Keir Starmer’s moral vacuum Labour's ethical limits remain unclear

Who is Sir Keir Starmer, really? It’s fairly clear that the British public have difficulty with this question. Although by now they’ve probably picked up that he’s the son of a toolmaker, much else remains obscure. On the face of it, he seems like a composite of clashing characteristics, as if found in a children’s mix-and-match book: the legs of a blokeish Sunday five-a-side player; the torso of a family man nipping off to B&Q; the head of a successful barrister. A poll last month asked which wild animal the politician most resembled, and concluded he’s one third tiger, one third skunk, and one third lizard — not even 100% mammal.

Partly you know who a politician is by what he says he wants, but here things get especially murky. As has been detailed by Jon Cruddas in his recent book, A Century of Labour, Starmer ran his 2020 leadership campaign by appearing to embody every historical Labour-associated tradition simultaneously. Liberalism, ethical socialism, pluralism, welfarism, and statism were all in the mix somewhere. Since then, to the fury of some who reluctantly supported his leadership, he has reneged on many of the more socialist-sounding pledges. Now nobody seems quite sure what role he is adopting any more.

Interpretations of his background commitments differ wildly. Peter Hitchens thinks he’s “far-Left” bordering on Trotskyism; Jordan Peterson predicts that should he win, Britain will be “Venezuela for 20 years”. The New Internationalist says Starmer is a “cold-hearted Blairite”, and Corbyn’s former advisor Andrew Murray scornfully dubs him a “centrist liberal”. Bequeathing us a particularly distressing image, George Galloway has declared that “Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are two cheeks of the same backside”. In terms of sheer range, then, Starmer appears to be the Cate Blanchett of British politics.

This week brought a new performance to pore over, in the form of a filmed walk-and-talk with Gary Neville in the Lake District, a location for Starmer family holidays when he was young. “How did you find this place?” marvelled an incredulous-sounding Neville, as if Sir Keir had hacked through dense jungle foliage rather than trundled up the M6 like everybody else.

Here again, though, the video signalled as little information as a plain white T-shirt worn on matchday. Along with a few repeated manifesto pledges, we learnt that the Labour leader puts “country first, party second”, believes in “action not words”, wants to “return politics to public service”, and is aiming for a “decade of national renewal, fixing the fundamentals”. On “day one, sleeves rolled up”, he plans to “hit the ground running”.

In fact, this is Starmer playing the fictional character created during focus groups before the Labour leadership election, as described in Deborah Mattinson’s book Beyond The Red Wall. In 2020, at the behest of influential policy group Labour Together, Mattinson drew together Northern town-dwelling former Labour voters (dubbed “Red Wallers”) and more prosperous city-based current Labourites (“Urban Remainers”). Each side was separately asked to create its ideal political party, complete with its top three possible leaders. Red Wallers chose Sir Alan Sugar, internet finance guru Martin Lewis, and Wetherspoons founder Tim Martin. Apparently unafraid of looking clichéd, the Urban Remainer team chose Michelle Obama, Hugh Grant, and “a young David Attenborough’”. The two teams were then brought back together in a “citizens’ jury” in order to thrash it all out.

Discussion began unpromisingly with Simon, an accountant from London, confiding: “I literally can’t believe that I’m spending a whole day in the same room as a group of people who’d like that awful Wetherspoon’s bloke to be Prime Minister.” Eventually, the whole group were able to come up with a joint wish list for party priorities. And it was one that noticeably skewed towards stereotypical Red Wall concerns: more investment in the NHS, housing, education, and police; getting tough on tax avoidance, and placing restrictions on immigration. The group’s ideal leader, meanwhile, would be someone who demonstrated “strong and purposeful leadership”, “winning back the disaffected” by “identifying a smaller number of defining policies”, and who did not “shy away from or fudge difficult or challenging issues but rather tackled them “head on”.

Mattison would eventually become Starmer’s Director of Strategy. Labour Together’s then-director, Morgan McSweeney, would become the party’s new campaign director and the mastermind of Starmerism. Four years later, a strong and purposeful Starmer entered stage right, jaw set and sleeves rolled-up, ready to hit the ground running on the NHS, housing, education, crime, tax avoidance, and immigration — as instructed.

Apart from suggesting that affluent urban liberals are pathetic pushovers in negotiations with working-class Northerners, what else can we glean from this episode? It seems that the chief aim of Starmerism is now to listen to what “working people” actually want and then try to give it to them. Guided by McSweeney, Starmer’s team reputedly eschews top-down technocracy, veering in a superficially communitarian direction. Liberal attitudes to immigration and radical social justice demands are out, while community and family and fairness are in: stop the boats, save the little platoons.

Some commentators are emphasising that despite — or perhaps because of — the ideological vagueness, the new ethos is neither populist nor paternalistic; it doesn’t whip the people up nor does it talk down to them, but rather treats them as sensible, decent, and best able to work out their own needs from the grassroots. And the approach is also being presented as pleasingly nimble in response to new events. The current director of Labour Together and a prospective Labour MP, Josh Simons, underscored the benefits of flexibility in an interview last month: “While you can and should draw on thinking and traditions, New Labour, Blue Labour, Old Right, or whatever, if you allow yourselves to be seduced into thinking that any one of those frames can generate the politics, strategy, and policy agenda that you need, then you’re probably not taking the novelty of this moment seriously enough.”

Compared to the fantasised projections of some politicians upon the electorate, this doesn’t necessarily sound bad. Still, it has obvious weak points. One issue is that, without an accompanying positive and well-articulated vision of what human flourishing looks like, communitarianism is only as Left-wing as the community whose desires are currently being accommodated; that is, it will be contingently on the Left of the political spectrum rather than essentially so. And perhaps more seriously, a lack of accompanying discussion about ethical values will leave the electorate chaotically chasing its own tail.

Voters won’t know what Starmer really stands for, because voters won’t know what they themselves really stand for. In his interview, Simons cited political philosopher Michael Sandel as a key influence on his current thinking. Yet one of Sandel’s insights is that you cannot divorce either politics or economics from underlying moral commitments and preferred values. To pretend these things are separate is to implicitly capitulate to a particular moral outlook anyway. To take an obvious example: decreeing that people should be free to do what they want without harming others downgrades the importance of inherited social bonds.

It seems to follow that Labour can’t do an electorate-chasing version of communitarianism without outsourcing its moral conscience in the attempt. Darker economic times even than present ones may soon be coming; and sensible and decent people sometimes get less so under duress. It would be good to have a concrete idea of what Labour’s moral limits are, expressed in plain terms.

And Sandel is also clear in his writing that a viable, explicitly morally inflected communitarianism which prioritises particular values over others requires genuine democratic participation to make it work. In reality, Britain is not just made up of salt-of-the-earth, Brexit-voting social conservatives, obviously. Hugh Grant lives here too. As in a scaled-up version of Mattinson’s citizen jury, ideally the opposing teams would thrash out their ethical differences in civic deliberation — not just because it would tell politicians what they might write into election pledges; but also because it would arguably bring greater clarity about personal values, increase social cohesion, and widen acceptance of any eventual policy outcomes too.

In the past few months, there have been rumours that Labour may introduce citizens’ assemblies for socially divisive issues, which would perhaps be a step in the right direction. Certainly, they need to do something. In the end, being vague about the party’s concrete ethical worldview, while deferring to the sensibleness of the British voter, just won’t be enough.

In Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn, an insider said of Starmer’s tricky stint as Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union: “He said he could only go as far as the rope would let him. He was constantly seeking to increase the radius in which he could roam.” If we are to be in charge of holding Starmer’s rope in future — and perhaps stopping him from increasing the radius, if needed — we had better find adequate ways of working out where the centre should be.

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Kathleen Stock is Contributing Editor at UnHerd.

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