The Guardian view on Labour and coronavirus: lay claim to the future
Leader of the opposition has always been one of the toughest jobs in politics and Keir Starmer has come to it in exceptionally tricky circumstances. His party has been out of government for a decade. Labour is united in wanting to set factional differences aside but without agreement on how to do it.
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson is enjoying a prolonged honeymoon in opinion polls. Partly that reflects natural gravitation of support to incumbents in a national crisis. Mr Johnson’s critics might complain that his credentials as a reliable leader are unearned, but the complaint itself is unlikely to change voters’ minds.
Sir Keir’s challenge is to assert the truth about government failings without appearing to undermine its pandemic response with excessive partisanship. That is the balance he struck in his first interrogation of Mr Johnson in parliament on Wednesday. The questions were well calibrated to dismantle Downing Street’s claim that the UK’s handling of the coronavirus has been a success. It has not, as the grim death toll – the highest in Europe – seems to indicate. Sir Keir’s background as a barrister equips him well to build a case and present it in a way that discomforts the other side. Mr Johnson’s typically blustering responses sounded doubly vacuous in a Commons hushed by the requirements of physical distancing.
It is not surprising that the prime minister prefers to make announcements by televised address, and the Labour leader is right to demand that future policy changes be presented to parliament first. Mr Johnson is in the habit of evading such scrutiny and is unlikely to relish routine questioning from a rigorous adversary. But competence across the despatch box is only a small part of the project to persuade voters that the leader of the opposition is a potential prime minister. Most of that task is behind closed doors. It is the strategic mission to develop a clear argument about what is wrong with the country and a distinctive prescription for making it better.
The vital ingredient is optimism. Oppositions win elections when people gamble on change. It is not sufficient to convince voters that the incumbent has flaws. By extension, sitting govern
ments cannot expect public gratitude for their achievements when oppositions have a more compelling account of what should come next. The Tory party is haunted by its defeat in 1945, when national rejoicing at victory in the second world war failed to translate into votes for Winston Churchill.
Military analogies are overused in the current crisis, but that postwar poll is not an unrealistic model for Labour. The job of reconstruction required after the pandemic will be as vast. That task should have a clear ethical blueprint, incorporating longer-standing social and economic challenges, just as the establishment of the NHS in the 1940s spoke to legacy demands of the pre-war years. Labour has an opportunity to develop the equivalent vision for the 2020s, for example, by combining changes demanded by the climate emergency with reforms to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity.
That is a heavy intellectual burden when the party also has an electoral mountain to climb, but the summit will not be reached with smaller-scale ambition. A trap for Sir Keir is to think he can advance by tactical increments, probing weaknesses in Mr Johnson’s position, chipping away at the Tories’ lead. Politics affords few second chances and the Labour leader’s audition with the electorate has begun already. There are many more questions than answers about his priorities, and his vision. It is still very early in the electoral cycle. No one expects to see a fully-formed government-in-waiting yet. But there will come a time when voters demand to know what the opposition stands for, besides criticising the Tories. If Labour is to build something worth showing at that moment, the foundations need laying now.