The speaker’s tone is mild but to his audience the words are deeply alarming. It is early this January, and senior Labour officials are finding out exactly what the public thinks of them. It’s not kind.
“We lack any form of identity,” says one of them. In voters’ minds, says this longstanding staffer who has devoted punishing days and nights to his cause, the party is defined by “wish-washyness”.
The fog of confusion seems to reach all the way to the top. Almost a year into Keir Starmer’s leadership, this secret internal presentation suggests “his image lacks definition from other politicians”.
While he scores vastly better than Jeremy Corbyn, lots of Britons find him less “relatable” than that son of Eton, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
So far the new leader’s policy of being not-Corbyn is having less success than he hoped – because Labour’s problems appear to go far deeper than just its previous leader.
While Corbyn in 2019 clearly did not work, leading Labour to its biggest bulldozering since 1935, neither did Ed Miliband or Gordon Brown. All three men represented different strands of social democratic tradition.
Even now, when the UK is cursed with one of the worst Covid death tolls in the developed world and economic devastation, the Conservatives still lead Labour in the polls. This is the backdrop that has led Starmer to consider wrapping himself in the union flag.
It is a huge risk, make no mistake. The very people he wants to woo may see Labour’s new red, white and blue as so much spray paint.
Here is Westminster’s arch-remainer now talking up the possibilities of Brexit; a human rights lawyer professing his love for the police and the army. As one staffer in Labour HQ who has seen the new strategy says: “They don’t believe any of this stuff; they’re saying whatever they think will get them votes.”
In the era of authentocracy, there is no political sin more grave than being fake.
Others believe Starmer’s office has got both language and symbols wrong. The North of Tyne mayor, Jamie Driscoll, may count as Labour’s most powerful politician in the north-east. He has seen the videos of his leader emoting in front of a union flag and says: “Up here, we talk about defending the north-east. Bringing up the union – well, that’s a reminder of the establishment down south, isn’t it?”
The biggest risk of all, as acknowledged by the party strategists, is that Starmer’s patriot act will turn off those voters who Labour still believes it can rely on – the young and the ethnic minorities. And it may well drive away its last bastions of support in the increasingly independent-minded Scotland.
One frontbencher representing a seat in the north-west says: “To get a majority in parliament Labour needs to win both Chipping Barnet and Bishop Auckland. At the moment, they’re just playing to Bishop Auckland.”
A year ago, when Labour was holding its latest leadership contest, every candidate felt compelled to discuss the fragility of an electoral coalition that stretches from Walthamstow to Workington.
This problem stretches back decades and since Brown’s leadership the way Labour has tried to get around it is by focusing its appeal along the lines of economics and class.
Miliband had his “squeezed middle” to be won over by lower energy bills, while Corbyn tried to engender a sense of shared interests between the Uber driver and the university lecturer on a zero-hours contract. Any appeals to national identity have always looked as forced as a politician’s selfie on the doorstep.
Starmer began his leadership in much the same vein, making 10 pledges to party members that were essentially continuity Corbynism. Yet he now appears to be moving away from the language of economics and policy to identity and values. “There’s no way he can do that flagwaving better than the likes of Nigel Farage,” says Driscoll.
And so the biggest leftwing party in Europe could find itself in a very strange position. It could be accused of combining the electoral tactics of the right with the economics of the right, too.
The party’s strategy calls for it to broadcast its “economic competence” and drop the associations with “spend, spend, spend”. This sounds like shorthand for dropping any attempt to be significantly different on tax and spend from the Tories.
This may all work for Starmer and his team. Or it may be that in a choice between Coke and Diet, voters prefer the real thing – in which case it could well be jettisoned for the next new thing.
But in the meantime it raises one question for all progressives in the UK: if the main party of the left seeks to walk like the right and talk like the right, then what precisely is the point of the main party of the left?
