Nobody’s excited about Labour, because Keir Starmer offers nothing

He’s betting on a managerial approach to government. But today’s crises, both domestic and global, require convictions

Generally speaking, when an opposition party is clearly on the road to power – consistently beating an unpopular government in opinion polls and winning a string of by-elections – it brings with it a sense of optimism and renewal. The national mood becomes one of anticipation – even impatience – for this new project which will replace a burnt-out, exhausted regime.

Not this time. There is no ecstatic hope for a programme of fresh ideas, because there are no ideas on offer at all. What drives the support for Starmer’s Labour among ordinary voters – the ones who don’t have something specific to gain from it, like trade unionists or public sector staff

– is despair and desperation. Anything, they are thinking, would be better than the current shambles. Even the blank slate that Sir Keir is offering is a risk worth taking.

On the face of it, Rishi Sunak’s claim that last week’s by-elections showed that there was no great enthusiasm for Labour – in spite of the fact that they had overturned large Tory majorities – might have seemed absurd. But a look at the detail shows he was right. The majority of voters in Wellingborough and Kingswood voted for nobody. They stayed at home. The real winner of those by-elections was None of the Above.

Most significantly, if the votes cast for Reform UK are added to those of the Conservatives, the combined results are pretty much neck-and-neck with Labour. I am quite sure that most of the people who voted for the Reform candidates do not believe that the party is credible as an alternative government: they were simply sending a furious signal of dissatisfaction to the Tories. I suspect that many of them will, in fact, return to the Conservatives in the general election because when people vote to put a government in power they don’t mess around.

So what those by-election results actually show is manifest disgust with the present government’s performance and significant support for policies that are further to the Right. This will have been noted in Downing Street but it will not have eluded the Labour leadership either. Starmer will now be faced with an even more impossible dilemma in the presentation of his programme for government.

If what the electorate actually wants are lower taxes, less immigration, a radically reformed health service and cheaper energy then Labour is going to have to turn itself inside out to appear credible as the deliverer of those things. Sunak’s lame repetition of the claim that Starmer “doesn’t have a plan” scarcely covers it. Not only have we not heard of any detailed plan, we don’t even know what the goals of such a plan would be.

Does Labour believe that lower taxes would promote growth? Or that cutting immigration would impede economic recovery? Or that it is possible to reform the NHS on the present funding model? Who knows?

Unlike the Blairite revision of the party’s image, which explicitly dismantled the old sacred policies – state ownership of the means of production, uncritical support for trade unionism, class war against the rich – this incarnation of Labour stands for nothing that is identifiably different. Its campaign pitch seems to be: we believe in pretty much the same things as the present lot but we’ll manage it more competently. At least I think that’s what they are saying with their impossibly vague promises.

You might argue that this is not a historical moment for idealistic vision. Blair’s reconstruction of Labour philosophy was done under entirely different circumstances: the Thatcher era had petered out under John Major but it had affected the national political discourse so profoundly that Labour had to reinvent itself ideologically to enter the debate. Private home ownership, the self-determination brought by individual prosperity and the breakdown of class determinism had to be embraced in a wholesale shift of principles. But, you may think, we are past that point now.

Everybody in today’s world accepts that some mix of free market economics and social democratic values is the answer. We just have to adjust the balance regularly to suit the circumstances of the moment. So this is an era that demands sensible management, not grand dreams. Indeed, this has been the view of every presiding government for the past 20 years.

But something seems to have changed. Faced with the world altering events of the past few years – the pandemic and the war in Ukraine – simply pulling the usual fiscal and monetary levers does not seem to be enough. Things have gone terribly, unpredictably wrong. Having been paid to stay at home and retreat from what used to be regarded as normal adult life, a large cohort of the population is simply refusing to return.

For so many people to resile from what would once have been their natural responsibilities is an unprecedented social phenomenon and no one in public life appears to know what to do about it. The one thing they agree on is that it is not a simple problem of management. It is damaging the country’s productive capacity in catastrophic ways and it has moral dimensions that few politicians would dare to confront. In other words, it requires just the sort of large visionary message that has gone out of fashion.

Then there is the monumental question of Russian aggression (the dimensions of which have just reached a new terrifying level with the death of Alexei Navalny) and the impact that has had on the cost of living. Surely no one in public life can believe that the invasion of Ukraine is an isolated incident whose consequences can be “managed” in ways that pose no threat to the West.

The new Cold War may not be ideological in the sense that the old one was – that is, it is not an argument between communism and capitalism as theories. But it is clear now that it will be a fight to the death between autocratic rule and freedom, and that is going to involve a belief in the importance and power of great ideas.

Unlike Blair’s revision of its image, this incarnation of Labour stands for nothing identifiably different