Starmer the lawyer is back – and this time Johnson has nowhere to run
“Security. Prosperity. Respect.” Keir Starmer appeared in Birmingham on Tuesday to lay out his offer to the country. It is always, if you care about the Labour party, nerve-racking to hear its leader make an account of its core values, though nothing will ever match the dispiriting moment before the 2015 leadership election, when it named one of its core values as “having strong values”.
Shelving, very briefly, the question of who is and who isn’t centrist enough for the country, values are like an octave, or a deck of cards: they are fixed in number, at least the acceptable ones; they are always the same. “Another C sharp, another jack of diamonds,” you think. “Big wow.” It’s only once you’re in the middle of a game that any of them become precious or meaningful, and for far too long the Conservatives have been writing the rules. “Labour values” such as equality were effortlessly lifted, to become “levelling up”. The progressive party flailed to adapt – what next, are we all leveller uppers now? Do we level down? – not realising that the rules were always changing, and now jokers were wild in play too. The way to win against the Conservatives was not to find better, different, newer, or more traditional, or more decisive, or more interpretable values. It was to divest the Conservatives of the legitimacy of their rulebook.
So Starmer’s offer in this speech was more of a placeholder: he vowed that “if we work hard, we should have a right to job security”. I would have preferred a more radical promise, that if we work hard, we should be relatively confident that we can feed and house ourselves, then a side order of support if by circumstance we can’t work hard.
He asserted, too, that “everybody has a right to be valued for who we are and what we do”. It’s a laudable idea but quite hard to measure. Yet if you connect those two thoughts – we have workplace rights, and we all have value – it represents a significant break with the last 12 years of economic reality and political discourse.
The transfer of power from the worker to the employer that, with zerohours contracts and poverty wages, has seemed inexorable, would not survive this meaningful reassertion of workplace rights. And the many cruelties of austerity have only endured this long thanks to the underpinning narrative that hardship was self-inflicted and that some (millions of ) people simply had less value than others.
This is an optimistic interpretation of the speech; the counterpoint, that it simply didn’t say enough about Labour’s policy intentions, is also fair. Its driving purpose was to establish the party as the dynamic vessel of, rather than a moaning participant in, antiConservative feeling.
Boris Johnson’s critique of his opposite number has, of course, always been that he’s a lawyer – combining the insults boring, technical, elitist, an observer rather than an actor, “Captain Hindsight”. Starmer’s speech, perhaps for the first time since he became leader, performed a jujitsu move: yes he is a lawyer, and Johnson could have at it. He conveyed this explicitly, his patriotism mediated through his hinterland as the “country’s leading prosecutor”. He also did so implicitly, framing his relationship with voters as a “contract” – about as lawyerly as it comes. And he laid a very simple, yet nevertheless lawyerly trap for Johnson: the prime minister himself is unfit for office, yet the problem is with the entire party, not just one man.
The Conservatives care so little about the country that they’re “gearing up for a leadership fight” precisely when we most need stability. It was a systematic, rather obvious, block of each exit: they can’t keep Johnson because he’s bent; another candidate won’t stop the rot, because the party is spent; if they ignore the problem and forge on with their leader, it will merely be a depressing illustration that “they’ve been in power too long”; if they try to replace him, they indicate their lack of seriousness and civic duty. These points lay out a foundational principle, without which Labour will always be on the back foot: the Conservative rulebook is no longer legitimate.
Later the same day, Johnson gave a press conference of his own, in a move that cynics, which is now all of us, read as attempting to draw attention away from Starmer’s speech. Problematically for Johnson, that press conference was drivel: repetitive, chaotic, and largely devoid of substance. Any that there was, was immediately contradicted by the look on the face of the man (Chris Whitty) standing right next to him. Johnson is getting to a place where, every time he opens his mouth, he makes his opponent’s point for him. Lawyers, huh?