Labour has finally given its real game away
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Sir Keir Starmer was in deepest blue Sussex on Monday on the hunt for swing voters. There are a large number of undecideds in this election, possibly more than ever, because disgruntled Tories have not warmed to Labour. The latter is campaigning on the single word “change”, which is a powerful slogan after 14 years of Conservative-led government. But change to what?
By definition, floating voters hold no strong party allegiances, nor do they embrace any particular ideology. They are looking for an improvement on what they have seen over the past few years, but one that is more performative than fundamental. “Let’s give the other lot a chance” is a sentiment often heard, especially if the other lot differs little from the present lot.
They are looking, essentially, for a Tony Blair-style Labour Party, something non-threatening, mainstream and centrist. If Sir Keir in his speech on Monday had said he was preparing to lead Britain into a socialist promised land, they would have been appalled.
Yet when asked point blank if he would call himself a socialist, he said: “Yes, I would describe myself as a socialist. I describe myself as a progressive. I’d describe myself as somebody who always puts the country first and party second.”
If you are named after a founder of the Labour Party, it is hard to disavow your heritage, not that he made much of it in his Lancing speech. It contained the now obligatory personal story to be told at every party conference or on the election trail.
The Labour leader took us back to the grim days of the 1970s when he was the only horny-handed son of toil in Oxted, Surrey. His character was shaped by this upbringing, his father a tool-maker, his mother a nurse whose chronic illness dominated the family’s life.
By this account, he was a working-class lad living among the chalk hills of the North Downs, surrounded by the Victorian red bricks of the well-heeled. “You could make easy pocket money clearing stones for the local farmers, that was actually my first job. And you could play football until the cows came home – literally. At my first football club, Boulthurst Athletic, we shared our home pitch with the local cows.”
It was almost on a par with Monty Python’s “you were lucky” sketch, and Starmer was lucky. He went to a grammar school before it was closed as a result of Labour’s previous socialist class war on education, and stayed on when it became independent, his fees paid by the local authority.
You might have hoped he would have learnt that a policy leading to the destruction of good schools is vindictive, immoral and ultimately self-defeating, but apparently not judging by his plan to impose VAT on independent schools.
Another aspect of his “journey” that he failed to mention was his involvement with a Lefty fringe magazine called Socialist Alternatives or his membership of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, which has a history of far-Left sympathies and for which he was listed as secretary. He only gave up the latter in 2008 before becoming director of public prosecutions.
Indeed, he never referred to this socialist past in his speech, only when asked later in a BBC interview. Since we were being treated to Sir Keir’s potted biography primarily to introduce him to a voting public on whom he has made little impression over the past five years, it was a surprising omission, unless he felt it should be hidden away.
Anyone focusing on the Labour leader for the first time would probably think he can hardly pose a threat given his knighthood, Surrey upbringing, former job as director of public prosecutions, and status as a King’s Counsel.
But for those who might find that too posh, too establishment, too Home Counties, he also needed to conjure up a childhood of hardship:
“I know what out of control inflation feels like, how the rising cost of living can make you scared of the postman coming down the path: ‘Will he bring another bill we can’t afford?’ We used to choose the phone bill because when it got cut off, it was always the easiest to do without. We didn’t have mobiles back then but you could still just about get on with it.”
Of course, the out of control inflation was largely caused by the Labour government’s mishandling of the economy back in the 1960s and 1970s and the power of the trade unions.
Back then, the party was wedded to mass nationalisation of industry, secondary picketing and the closed shop. Its socialistic aims were enshrined in Clause IV of the party’s constitution: “To secure for the workers … the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.”
This was junked by Tony Blair in 1995 with the clear intention of separating “new” Labour from its socialist roots.
Although Blair called himself a socialist in his maiden Commons speech in 1983, by the time he took power in 1997 no one would have considered him to be one and nor did he claim to be. Tellingly, perhaps, since 1974 he is the only Labour leader to have won a general election.
Sir Keir may think the Tories are such a busted flush that he can flaunt his socialist credentials with impunity, hoping no one will care. “I have changed my party permanently,” he assured voters. Yet his past suggests he was every bit as committed to the cause as Jeremy Corbyn, who is now an outcast.
At least Corbyn was open about his true ideology, whereas Starmer wants voters to accept he can be a socialist only without the statist belief system that underpins it. Then again he may be a Marxist, of the Groucho, not Karl, kind – “Those are my principles and if you don’t like them, well I have others.”
There is a danger that floating voters will back Labour because the Tories have had their turn and they are really “all the same”. But they aren’t.
There is a fundamental difference between the unfortunate resurgence of Conservative paternalism and a socialist belief in central planning, common ownership and income redistribution.
Wherever it has been tried, including here, socialism has been a disaster. Margaret Thatcher, who smashed the last two-party consensus, had a message for undecided voters: “There is no such thing as ‘safe’ socialism. If it’s safe, it’s not socialism. And if it’s socialism, it’s not safe.”
