What exactly is the point of this vacuous and confused Labour Party?

It is impossible to tell whether Keir Starmer is a Blairite incarnation or a union mouthpiece

What exactly is Keir Starmer’s Labour party for? I mean that in both senses: what is their purpose on earth, and for what or whom do they speak? Judging by their vacuous performance last week in response to Gavin Williamson, the Government’s least impressive Cabinet member, there can be only one answer to this. They are now the parliamentary wing of the public sector unions. We can only hope that this is a provisional position while they figure out the appropriate function of an opposition in the time of a health crisis. Sometime later this year, presumably, some long-term decisions will have to be made.

Meanwhile, the Labour leader’s response to Mr Willamson’s presentation in the House was a catchall endorsement of the Government’s proposal to hand over almost total control of A-level results to teachers, to which Labour could not object since it is what the education unions have been demanding – and what they wish to see established as a precedent for the post-pandemic future. The statement by Labour’s education spokesman Kate Green was even more blatantly obsessed with the unions’ objectives, complete with the inevitable demand for resources (more money) and Government support (more money) for the school staff who will bear the burden of this disruption to education – which sounded in Labour’s version as if it were the fault of the Government rather than the virus, even though Labour had been arguing for earlier and longer school lockouts.

In what could loosely be described as the “debate” that followed, there was only the briefest expression of concern from Labour MPs for the pupils whose future prospects have been so devastatingly affected by the events of this year. The backbenchers, too, devoted their attention almost entirely to the needs of the people who are employed in schools rather than those who are taught in them.

For any extended expression of compassion for those A-level students who, what with optional exams, teacher assessments and unlimited appeals, scarcely know whether they are coming or going, you had to hear from Robert Halfon, the Tory chairman of the Education Select Committee, whose dedication to the cause of pupils’ welfare has been tireless. Labour’s devotion to relaying what are, at the moment, the demands of the more militant teachers’ spokesmen might prove to be politically problematic.

If all goes well with this year’s exam results and the teachers are seen to have saved the day, everybody in this opportunistic alliance may benefit.

But what if this year turns out to be as much of a chaotic, unsatisfactory mess – perhaps for different reasons – as the algorithm fiasco over GCSEs last year? What if grade inflation, or social inequality, or favouritism become the great matters of contention, and teachers’ representatives start claiming that they were given an impossible load of work and responsibility? What will Labour’s position be then? Still on the union side or not?

But this momentary impasse will fade as will the dilemma over A-levels. What may remain is Labour’s total failure to orient themselves in what has become the new political landscape.

There are questions in our midst now that no one would have predicted at the time of the last general election – questions that are so profound that they exceed the accepted bounds of normal British public discourse. The limits of government interference in the most intimate personal freedoms is not what we expected to be arguing about in the post-Cold War Western world. So maybe politicians of all kinds can be forgiven some confusion.

For parties in power, alas, there is little scope for meditation. They have had to make effectual decisions on the hoof. But the useful service that oppositions could serve would be to demand proper consideration of drastic measures, to question in good conscience whether dangerous precedents are being set, to ask where all this is leading and to demand guarantees that it will be suspended when the immediate danger is passed.

Where does Labour stand, for example, on vaccine documents as a condition of employment, which might have consequences for racial minorities? (Should you have a right to refuse vaccination if that could put co-workers at risk?) Perhaps more philosophical, but no less significant: what is its view on the Government’s Orwellian advertising campaign in which actors wearing oxygen masks glared balefully at the camera, demanding that we “look them in the eye” and deny that the virus threat was real? These have now been replaced by posed images of models gazing beatifically out of windows, with the slogan, “Every day at home is making a difference”. This kind of manipulation of public sentiment, guilt and fear seems quite sinister to me. What does Labour think? And what about global travel? Is that a basic human right, or a luxury we have come to take for granted in happier times?

I am not just in the dark over those huge cosmic questions that have emerged unexpectedly in the past 12 months. What about more conventional matters? Sir Keir has warned the Chancellor against raising taxes in next week’s Budget.

Since the tax rises that Rishi Sunak is rumoured to be considering are corporation tax and capital gains, this seems rather bizarre – at least if we assume that Labour’s economic loyalties are still their traditional historic ones: workers rather than employers, the poor rather than the rich. If Labour is warning the Tories against raising taxes on business, then some of its priorities must still lie with its Blairite incarnation.

But that doesn’t sit very easily with its close rapport with the unions. And the fact that the party is still, endlessly, demanding more spending on pretty much everything: schooling, universal credit, the NHS, you name it. Where will that extra funding come from – more funny money hot off the Treasury printing presses? And what of the Starmer political tactics? He has warned Tory backbenchers not to rebel against the Government’s ever-soslow road out of lockdown when he could be encouraging debate in Parliament to everyone’s benefit. This is all very confusing.

There are questions in our midst that are so profound that they exceed the accepted bounds of normal public discourse