{"id":17285,"date":"2025-10-04T10:22:36","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T10:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=17285"},"modified":"2025-10-04T10:27:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T10:27:08","slug":"does-starmer-have-a-vision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2025\/10\/does-starmer-have-a-vision\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Starmer have a vision?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Keir Starmer\u2019s conference speech<\/a> has rescued him from leadership challenges, for now; such appears to be the consensus opinion. Starmer certainly managed a stronger, more personable delivery than his more typical rabbit-in-the-headlights stance.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But one minister told Channel 4 News that the mood amongst MPs was still sulphurous. And former shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, told Channel 4, on the record, that if next May\u2019s Scottish, Welsh and local election results are a disaster he was sure Starmer would do the decent thing and go \u2013 a view, the Guardian reports<\/a>, that is shared by five cabinet ministers.<\/p>\n

For a prime minister with a large majority at Westminster, just one year into a five year term, this is fairly catastrophic. A recent YouGov poll<\/a> has Reform on 29% to Labour on 22% in a general election scenario. In Scotland, a recent Survation poll<\/a>, on the upcoming Holyrood election, has the SNP on 37% for the constituency vote, Labour on 20% and Reform on 18%. The level of Reform support is shocking for Scotland but is also a mirror of the collapse in the Tory vote, sitting at 11% in that poll.<\/p>\n

And what remains clear in comparing England and Wales to Scotland is that in general election voting intentions, around 45% across Britain would vote Tory or Reform while in Scotland the total is around 30%. This is no surprise \u2013 Scotland is not as right wing as England.<\/p>\n

Labour attacks on the Scottish government have ramped up recently; it\u2019s going to be a long election campaign. But, for now, the SNP look comfortable as Starmer continues to alienate voters and chase, hopelessly and damagingly, after Reform voters.<\/p>\n

Did we see Starmerism finally?<\/h2>\n

Ahead of Starmer\u2019s speech, with Andy Burnham making an incompetent leadership challenge on the sidelines, pundits lined up to say that no one knew what Starmer actually wanted to achieve in government. And a fairly devastating round up<\/a> of opinion from Laura Kuenssberg included this quote from one, so-called Whitehall figure: \u201cHow many more data points do you need to see that he is just not very good at being prime minister?\u201d<\/p>\n

What we got, from Starmer\u2019s speech, was a lot of familiar priorities \u2013 growth, living standards, tackling migration, bringing communities together, respect for working people, fighting for the \u2018common good\u2019, owning all our flags. And a lot of this was framed in ways that the right-wing, so-called \u2018Blue Labour\u2019 group, linked to Maurice Glasman and others, may have welcomed.<\/p>\n

There was also repeated mention of growth from the grassroots up and creating wealth differently. Presumably, this is meant to be different to trickle down growth, although Starmer is pro-business, anti- (lots of) regulation, pro-technology. In his speech, he talks of placing \u2018too much faith in globalisation\u2019 while welcoming inward investment and trade deals. There is no clear or new economic model or strategy here.<\/p>\n

Starmer is also against wishful thinking such as, he says, going back to the politics of pre-Brexit days. Poverty gets mentioned but inequality only once, wealth taxes are dismissed (\u2018snake oil merchants\u201d of right and left), and clean energy is a phrase he prefers to much mention of climate change let alone of green politics or policies. In fact, it\u2019s not even clear<\/a> that Starmer will go to the vital upcoming COP30 global climate meeting in Brazil in early November (apparently some of his advisors consider it will play badly with the Sun and Mail).<\/p>\n

Notably, the speech also seemed to reflect some of a blue-Labour-ish anonymous memo published<\/a> by the New Statesman titled \u2018what did we learn over our summer holidays\u2019 that has apparently circulated for a while in Labour circles. The memo is disparaging of the \u2018professional middle class\u2019 left, including its support for the EU, admiring of Farage, and sure that the UK is in the midst of an uprising against the status quo, bringing the UK to a \u2018fork in the road\u2019. Tellingly, Starmer himself uses the same phrase at the start of his speech \u2013 a fork that represents a choice between renewal and decline.<\/p>\n

Perhaps a good moment to repeat a quote<\/a> from the late John Prescott on Glasman: \u201cGlasman. You know sod all about politics, economic policy, Labour or solidarity. Bugger off and go \u2018organise\u2019 some communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Starmer and working people<\/h2>\n

\u00a0Starmer has said repeatedly, since he became prime minister, he wants to unite the UK, in all its diversity, to end division and, as he put it in his conference speech, to oppose the politics of grievance including the racism of Reform. But his real and preferred focus is an idealised version of the skilled working man who needs respect, as well as growth, to thrive. He\u2019s told the tale of his tool-making dad many times but he told it again. He criticised excessive respect for university degrees compared to manual work while hastening to add he isn\u2019t against universities: \u201c you will never hear me denigrate the aspiration to go to university\u201d, (given the crisis in the sector this isn\u2019t that encouraging).<\/p>\n

A very good blog by Ben Ansell, here<\/a>, digs deep into the data to show Labour\u2019s voters, and likely voters, are in fact the large and varied ranks of the professional middle classes (who, Ansell shows, count for half of employed voters, much bigger than the much shrunken size of the manual or \u2018traditional\u2019 working class) \u2013 and that the economic and cultural views of those actual and potential Labour voters sit a long way from those of Reform and Tory supporters.<\/p>\n

But Starmer not only continues to insist on the \u201csoviet\u201d centrality of \u2018working people\u2019, he clearly also only means a rather narrow subset of working people. Focusing a policy on good apprenticeships is fine, as is being anti-elitist (not easy as prime minister and former DPP). But uniting communities around a narrow idea (and ideal) of who Starmer considers are the key subset of working people is not. And forgetting the other half of the population who don\u2019t work (children, old people, students, those with long term sickness, unpaid carers), or implicitly rendering them second class, is not unifying either. Starmer, in his speech, said he makes no apology if his decisions \u2018tilt towards working people\u2019 as they paid the price of Tory decline. Yet, surely, almost all but the wealthy paid that price.<\/p>\n

Recent data show that just over 75% of those between 16-64 are in employment (full or part time or self-employed) \u2013 34.2 million people, just under half the population (unemployment is currently 4.7%. Notably, 80% of EU citizens in the UK are in employment). These are decent levels and comparable to other major EU economies. But our societies across the UK are more than just what we do, or don\u2019t do, for work. And if, as Starmer puts it, we need national renewal, it\u2019s the crunch time to bring \u2018the country\u2019 together, then let’s include everyone not just prioritise his preferred subset of working people. He talks of working people losing faith. But in the deep multiple crises of our days, aren\u2019t we all at risk of that?<\/p>\n

Vision come and gone?<\/h2>\n

This, then, is as much of Starmer\u2019s vision as we are ever likely to get. He listed, to cheers from the conference floor, some of his government\u2019s policies so far \u2013 more childcare, an end to zero hours contracts (though not until 2027), Great British energy (small, and uninspiring so far) and more . He argued that his shameful cut in already low levels of international development aid was needed to pay for more defence. He talked in rather uninspiring terms of a long, difficult, hard road to national renewal \u2013 which is nonetheless meant to bring us all behind him on this endeavour.<\/p>\n

And, inevitably, Starmer talked a lot about migration, secure borders, and respecting those who want more control of migration (with a rather odd story of a woman in Oldham who didn\u2019t like immigrants from eastern Europe as they spat and put their rubbish out on the wrong days \u2013 something locals obviously never do). There may not be racism or xenophobia in discussing limits to migration \u2013 but, in many cases, there may be and is, as we have seen in the violent demonstrations outside asylum hostels and in towns and cities across the UK.<\/p>\n

Starmer went straight from Labour conference to European meetings in Denmark. But he chose there to make yet another announcement<\/a> on making things tougher for people granted asylum (Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood\u2019s, speech not enough of a right-wing, tabloid-pleasing stance for a few days). Starmer could have chosen to build on his speech with some positive announcements, not going straight back to his excessive focus on migration, playing directly into Reform\u2019s agenda, continuing to big up Farage as the main opposition. But, already, his vision has shrunk back to the small boats.<\/p>\n

Starmer, in his speech, said both Farage, the Tories, \u2018the extremes of the left\u2019 and the SNP want Britain to fail. But as the Prime Minister struggles on, the biggest risk is that Starmer will fail and Labour will end up where the Tories were, desperately swapping one bad leader for another. The UK does not need such poor leadership.<\/p>\n

And the crisis in UK, and especially England\u2019s, politics continues.<\/p>\n

First published on the author\u2019s Substack<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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