The Guardian view on Labour’s task: a need to believe
Sir Keir Starmer’s speech on Thursday has come not a moment too soon. Frustration has been growing within his party about the limited nature of the Labour leader’s recent ambition and impact as the first anniversary of his election nears. Sir Keir’s early attacks on government competence were well made and boosted Labour ratings. But these are showing diminishing returns, and Covid politics may soon be ending. The slippage has been accentuated by the success of the vaccination rollout over the last two months.
Recent polls have shown the Conservative party re-establishing a lead and a boost for Boris Johnson’s ratings. Labour dissatisfaction with its leader has been growing as a result. Internal divisions had begun to simmer again. With important elections also looming in early May, it was urgent that the Labour leader should show supporters a more positive sense of political direction than merely bashing the Tories over pandemic failures. Sir Keir needed to lead. His voters needed to believe.
A single speech is not going to transform those concerns all on its own. But it was a start. It is important to acknowledge that the process is not easy and will not be quick. Labour has been out of government for 11 years.
It has struggled to find a consistent voice, articulate a national programme and even to show it knows who its voters now are. The pandemic has made party politics tougher. Incumbents have dominated the agenda and the airwaves, and there is little space for opposition parties. But the long march back will never arrive unless it begins.
Sir Keir’s overarching belief is that there is a mood for change in Britain that bears comparison with the mood in 1945. This is natural Labour high ground and well chosen. It invokes the national spirit on which Labour was able to rebuild Britain under Clement Attlee after the second world war. It also invokes the necessity of radical measures to achieve the necessary rebuilding. Sir Keir is right that, in the wake of the financial crisis and Covid, people now expect more from government today. But he was careful to promise that good government must be the partner of good business, not its enemy.
The opposition leader did not provide much detail. His practical proposals were familiar and family-focused – maintaining the £20 uplift in universal credit, ending the public sector pay freeze, and extending the furlough – though none the worse for that. His headline proposal was a socalled British recovery bond to attract savers. That ticks a lot of political boxes, including patriotism, common endeavour and borrowing to invest, and some economic ones. The chancellor may pinch the idea for his 3 March budget. But Sir Keir certainly staked a claim that Rishi Sunak cannot match: to speak for those who know there can be no return to the old political economy that gave Britain its decade of austerity after 2010.
Labour should in practice have little difficulty uniting behind this message. An intriguing possibility is that Mr Johnson may try to seize some of the same ground himself. Though he is certainly not a reincarnated post-1945 taxand-spend Tory, the prime minister is a political free-wheeler who is more aware that the old normal is not sustainable in the wake of Covid, Brexit and the 2019 election gains in the north and Midlands. Plenty of Tories do not accept this, Mr Sunak perhaps among them.
Next month’s budget will therefore be an important sign of the direction of travel. Sir Keir calls it a “fork in the road” moment. He is gambling that the chancellor has the upper hand and that Mr Johnson is not serious. He is right to put the Conservatives on the spot. Tory divisions on political economy are extremely real. The speech gives Labour some control over the political narrative of the vital May elections. But this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Trevor Noah
After three days of record-cold temperatures, blackouts in Texas have stranded millions without electricity, clean water, or access to food. “This, no matter what anybody says, is awful,” said Trevor Noah on Wednesday’s Daily Show. “I know people were praying for Texas to go blue, but not like this! I mean, is it too much to ask for just one apocalypse at a time?”
Noah played clips of residents’ desperate measures for warmth in homes not designed to withstand freezing temperatures – boiling pots of water on the stove, taping doorways, even dangerously turning on cars in the garage (which has led to a spike in carbon monoxide poisonings). “You know, Covid is bad enough, but now Texans have to deal with their homes turning into meat lockers? This shit is unfair,” he said.
The power outages that have crippled the state are due in large part to failures of the state’s natural gaspowered plants and years of underinvestment in the state’s power grid, which was deregulated and moved outside federal guidelines in the 1990s.
The rollback led to “a lack of oversight that could’ve helped to keep the infrastructure maintained”, Noah explained. “Instead, for some reason, there are more people keeping tabs on Britney Spears than the Texas power grid.
“This just goes to show you that you can’t put profits over quality and safety,” he added. “Money’s not worth a whole lot if you have to burn it to keep warm.”
The crisis was especially embarrassing for the state’s leaders, he continued. “I mean, this is the state that prides itself on its oil and gas industry and now that industry has failed spectacularly.”
“Which is probably why state officials and their allies on cable news are working so hard to blame someone else,” he continued, segueing into a series of Fox News clips which uniformly blamed the blackouts on frozen wind turbines and, by extension, renewable energy, the Green New Deal and, in the words of the former governor Rick Perry, “AOC America”. (The latter is a reference to a frequent target of rightwing ire, the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; in reality, wind turbines account for only 12% of the lost power in the state.)
The blame shift is “fucking insane”, said Noah. “These guys are so desperate to just let fossil fuels off the hook that they’re blaming AOC and the Green
New Deal – which, by the way, hasn’t even happened yet – for something that’s happening in Texas right now? But this just goes to show you that no matter what happens, no matter how far removed she is from the problem, conservatives can and will always find a way to blame the bogeyman AOC.”
Jimmy Kimmel
In Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel checked in on Donald Trump, who reappeared after 27 days of relative silence with a phone call to Fox News. The call was ostensibly to honor Rush Limbaugh, the rightwing radio host who died at age 70 on Wednesday, but Trump had other plans. His tribute to Limbaugh? “Well, Rush thought that we won. And so do I, by the way.”
“Anyway, who died again?” Kimmel joked. “There’s no I in eulogy, Don. And it’s not the like Fox crew didn’t try – they did everything possible to tee him up to talk about Rush. But somehow he kept coming back to this election that he still thinks he won.”
In another clip, Trump quickly spun a Limbaugh question into his baseless talking points on election fraud, America as a “third world country”, and “you don’t know how angry this country is”.
“Well, I have to believe that listening to Trump blather on nonsensically about himself is what Rush would’ve wanted,” Kimmel joked.