April 23, 2020 - 11:25am
Whatever his rhetoric during the leadership campaign, Keir Starmer — North London liberal, member of Corbyn’s top team, Remainer and technocrat — has seemed perfectly poised to continue the Labour Party’s shift from a party of the regional working class to a party for graduates and the metropolitan young.
By putting Lisa Nandy — the most ‘Leave-friendly’ of the leadership candidates — in the shadow Foreign Secretary job he has kept her away from her main agenda of towns and left-behind places. Sure enough her first move in post was to wade in on Israeli settlements in the West Bank (hardly the number one priority for the old ‘red wall’ seats Labour so desperately needs to get back).
But one appointment in Sir Keir’s new team made us sit up and take notice: Claire Ainsley, formerly of the Rowntree Foundation, is to be his head of policy.
Anyone who has heard Claire talk while at Rowntree will know how much she saw it as an ‘somewhere’ rather than an ‘anywhere’ organisation — deeply rooted in the area around York where its founder came from.
She is pretty clear-eyed about the political shift away from economic and social liberalism, and the new centrality of social, culture and identity issues in British politics. She openly talks about how people don’t always act in economically self-interested ways, and that nation and faith matter. That’s already quite a big deal in Labour circles.
Check out this research she did about local people feeling ‘let down, ignored and patronised’ over Brexit, and this piece in the Times in which she even uses the F-word (family, that is) as one of the cornerstone values of working class voters. She’s hardly an ultra traditionalist on these issues — ‘more EP Thompson than R H Tawney’ as one friend put it — but even using the word ‘family’ is not something that Labour has been comfortable doing for decades.
As director of Rowntree she helped fund a project by popular Conservative think tank Onward into ‘repairing our social fabric’, and sat on the steering board alongside James O’Shaughnessy, Danny Kruger and Vidya Alakeson. She has stepped down from that position now that she works for Starmer, but here’s hoping she brings some of these ideas with her into Labour’s top team.
Freddie Sayers is the Editor-in-Chief & CEO of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.
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SubscribeThis is a rather uncharitable portrayal of the decision.
It would be worth looking at what happened when the “Manpower Services Commission” moved to Sheffield, or DVLC to Cardiff. Or other such moves. I am no expert in urban development, but my impression (and that is all) was that the MSC provided a much-needed boost to the Sheffield economy, playing a meaningful part in regeneration.
My aunt actually moved there as a consequence of that decision, so I got to know and visit the town. Although truthfully the only remarkable thing about it was the trams.
Quite. But that was then. It is a pleasant city today, much more economically successful. I wonder if anyone has properly examined the role of the MSC – quite a significant employer, if I recall – in reviving the sity centre?
You have to start somewhere, so good to see something beginning to happen.
How about (a slimmed down) House of Lords to Wakefield next ?
I agree. It is, at least, something.
Wakefield is far too good for most of that lot.
So sort of like the tech industry is doing in California, moving to Texas and Arizona, getting out of the mess they made of their old nest.
Haha, but not really, this is tokenism, sending it off to the deprived parts like this, but not as you say, to Leeds or Bradford where it would make more sense, but where no one would want to move to from London.
Come off it Darlington needs a break. Nothing has really happened since 1825.
An influx of 700 or so ‘Epsom’ toffs should do the trick.
Even then (27 Sep) didn’t the train arrive late?