Why Starmer will be dragged to the Left Labour will have no choice but to be radical

But in stark contrast with 1979, those whom the tides should favour — Starmer and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves — dare not seek to define themselves ideologically against their opponents. Instead, they see the main dividing line in this election as being “stability versus chaos”: the most safely apolitical pitch it is possible to make. Who, after all, would vote for instability? And in the same breath, they reassure that “stability is change”, which is a promise of everything and nothing.

All things considered, it is an extremely limited pitch given our current political and economic climate. Current orthodoxies and assumptions shared across the political spectrum are almost the reverse of those that prevailed in the late Seventies. The financial crash, pandemic and soaring energy prices have transformed the state from villain into a far more benevolent actor — one to which voters and institutions increasingly turned. Amid such an ideological rebalancing, it is hard for Thatcher’s disciples such as Rishi Sunak to flourish. The current PM is not useless, but like Callaghan, his convictions are increasingly outdated.

Looking back, our recent Tory politicians have sensed the turning of the tide. On becoming Prime Minister, in 2016, Theresa May declared that it was “time to recognise the good the state can do”. Thatcher would have rather swam the Channel than make such a proclamation. May also spoke of the need to intervene in markets and sought a new industrial strategy. Her successor, Boris Johnson, claimed to be a “Rooseveltian”, a big spender like the US president. A confused Keynesian, Johnson initiated “Levelling up”, was an enthusiast for HS2 as an engine of economic growth, and increased National Insurance to pay for his vaguely defined plan for social care. During her fleeting tenure, the “small state” advocate, Liz Truss, hosed a fortune on subsidising fuel bills. Even Sunak, the self-declared Thatcherite, instinctively well to the Right of May and Johnson, was forced to raise taxes to prevent public services from collapsing altogether, and has since committed to spending more on defence, proposed a return to National Service and become an inadvertent advocate of a more active state. Currents have been nudging all our recent Prime Ministers to the Left.

Nigel Farage, in spite of himself, is swimming in the same direction. His obsessive focus on migration has forced him to become an inadvertent Bennite, who in the early Eighties argued in favour of import controls to boost the wages of British workers. Since announcing he was standing as an MP, Farage has acknowledged that his plans for curbing immigration would create labour shortages, adding defiantly that this was good news for British employees who would enjoy higher wages. The populist Right-winger, full of incoherent contradictions, leaps to the Left.

This is the background against which Starmer and Reeves will make their modest appeal. If the polls are right, they will win big, but only secure the narrowest of mandates. Their model is the New Labour victory in 1997, when, for all Tony Blair’s charisma and vision of “a young Britain… a Britain reborn”, he only really dared pose a safely technocratic division: “competence versus incompetence”.

The underlying ideological dividing lines in 1997 also seem eerily familiar now. According to New Labour there was to be no longer a debate about high spending and low spending, but between “productive spending and unproductive spending”. We were told to forget about “high versus low taxation” — all that mattered was “fair versus unfair taxation”.

When Reeves became shadow chancellor, one of her first conversations was with Gordon Brown. The former Iron Chancellor told her that, above all else, she must ensure that every pledge is fully costed and that she must exert an iron discipline on the shadow cabinet not to utter a word that implies a spending rise. She has followed his advice to the letter, with a little Brownite sprinkle of tiny but popular tax rises and a commitment to seemingly formidable fiscal rules.

But there the New Labour similarities fade. Starmer’s background — the son of a toolmaker who could not always pay the bills — leads him to back a package of employment rights that Blair and Brown would not have touched, as they hailed the UK’s flexible labour markets. It’s the same with his nod to public ownership with the proposed national energy company and the railways — neither of which Labour in 1997 would have touched. Starmer’s unyielding commitment to international law also means he opposed the Rwanda scheme without qualification, which New Labour would have cautiously kicked into the long grass with a “review” into whether or not the experiment was working. On the whole, “Starmerism” such as it is, can be simply explained as a ferociously competitive will to win by following timidly those who have won before, stiffened with a few strongly held convictions born of his upbringing and life outside politics.

In 1991, the former chancellor, Nigel Lawson, observed “the party that wins the battle of ideas wins elections. The Conservatives are still winning the battle of ideas and will win the next election.” At the time of the speech Labour was well ahead in the polls. And less than a year later, the Conservatives won a fourth successive term.

In 1992, the assumptions and orthodoxies were almost the reverse of now. Since Thatcher’s privatisations were seen as triumphant, John Major doubled down and privatised the railways. He also kept a tight lid on spending, hailed tax cuts and warned against “tax bombshells”. When Labour leader Neil Kinnock tried to argue that the state could be an agent of “freedom”, he might as well have been speaking Latin.

This was the backdrop as Blair and Brown made their cautious moves towards victory in 1997. In interviews, the main test was whether they were as deadly serious as they claimed to be about sticking to Tory spending plans and in their faith in privatisations. The approach was captured in an exchange between Blair and the wary centre-left shadow cabinet member, Claire Short, before the 1997 election. The Labour leader said to her: “Don’t worry Claire… we will be more radical in government.” To which Short replied “You mean even more Right-wing”.

At the launch of Labour’s manifesto that year, Evan Davis observed that the message was: “Everything in this mansion is rotten. We plan to change the ashtrays.” This year, as Sue Gray’s leaked shit-list details, upon election the new administration will face the potential collapse of Thames Water, public-sector pay negotiations, overcrowding in prisons, universities going bust, NHS funding shortfalls and failing local councils. I’m not sure any incumbent administration has ever faced such an incipient crisis.

Voters are in despair about the cost of living, the state of the country and the destructive hopelessness of the ruling party over the past 14 years. But Starmer and his advisers, leading the polls so decisively, are so obsessed about “not being Jeremy Corbyn” that they opt for a minimal programme and a technocratic analysis of what has gone wrong. They have gone for the new ashtrays option.

But new ashtrays aren’t going to cut it. The mansion is going to need to be gutted and rebuilt. As Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies has insisted, taxes will have to rise — and Reeves is an assiduous follower of Johnson’s words.

A Starmer government, then, will move to the Left not because they have hidden plans to do so. They do not. They will move to the Left because they will have no choice but to do so. There is a sea change and there is nothing they can do about it. In the same way that May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak discovered, when the tide turns, and there’s a sea change, there is nothing much you can do about it.

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Steve Richards presents a weekly podcast, Rock N Roll Politics. His latest book is Turning Points: Crisis and Change in Modern Britain, published by Macmillan.

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