Can you trust Starmer on policy?
The Labour leader wants the left to shut up and take him at his word, is that really what we should be doing between now and 2024?
Being a left member of the Labour party of late has been a relentless experience of gaslighting. The leadership expels comrades you respect for saying something it doesn’t like, and whips to abstain on dreadful breaches of civil liberty like the Spy Cops bill, and just as you think enough is enough Keir Starmer does an obscure interview somewhere low profile where he assures you he’s committed to this radical policy or that radical policy, and then you never hear of it again. What the hell does all this mean? Let’s unpack it.
There are two ways to read this. The first is that Starmer genuinely wants the left on side and is genuinely committed to keeping (some) of his promises come 2024 on hard policy, but doesn’t want to discuss those things publicly yet, so he’s sending covert messages in interviews here and there that he’s still on board. The second (and more realistic) is that Starmer is going through the motions, saying the right things to the right people, but has no genuine commitment to any policy right now, and has essentially become the Pandora’s Box of Labour leaders.
The issue here is that the left has no reason whatsoever to trust Keir Starmer. When he won, most of us gave him the benefit of the doubt, while remaining sceptical, but keeping in mind that he ran for the leadership on a Corbynite policy platform and pledged himself very publicly to an agenda for Labour under his leadership and 2024’s manifesto that was absolutely to the left of most recent Labour leaders right back through Kinnock, with the exception of Corbyn himself.
Starmer then proceeded to directly and indirectly row back on various things, breach core principles of his 10 Pledges relentlessly (to the point they became an easy to mock meme), all while displaying at best quiet contempt, and at worst open hostility to the parliamentary left, and socialist party members. This evidentially wasn’t what the membership thought they were voting for, and it’s what many of us feared and warned about when we insisted the left should cast their votes uniformly for Long-Bailey in order to preserve the prospect of a left-Labour government, whatever her own flaws were as a candidate.
As I say, the result of all this is a complete destruction of any lingering trust between Starmer and the Labour left, now we’ve seen Spy Cops, the factional crackdown, the Corbyn suspension, and now we’ve seen Rachel Reeves and Lisa Nandy rolling back Labour policy live on Marr every week, spiced up with constant head banging invocations of “constructive opposition”. We can’t take Starmer at his word on policy, and if we did, we’d be fools.
Starmer has recently committed himself to votes for 16 year olds, and the abolition of tuition fees. These are both core parts of what Labour should be offering in 2024, because they offer tangible motivation to get young people fired up to vote, as they were in that glorious summer of 2017. But can we really believe Starmer won’t decide to throw these things under the bus? The welcome news is that on votes for 16 and 17 year olds, Sir Keir has form, and has been a consistent advocate, which would imply he has personal commitment and some skin in the game, and is likely to maintain the commitment.
As for tuition fees? The Lib Dems teach us to be very sceptical of handsome men in suits offering us free Uni; the left should instil the fear of god into Labour that if they say this, and either renege before the next election, or renege once in office, they would have lost young people, and have lost any prospect of forming a government for literally decades upon decades. No joke, the biggest blunder would be breaching that promise now it’s made. Look at the state of the Lib Dems! Labour have made a pledge, and no amount of technocratic doublespeak can get them out of it without breaching a compact with an entire generation.
On austerity, Starmer has recently made a very eloquent case for why it was a policy failure, why rushing to “get the debt down” is the worst of all worlds for the economy, and why we need an investment lead strategy to grow out of the crisis. Great, but will he keep to it? The worry here is that the Tories are committing themselves to higher state spending in key areas for a decade, initiating a whole new political paradigm in Britain, the likes of which Labour hasn’t had to reckon with before.
What could the net result of this be? The nightmare scenario is Labour paint the Tories as reckless on spending out of sheer desperation, pivoting the conversation to the right, and either loosing miserably, or winning a Labour government to the right of the Conservatives on state spending. This may sound desperate and unlikely, and both of those things are two, but it’s the logical conclusion of the buzzwords of “responsible” “value for money” etc etc, which are fine on principle, but have long been co opted by rightwing deficit hawks.
So can you trust Keir Starmer on policy? No you can’t, but there’s room for optimism in the fact he’s an empty shell, and will do what the current of Labour opinion does, therefore might commit to aspect of left policy if we make it more of a hassle for him not to. There are realm, tangible ways to pressure Keir Starmer and hold him to account; that’s not rhetoric, that’s something we can all do.
It’s massively to early to tell what Labour’s 2024 offering will look like, and the left’s task is to imbed itself in the party, be honest about our principles, make the case for our agenda at conference, and unite members against anti-democratic factional crackdowns. We have to push these people, they aren’t Blairites, they’re empty political shells, they’re soft left, not rightwing. This doesn’t need to be despair, but it does need to be a colossal wakeup call to those with progressive or radical principles, that we’ll have to squeeze policy from Labour now, to expect it, and we can’t trust the leadership at its word, we have to hold it to it.