Why is Labour under Starmer not doing much better?

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter for Reaction subscribers. To receive it by email, subscribe to Reaction here.

There are a few additions to this week’s newsletter for Reaction subscribers. Below the political commentary I’ve included a “what I’m reading” section. One of the pleasures of editing Reaction is being bombarded with new books by publishers. They know we’re expanding our books coverage and interviewing authors for our fledgling YouTube channel. There are live events for subscribers planned for this autumn too, if the country continues getting on top of the damn virus.

As well as those books sent from publishers, I have a bookshop addiction that is getting worse every week. The result is piles of books all over the place, and me with three or four new titles on the go at a time. I thought it might be useful for me to flag here what I’m enjoying.

Incidentally, the Reaction team is celebrating its fifth birthday this week. Happy birthday to us, we’ve come a long way since a small band of founders had the idea. If this was American journalism (where they take talking about journalism most  seriously indeed) I would now embark on a long, portentous sermon with the theme music from journalistic classic All the President’s Men (soundtrack by David Shire) playing in the background. Thankfully, this is Britain, where we treat journalism as a noisy trade, not a profession, and we unsentimental hacks generally eschew going on about how wonderful our colleagues are with their pursuit of excellence and relentless seeking after truth.

So, British-style, I’ll restrict this to a quick list of birthday credits.

Thanks go to the loyal band of writers who make Reaction what it is. Thanks to the Reaction editorial team and to our board of directors and advisory board for guidance. Thanks to the supporters who generously take tables at the dinners we put on to fund our student scheme, that is our Young Journalists Programme, a contribution to training the next generation. And thank you to all the speakers at those dinners who have generously given their time.

And thank you to our subscribers for reading the Reaction team and supporting what we do.

I’ve been wondering about that S-word – subscribers – after a beer this week with a friend who subscribes. It’s the wrong word for what we do at Reaction, he suggested, kindly. It’s membership, he said. And as we return to live events, Reaction will become more of a membership organisation.

Next week, we’re creating a subscriber/membership panel to gather feedback on what you like, dislike and want to see more of. There’ll be a chance to cross-examine me and the team about journalism on a closed invite-only event on Zoom. At some point there might be a real gathering and drink involved. If you would like to take part, reply to this email by saying “count me in”. I assume that one of the things you want as a Reaction member is some political analysis, and I’ve burbled on long enough.

With the political class off on holiday, my colleague Adam Boulton has written an excellent end of term report on Boris Johnson in his weekly column for Reaction Weekend, asking how the Tory leader defies political gravity. There’s a flip side to Johnson’s dominance, though. That’s the pitiful failure of Labour to break through or even to provide anything approaching convincing opposition to a vulnerable government. With so many challenges facing this administration – in the health service ahead of an especially tough autumn and winter as it struggles to catch up with a treatment backlog, on housing, on labour shortages in the economy, on civil liberties, on the public finances, and on voter concerns on crime – a decent opposition would be landing proper punches.

In the last few weeks there have been a series of economic announcements from Labour, yet they are all grimly statist and unimaginative, only adding potential burdens on business and inhibiting the wealth creation that is the country’s best route to paying the bills run up during the pandemic.

The gap between the parties in the polls has narrowed somewhat and Sir Keir Starmer survived the crises that could have ended his leadership in the Spring. But that’s not enough. A government in mid-term, after a pandemic, should be behind and under pressure. Labour under Starmer is so far away from resembling a government in-waiting that you’ll struggle to meet anyone at Westminster who thinks, seriously, that it can win in this condition.

By the time of the next general election in 2023 or 2024 it will be almost two decades since the party last won. It is a miserable, tragi-comic record of abject failure. From a position of dominance in the late 1990s and 2000s, when it was wrongheadedly fashionable to wonder if the Conservatives would ever win a majority again, Labour managed to torch its reputation so comprehensively that it was transformed into an unelectable smoking ruin of a party. As leader Ed Miliband let the far left flood in, and in this way the party ended up after Miliband with a leadership team dominated by Marxists, among whose supporters there were anti-Semites. By the time of the 2019 general election, the prospect of a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn counted as a genuine threat to national security. One of Britain’s great parties – the patriotic party of the War, of Ernest Bevin, James Callaghan, John Smith and Mo Mowlam – had become this thing.

Historians in the future will wonder how this could have happened, how the descent could have been so complete. Yes, Labour was associated with the financial crisis, having been in power and responsible for policy in the build-up. But after a reasonable interlude it should have been possible for the party to benefit in the aftermath of 2008, or certainly after the coalition government made unpopular decisions involving public spending. The drift since the crisis has been towards bigger and more interventionist government, a trend supercharged by the pandemic that should have suited Labour. Yet it is the Conservatives who are supreme.

True, the latest YouGov polling published by The Times this weekend suggests that Tory popularity has dipped markedly in the so-called Blue Wall of seats in the south. The party is down eight points and could lose 17 seats, it is suggested. Although on one level this sounds bad for Boris and the Tories, again in mid-term it is a pretty pitiful performance by Labour. The Tories in those seats are down to 44% but Labour is only up four points to 24%, says YouGov. The Greens are up seven points, to 9%, suggesting that opposition fragmentation, as anti-Tory voters try out alternatives, will make the Conservatives hard to beat.

Part of the problem is Starmer himself, a wooden leader who struggles to generate any sense of spontaneity or excitement. Over him hangs a cloud that limits his appeal with former Labour voters the party needs to win back: he tried to reverse Brexit and he sought to make Corbyn Prime Minister. That is undeniable.

This autumn, Starmer will get a chance to try again with his party conference and a package of new policies. For Labour’s sake it had better be good.
 

WHAT I’M READING…

How did I miss getting into Lionel Shriver’s novels until now? Last week in Topping & Company, the out of this world bookshop in St Andrews, I picked up a hardback copy of the Mandibles, retreated to a comfy chair with free coffee, and started reading. The Mandibles: A family, 2029-2047 centres on a future financial crisis in which America goes bust, and with it a family relying on an inheritance and investments that have been wiped out. Who knew economics could be tackled this well and so amusingly in the form of a novel?  

A quarter of the way through Simon Kuper’s Barca – the inside story of the world’s greatest football club – and I’m hooked. Published on 19 August, it charts how FC Barcelona transformed the game. Kuper, an FT journalist, has been around Barca for thirty years, interviewing the leaders and staff at a unique institution. They’ve given him unprecedented access, as they say, to complete the book, although there was no interference or censorship.

For Alice Crossley’s Reaction Weekend section (look out for her email every Saturday at 9am) I’ve written a short review of Confessions of a Heretic, the republished and uplifting collection of essays by Roger Scruton, who died last year.

Iain Martin
Editor and publisher, Reaction.