Starmer’s gamble on ultra-cautiousness could store up trouble

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Good morning. What do we want? Non-threatening change! When do we want it? At a pace that doesn’t scare Middle England! That’s the subtext to everything that Keir Starmer has said and done since becoming Labour leader.

One difficulty for Starmer is that this message is rather different to the things he said and did in order to become Labour leader. (Back then, the message was more like “What do we want? To get back into government! How will we do it? Without upsetting anyone on the soft left!”)

This has left him with some bitter enemies within the Labour party, and created a strategic vulnerability for him outside of it, something that Rishi Sunak tried to exploit yesterday. More on that story later.

Another difficulty is inevitably, change is always threatening and scary to someone, so there is an inherent incoherence to everything Labour says and does.

Labour’s long exit from its pledge to spend £28bn a year on green investment is shaped and driven by that incoherence, and by the personality of its leader and his top team. Some more thoughts on that below.

Risky business

Keir Starmer will abandon Labour’s commitment to spend £28bn a year on the green transition today, the culmination of a long retreat over the policy.

The trade-off over Labour’s £28bn pledge is between two risks. On the one hand, you have voters’ historic and long-standing anxieties from seeing a big number close to the words “borrow” and “Labour party”. On the other, you have the specific anxiety voters have about Starmer, that they don’t know what he stands for and he changes his opinion in the wind. You can make any number of arguments for getting shot of this pledge and any number of them for keeping hold of it, but you can’t avoid both these risks.

Is it the right decision? I don’t know. Robert Shrimsley sets out the arguments for and against well in his column and I don’t have very much to add to that.

The reason why it has taken the Labour party quite so long to decide is that it has taken its leader a long time to do so. But the view that has eventually won out is the same ultra-cautious approach that defined his campaign for the party leadership. It doesn’t look the same, because during that campaign “being cautious” meant “making a series of quite radical promises to Labour party activists”, and now being cautious means making quite expansive promises to British voters about what he won’t do. As Robert puts it:

If there is one thing we have learnt about the Labour leader — aside from his being the son of a toolmaker — it is that he is not burdened even by recent history. He won the leadership as a unity candidate, essentially offering competent Corbynism. Four years on, he has purged his predecessor and is running for election on a programme that critics see as closer to competent Conservatism.

There are two risks here for Labour: the first is that this will disrupt the party’s path to power. The second is that it will make them swiftly and irrevocably unpopular once they are in office if Starmer once again transforms his position on key issues.

When his leadership was in a vulnerable state back in 2021, some of his allies and supporters would complain that it was all the fault of Morgan McSweeney, the chief architect of Starmer’s successful 2020 leadership campaign.

McSweeney, they bemoaned, had been far too cautious in that leadership election and overcompensated for his previous experience of running Liz Kendall’s doomed campaign for the party leadership in 2015 (she finished last with 4.5 per cent of the vote). Starmer made a series of specific promises to win over the Labour party membership that he then had to jettison at considerable political cost.

Now that Starmer is, per our opinion poll tracker, 19 points ahead, this criticism gets aired a lot less. McSweeney’s stock is incredibly high and he remains Starmer’s most influential aide when it comes to election strategy.

But essentially, the same dynamic that played out in Starmer’s leadership campaign (“do we really need to make quite so many promises and show quite this much ankle to the party’s left, Morgan?”) is playing out in Starmer’s general election campaign (“do we really need to make quite so many self-denying ordinances and show quite this much leg to undecided voters, Morgan?”).

There is an opportunity for the Conservative party here. It can try to paint Starmer as a dangerous gamble. (The Tories’ dream scenario is for voters who flit between the Conservatives and Labour to worry that Starmer is a dangerous radical, and for voters who choose between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens to worry that Starmer is no different from Rishi Sunak.)

But thus far, Sunak has not shown a clear sense of what he wants to say about either the direction he’d take the country or the risk that Starmer presents. There is a question mark over his ability to actually do so.

His latest attempt to remind people of the Labour leader’s changed positions has seen him face calls to apologise from the father of a murdered trans teenager, who has described Sunak’s language at Prime Minister’s Questions as “degrading” and “dehumanising”.

There’s no question that trans rights is another issue on which Starmer’s stance has changed. I remember very vividly the interview I did with David Lammy at the Labour party conference back in 2021 in which he said that there were some “dinosaurs” in the Labour party who wanted to “hoard rights”. That is very far from Labour’s current line. It is true to say, I think, that as a result almost no one who feels strongly about the issue is happy about or really trusts Labour’s position. But more important, there is also no question that the week in which the parents of a murdered teenager are in Parliament is not the week for Sunak to try and have that conversation.

As long as Sunak remains incapable of finding effective ways to attack Starmer, Starmer’s gamble that emulating the approach that won him the 2020 Labour leadership contest will work again might well succeed. But it’s far from clear that he will have an equally easy time of it in office, or that he will continue to face a Conservative party that is quite so divided or poorly led.

Now try this

I’m really enjoying The Chalk Artist by Allegra Goodman, which was kindly lent to me by our newsletter supremo Sarah Ebner, after I mentioned how much I enjoyed Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

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