Rishi Sunak has gifted Keir Starmer the opportunity to position himself both as a safe “conservative”—yet one who will conserve the best of Britain by delivering change for the better. The faltering prime minister has done this by failing to deliver almost anything for the better, while cravenly appeasing the constantly destabilising Brexit right wing, including their last-gasp leader Suella Braverman.
In a speech to the Progressive Britain conference two weeks ago, Starmer made a virtue of conservatism and stability applied to Britain’s great institutions. Labour will defend them, he proclaimed, while the Tories threaten them and have ceased to be a truly conservative party. He highlighted the NHS, the greatest British institution in the public mind, attacking Sunak for threatening its demise by mismanagement and neglect.
Starmer took up this theme in another speech this week, in front of an ambulance in Braintree in once Brexity Essex. A picture of the NHS in mortal jeopardy. And what was it he promised to deliver in order to conserve it? Largely the targets for reduced waiting times for treatment—like no more than a four hour wait in A&E—which the Tories inherited from Labour in 2010 but are now a million miles from delivering, mired as they are in strikes and crises across the NHS. Very neat positioning.
He did the same last week, with more daring, on housing—an issue shooting up the political agenda with younger voters in particular. Boris Johnson’s 2019 Tory manifesto promised 300,000 new homes a year, to fulfil the Conservative dream of homeownership for the next generation. But in the face of a revolt by Nimby-captured Tory backbenchers, housing targets have been dropped by Sunak.
Starmer steps in and simply adopts the former Tory policy on housing targets, proclaiming himself the real champion of home ownership and on the side of the “builders” not the “blockers”. Again, neat positioning. He even boldly suggests that the green belt can’t be sacrosanct, highlighting the fact that much of it, particularly on the outskirts of towns and cities, isn’t particularly green.
Even on Brexit, where Starmer has been widely criticised for timidity, he has now started playing both sides with some skill. He says he wants to “make Brexit work”, so isn’t promising a reversal, but accepts that this can only now be delivered by “fixing” Johnson’s terrible Brexit deal. Again, a conservative who will deliver, unlike Sunak who dares not disown Johnson’s Brexit deal at large, despite his one real success since taking office in renegotiating the crisis-ridden Northern Ireland part of it.
When you add in his robust defence of the monarchy, the BBC, the armed forces, Nato, and support for Zelensky in Ukraine, there is a bedrock of Tory-type conservatism in the Starmer prospectus. Beyond the railways, nationalisation has now been discarded by Labour and the privatised utilities are also to be conserved. But with a promise to deliver—most topically on sewerage and water treatment requirements on the water companies—where the Tories have failed over 13 “wasted years”.
On tax, too, the Starmer positioning is largely conservative, with no general threat of higher taxes even on the rich. There is limited scope for higher taxes anyway, since Sunak and Jeremy Hunt cancelled almost all the disastrous tax cuts of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget of last September. But Starmer promises to deliver greater fairness, signalling with his constantly trumpeted tax on non-doms, which highlights Sunak’s personal family wealth and his failure to deliver basic fairness.
The Starmer positioning appeals to the deep underlying insecurity of so many voters, who feel worse off under the Tories if they are older, and worse off than their parents if they are younger. Their psyche is in some ways conservative—yearning for stability and a return to an age when public services and the public realm were in much better shape—but they also accept that change needs to be delivered to achieve this. The Tories have failed on both fronts.
Sunak looks increasingly like a feather in the wind. Starmer looks altogether more solid and stable, Tory even. That’s the trick for a Labour leader who wants to win.
