Keir Starmer was at his most clear today not in his speech to the Global Progress Action Summit in London, trailed as a fightback against the politics of hate and division, but in the panel afterwards. That’s when he said he wanted the next election to be an “open fight” between “Labour and Reform”. In the speech itself, however, he identified his enemies in the abstract. He was against the “politics of predatory grievance”, which used the “infrastructure of division”. He also made a lovely case for London at the start, with its plentiful pubs and pleasant parks, remarking wryly that it was nothing like “the wasteland of anarchy that some would have you believe”.
The problem is he needs to pick a lane. Either he was referring to Donald Trump’s comments at the UN earlier this week, when the leader of the free world said Britain’s capital had a “terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been changed, it’s been so changed. Now they want to go to sharia law”, in which case Starmer should say so. Or he was attempting to describe the ascendant hard right upturning our politics without identifying or reflecting upon its main mouthpieces, in which case, what the hell is he thinking?
