Keir Starmer bets on swerving culture wars as he sets out Labour’s stall

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. While we don’t yet know when the next election will be, one thing we thought we knew about it was that Keir Starmer didn’t want to talk very much about so-called “culture war” issues.

Some thoughts on what the Labour leader was doing yesterday when he defended the National Trust and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and on the timing of the next election, below.

Save the date

Speculation about a May election won’t go away. On the Labour side, Keir Starmer has set a “hard deadline” of February 8 for Labour’s draft manifesto (our story about that and the ex-Treasury official in charge of overseeing it all is here).

On the Conservative side, the FT has revealed that EU diplomats believe that Rishi Sunak is delaying providing a date for the next meeting of the European Political Community because he wants to retain the option of holding an election this spring:

Several EU ambassadors have grumbled privately that officials in London have been dragging their feet over agreeing a date for the summit, which insiders said was initially expected to take place in March or April.

While Rishi Sunak has indicated that a general election is most likely to take place in the second half of the year, European diplomats suspect the fact he has not completely excluded the possibility of a May poll explains the absence of a date for the summit.

I continue to think that a spring election is a) in the interests of the Conservative party and b) very unlikely for a number of reasons.

One of those is that it is less clear that this timing is in the interest of Rishi Sunak: call an election any time after late October and you have held on as long as you could, you aren’t going to be accused of a gamble that backfired on your party, etc. Another is that within Downing Street, the “go in autumn or later” tendency has long been in the ascendancy and I don’t think that is going to change this side of the local elections.

No culture wars, we’re skittish

One thing that has been pretty consistent on the Labour side is that Keir Starmer has been reluctant to fight the next election — or indeed go through a particularly extensive news cycle — on what you might call “culture war” issues. He wants to focus his election campaign on the economy, public services and the fact that the Conservative party has been in power for 14 years (not necessarily in that order).

As leader he has tended to swerve out of the way of culture war issues. Starmer has made the occasional conscious choice to either retreat (as he has over trans rights, withdrawing from his party’s previous positions on the reform of gender self-ID) or to draw a line. He criticised Priti Patel over her comments that fans had a right to boo England’s football team for taking the knee before matches, and condemned Lee Anderson over his boycott of some England games in objection against players doing so.

Part of the reason for yesterday’s speech is that the Labour leadership wants to set out a broader sense of what the party stands for. In the next few months, it is also planning to be more front-footed on a swath of cultural and economic issues, as well as in how it would run public services.

That said, I wouldn’t see it as a particularly big change in approach. Neither support for the National Trust’s attempts to display more about the history of its properties or the RNLI’s work at sea are particularly tricky culture war topics. The National Trust’s membership has consistently backed its leadership at the Trust’s AGMs. The RNLI is very popular. To the extent Starmer is taking a risk here, it is that he is betting that neither the RNLI nor the National Trust will do or say something on an issue he wants to avoid this side of the election.

Starmer has consistently wanted to position himself in the middle of British public opinion. But his ability to do so is ultimately a bet on his judgment. Sometimes, his first instinct has been right. An example of that was his position on the toppled statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, where he and Boris Johnson shared the same view (glad it came down, but it should have been the result of a proper process, not dumped into the harbour).

Now Starmer is trusting that his judgment on the National Trust and the RNLI will be more of the same — rather than the beginning of a period of agonising reappraisal, like that of Labour’s backpedal on Gender Recognition Certificate reform.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to David Bowie’s excellent 2013 record The Next Day while writing my column. It really is a great album (“Where Are We Now?” is the standout track, I think.)

Top stories today

• Borrowing falls | The UK government borrowed much less than expected in December, in a boost to chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s plans to cut taxes ahead of this year’s expected general election.

• Hammer blow to Labour’s £28bn plan? | The Labour party may need to look again at its plans to spend £28bn on green capital investment if, as expected, the chancellor uses his fiscal “headroom” to give away billions of pounds of tax cuts in the March Budget. Hunt’s allies also expect Keir Starmer to use the Budget as an “excuse” to drop the target, which has been repeatedly watered down in recent months.

• New strikes against Houthis | The US and UK launched another round of joint strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen on Monday, the second time that Britain has been directly involved in the military action targeting the Iran-backed rebel group.

• Treasury docs suggested tax cuts will have ‘low impact’ on growth | Treasury officials told incoming prime minister Rishi Sunak in 2022 that tax cuts would have a “low impact” on boosting growth, a view that appears at odds with Hunt’s promise of a 1980s-style “boom” sparked by giveaways in the March Budget, Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham reports.