For more than two years, an awfully long while in these frenetic political times, people have been waiting for Keir Starmer to do something bold. Since he became the Labour leader, Britain has been shut down by the pandemic, choked by Brexit, made poorer by the cost of living crisis, and governed by the most casually destructive prime minister in its recent history. In response, Starmer has offered “constructive opposition”, modest and mostly quickly forgotten new policies, and long silences.
The few risks he has taken have been the usual ones of orthodox Labour leaders: picking fights with the left; dropping radical but popular policies such as nationalisation; and generally dragging the party to the right. Meanwhile, he has left the over-mighty business interests and dysfunctional markets that dominate British life largely unchallenged.
Or he has until now. His announcement last week that a Labour government “wouldn’t let people pay a penny more” for energy this winter, and would partly fund this by taxing “the excess profits” of “the big energy companies”, could mark the beginning of a new phase in his leadership. Nearly two weeks on, we can begin to judge whether this intervention is having a lasting political effect. Has Starmer finally made a breakthrough? And if he has, how can Labour make it matter, still, when the general election comes?
The new policy has many of the hallmarks of clever politics. It’s clear and memorable. It’s being promoted in populist language, offering voters both reassurance and scapegoats. A Labour press release this week says the oil and gas industry is making “record profits at the expense of the British people”.
The policy seems to be affordable, at least in the short term. It promises both to control energy prices and reduce inflation in general. It makes the Conservative response to the crisis look even more inadequate. And it finally gives Labour’s many disgruntled leftwing supporters something to get behind. “The energy issue is a good dividing line for us,” someone involved in the policy told me. “It really does mobilise the [party] base.”
Many other voters like the policy as well. Since it was announced, Labour’s lead has leapt in the polls. One survey found that even 85% of Conservative voters liked Labour’s scheme. Parts of the rightwing press have acknowledged its appeal. “Labour’s plans … have traction and speak to a real need for reassurance,” said a Times editorial. The Daily Mail described Labour’s energy move as “dramatic” – not a word often applied to Starmer – and suggested it had “heaped pressure” on whoever becomes Tory leader by making it hard for them to avoid coming up with a plan of similar scale.
So far, the Conservative response to Labour’s plan has sounded vague and rushed. Brandon Lewis, a supporter of Liz Truss, told Times Radio that she would deal with the energy crisis “in a structured way, in a professional way … so when we do deliver something we know it can work and we can be clear with people how it works, why it works, and why it makes a beneficial difference”.
A party that has had 12 years in government to sort out a long failing energy market has been left awkwardly playing for time, until it can come up with an emergency budget under its new leader at some point in September – by which time the weather in much of Britain may be cold enough for millions to be worrying about whether to put the heating on. Having spent most of his leadership reacting to or being squeezed out of the news by huge events, Starmer suddenly seems slightly ahead of them.
His energy plan is hardly perfect. One frequent criticism is that it would help both those who can and can’t afford higher bills. Given the strained public finances, this flaw is hard to ignore, especially if you’re on the left. But if, instead, you’re one of the sometimes right-leaning, relatively prosperous voters whom Starmer has spent much of his leadership trying to lure back, his plan’s indiscriminate subsidies may be its most attractive feature. Recent hints from Truss and Rishi Sunak that they would mainly help the most vulnerable may turn out to be very bad politics.
Offering to protect everyone against frightening energy prices is also a way of animating what has until now been a rather abstract and dour promise from the Labour leader: that a Starmer government would give Britons more security. That promise is in some ways a conservative, even authoritarian one – for instance, when Starmer accuses the Tories of being “soft on crime” – but when applied to an economy that has been based on insecurity since Margaret Thatcher’s government, “security” has radical potential.
Will his new energy policy be the start of something big, or a one-off? My Labour source is keen to point out that the party has actually been arguing for a windfall tax on energy companies since January. Yet when I suggest that the spiralling rate of inflation – and of profit in some sectors – makes calling for price caps on other essentials the logical next step for Labour, the source hesitates then quickly changes the subject. Despite our national crisis, the instinctive caution of Starmer and his shadow ministers has not gone away. They first discussed their energy plan more than six months ago, but it was not announced until a week after a similar proposal from the Lib Dems.
In truth, Labour’s policy, like most opposition policies, is at least as much about symbolism as offering a practical plan for government. Unless the new Tory leader calls a quick election and loses, the scheme is not that likely to be implemented, and more likely to be overtaken by events. Further surges in the price of gas since the plan was unveiled have already increased its likely cost by more than a third, according to the Institute for Government. Meanwhile, away from the performative dogmas of the Tory leadership contest, the Treasury, ministers and their advisers, and the shrewder energy companies are all busily trying to come up with new energy strategies – which may steal or supersede Labour’s ideas.
Labour has made a breakthrough, for now. But if the party is to win power and then use it to soften our economic crisis, let alone lessen the chance of such meltdowns happening again, helping people with their gas bills has to be just the start. Labour has to realise that so-called free markets are not its friends.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
