Is QUITTING the best thing Sir Drear could do to help Labour?
He bores even his own colleagues. Voters will never forgive his support for Corbyn. And he can’t even define what a woman is! That’s why this veteran ex-Labour MP raises a question more and more are asking
LABOuR MPs have been joking that Durham police would be doing the party a favour if they fined Sir Keir Starmer for having a curry and a beer during the lockdown. They say that would give them a chance to elect a leader who might make more progress against the Government.
Sir Keir has made some progress over the past two years, but it has been too little and far too slow.
The latest opinion polls really are extraordinary. How is it possible for Labour to be only two points ahead after the past few months?
The Conservative Party has been tearing itself to pieces. Last week 148 MPs voted to remove the Prime Minister in a motion of confidence. More fines were issued to people at No 10 than any other address in the country. Inflation is rising and the economy is stumbling into recession. Households are cutting back on the weekly shopping, fuel bills are soaring and it costs £100 to fill up the family car.
Against that backdrop, Labour should be miles ahead and confident of winning the next election. Instead, the party is barely in front of the Conservatives and Boris Johnson still beats Sir Keir when voters are asked who would make the best prime minister.
Results at the ballot box have not produced much to celebrate either. Last year’s local elections were so poor that they provoked a huge row with his deputy, Angela Rayner, and talk of a leadership challenge.
Labour even lost Hartlepool to the Conservatives, only the second time in decades that a party in government had won a seat off the opposition at a by-election. Even the Batley and Spen by-election, which should have been a cakewalk, was too close for comfort.
This year’s local elections were grim for the Government but not nearly good enough for Labour. Anything less than a huge victory at Wakefield on Thursday would be a very poor result.
The latest research by pollsters J. L. Partners showed voters think Starmer is bland and boring. Some thought him honest, others untrustworthy.
That is bad enough, but the most worrying finding was that so many regard him as ‘weak’. That is a terrible indictment for someone who needs the public to think he is strong enough to negotiate with other nations and stand up to Putin.
Labour under Ed Miliband’s lacklustre leadership managed better poll ratings and we all know how that ended. Neil Kinnock’s poll ratings in 1990 were 15 points ahead of the Tories, yet he went on to lose the election in 1992.
The best even his supporters seem to say about Sir Keir is that he is decent but dull. A recent focus group of people in Wakefield who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 described him as weak, slippery and lacking vision.
Even members of his
Shadow Cabinet think he is ‘ boring voters to death’ and ‘uninspirational’.
Angela Rayner admitted last week that he needed to do much more to excite the voters, saying she had urged him to ‘put some more welly’ into his public appearances.
She said he was funny when there was ‘not a camera in his face’, but often appeared unemotional and cold in public. It is hardly a ringing endorsement when the first attributes a political leader needs are the communication skills to inspire and persuade people through the media.
So why, when the Government should be in trouble, has Labour’s leader failed to excite not just the public but even his closest colleagues?
The positions he took to win the leadership make it very difficult for him to win the public’s support because they will not easily forgive trying to put Corbyn in Downing Street or derail our exit from the Eu.
He was accused of trying to block Brexit on dozens of occasions, and people who attempted to negotiate with him said he tried to halt the whole process by demanding a second referendum.
He won the leadership contest by promising to unite the party, telling members, ‘ Don’t trash the last four years’, the period under Corbyn that had led to such a huge defeat. He pledged there would be ‘no stepping back from our core principles’.
It might have gone down well with the party faithful, but it was the last thing the voters who had deserted Labour wanted to hear. They didn’t want unity with Corbyn and the cranks who supported him. They wanted them kicked out.
He had served loyally in Corbyn’s team when other people stepped aside and some worked non-stop to get rid of the hard-Left leadership that had poisoned the party.
In an interview before the election, he declared: ‘ I’m 100 per cent behind Jeremy Corbyn. I am working with Jeremy Corbyn to try to win the next General Election. I think it is critical.’
He even said: ‘The attacks on Jeremy Corbyn were terrible . . . they vilified him.’
His supporters claim he had to back Corbyn in order to cement his position before going on to become leader and save the Labour Party. But it
The party had better ratings under Ed Miliband
has left everyone else wondering what he really believes — and, anyway, even after being elected Labour leader, Starmer was still praising him, saying: ‘I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who led our party through some really difficult times, who energised our movement, and who’s a friend as well as a colleague.’
He did eventually realise it was not possible to work with Jeremy Corbyn and the far-Left extremists who supported him, and suspended him after his appalling response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s damning findings on anti- Jewish racism in the Labour Party.
But there are strong grounds for believing his office still tried
to stitch together a deal to resolve the issue and readmit the former leader.
Starmer has tried to deal with the racism that poisoned the party under Corbyn, but his efforts got off to a slow start: some people who should have been expelled only received temporary suspensions and every week brings more stories of Labour councillors saying the most appalling things.
In any case, why should a moderate, centre-Left party founded to
fight for equality and justice expect to be praised for something as basic as kicking out racists?
Members and MPs — even shadow ministers — are still obsessed with and hostile to Israel, one of our country’s closest allies, and the only democracy in the whole of the Middle East.
Then there is the question of Nato. His supporters say he took tough action against 11 MPs who supported a statement criticising Nato and the UK over the invasion of Ukraine. There is, he promised, ‘no place’ in the party for people who drew an equivalence between Russia and Nato.
They were told they would lose the whip and so they withdrew their names from the statement. But no one believes for a minute they have changed their minds, so if there really is ‘no place’ for such views, why were they not expelled?
It is the same old story — he makes some progress, but it always seems so cautious.
Take his response to the announcement by Durham Police that they were investigating allegations that he broke lockdown rules. He considered the issue over the weekend and then, having previously demanded the Prime Minister resign over the Downing Street parties, said he would stand down if he was fined.
He said this was a question of honour and integrity, absolutely fundamental values central to his leadership, but it is difficult to claim it is bold, instinctive and based on your core beliefs if it takes three days to make the decision. And it emerged yesterday, two weeks on from receiving it, that Starmer has only just returned the questionnaire he was asked to fill in about what happened at the event in April 2021. That caution again.
Even if you set aside the difficulty making decisions and lacklustre communications skills, you struggle to know what Labour stands for.
One journalist worked out that the party has tried ten different slogans in two years. ‘New management’ was replaced by ‘a new leadership’. We were told ‘another future is possible’, then ‘a new chapter for Britain’. He offered ‘ secure, protect, rebuild’ but swapped that for ‘ work, care, equality, security’ and then tried ‘security, prosperity, respect’.
Politics is about surprising people with big, bold statements that grab the public’s imagination and show you understand their concerns and are on their side.
Not once has Labour under Sir Keir managed to do that.
Instead, a bewildered public rolls its eyes as the party ties itself in knots in a debate about whether men can have cervixes or get pregnant. Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting managed to give a clear answer that recognised biological facts, respected women’s rights and showed care for trans people, but the leadership seems more concerned about its members’ obsessions than the public’s mainstream views.
It is this weakness that explains the failure to stand up to Leftwing MPs, members and unions and offer a full-throated condemnation of rail strikes that would show the travelling public he is on their side.
Instead, Labour sits on the fence while union leaders are cynically trying to exploit the cost of living crisis to demand big pay increases and, as usual, it is hardworking taxpayers who would have to foot the bill — on top of the £16 billion spent saving jobs and keeping trains running during the pandemic.
It is the same issue when it comes to the Government’s plans to send asylum- seekers to Rwanda. Whatever anyone thinks, there is no doubt new measures are needed to prevent more migrants drowning in the Channel, and you can’t really criticise the Government’s approach without offering any alternative.
As Peter Mandelson has said, Starmer needs to show ‘ambition and hard thinking’. He must spell out a clear and optimistic vision for Britain, setting out a plan to build a stronger economy with good new jobs across the country, deal with climate change, migration and the ageing society.
They have more to do to earn the public’s trust on issues such as defence, welfare and crime, and prove they can grow the economy and work with business.
After two years in the job, MPs are beginning to doubt Starmer can do all that and they have started speculating about who might do better.
Angela Rayner would make matters worse. She was one of the few MPs who supported Corbyn even during the motion of confidence when the rest of us tried to get him out. And while she might show a passion Starmer lacks, the public will never warm to her angry insults or partisan abuse.
They should look to decent people who were untainted by the Corbyn years: Wes Streeting, who can think on his feet and find his way through complicated issues with answers that bring people together; persuasive, clever and thoughtful front-benchers such as Pat McFadden or Bridget Phillipson, or a big personality who can capture the public’s imagination and speak in plain English such as ordinary Brummie Jess Phillips.
Even the most optimistic MPs are starting to doubt that Starmer is leading them to victory, and wondering whether the best thing he could do for Labour might be to give someone else a chance.
Labour should look to those untainted by the Corbyn years
First-time Tory voters in Wakefield described Starmer as weak, slippery and lacking vision