Nobody knows what Starmer stands for
Honesty, reassurance and transparency were the self-defining virtues that Sir Keir Starmer identified yesterday as Labour’s annual conference got under way in Brighton. Doubtless he embraces the first of these, since he comes across as a decent man. But the other epithets are connected and the Labour leader fails to reassure precisely because he is so opaque.
Despite 18 months in the job and the publication of a lengthy treatise setting out his credo, what he stands for is still hard to establish. On The Andrew Marr Show on the BBC yesterday, Sir Keir was happy to set out broad principles but reluctant to say how these would translate into practical policies. We must wait and see if income taxes would need to rise, he said, even though Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has ruled this out.
Since one of the principles he has set out is the creation of a “contribution society”, whatever that means, he has left open the option of other measures, such as a wealth tax, though without spelling out where it would fall.
He did make some specific announcements. Labour would not be renationalising the energy companies, even though he campaigned at the 2019 election for such a policy. This will anger the Left but they might be partially appeased by the promise to remove the charitable status of private schools, an old Left-wing nostrum trotted out when the party has nothing to say about improving education in general. Not for the first time, a Labour leader educated privately wants to wreck some of the finest schools in the land.
Sir Keir says he is trying to break the grip of the Left but has been forced to water down rule changes to that effect after a union backlash. He is also pandering to the trans lobby in a fatuous row over whether only women have a cervix, which he said was wrong to say. Moreover, while he seeks to come across as a paragon of pragmatism and moderation, his deputy Angela Rayner has been unleashed to whip up the class war, denouncing Conservative ministers as “scum”.
Sir Keir said he would not be demanding that she issue an apology as her comments were a matter for her. It suits his purposes to have this Left-wing ranter playing to the socialist gallery while he seeks to reassure voters that his party is in moderate hands. That is not honest, reassuring or transparent.