labour are putting together now are very different from the progressive free market-ism of Blair, he has injected them with a kind of pragmatism and cunning that would make the former PM proud.
Make no mistake – Starmer has become utterly ruthless in his drive for power and is desperate to become Prime Minister. This has opened the door to attacks from Rishi Sunak, who has begun to paint the Labour leader as a craven opportunist that will say anything to win.
Starmer has done a commendable job of creating a viable blueprint to stitch together an election-winning coalition, but the real question is if he can sell it. He has two years to patiently herd the electorate toward his vision of Britain, while also proving his leadership qualities to those who see him as a boring technocrat.
Former Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod once said there comes a time in every political campaign where a candidate has to show he can “close the deal”. It won’t be long until we find out if Starmer has it in him to wrench open the door to Number 10 and slam it shut behind him.
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